and of course we don't want the free market to punish the incompetent and reward the smart ones, do we?
China never cared about free trade, they use it like a weapon to beat idealists like yourself over the head
What happens in 20 years when China has complete dominance of the solar market and those "cheap" solar panels get tripled in price because there is no competition left and the rest of the world can only grit their teeth?
slapping tariffs on foreign products ensures that our manufacturing becomes even more backward, while the rest of the world takes off.
if we want to avoid monopoly - build own capacity, competitively.
I think it's smart to use some amount of protectionist tarriffs in "industries of the future". Furniture? Who cares. Solar? Might be worth it.
Otherwise we'll only prolong inevitable decline.
Example: go to Japan and check in into a modern hotel. Then look at the hardware - door latches, bed, toilet... Then compare the quality of these products against their American counterparts. An isolated example, may be, but the outcome is higher quality at lower prices.
If the Chinese don't produce solar panels, the price would have been tenfold instead of tripled. With the Chinese in the game, tripling may not even happen, because the Chinese will compete with themselves.
The idea that the Chinese government subsidizes every Chinese company is nonsense. This is just something that Americans need to believe because they don't want to admit how extraordinarily inefficient their domestic industries were before 2000.
> and force competitors to give their native companies their IP to do business?
This is hilarious. Nobody forces foreign companies to give away their IP. These companies, which are supposedly the best in the world, analyze the trade and make it voluntarily or walk away. It's called the free market. Remember that?
> What happens in 20 years when China has complete dominance of the solar market
The irony here is that all the tariffs do is put America further and further behind. The tariffs don't help America at all eg [1]. This should be obvious to anybody who understands how solar works and knows that the real money is not in panel printing.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jillbaker/2018/04/06/tariffs-on...
XI is the new emperor for life
Everyone warns of this scenario, but it never seems to happen in real life. Sure, the old, inefficient producers disappear as foretold, but the goods in question just keep getting cheaper and more plentiful. Can you think of any historical counterexamples?