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Comment by ikeboy | Hacker News Reader

I've heard multiple horror stories of this happening with physical product brands.

Someone buys their products from a factory in China, sells on e.g. Amazon US with their own brand, trademarked and everything. Then some Chinese entity trademarks it in China. The clincher is that since they have a Chinese trademark, they can put an export block on anything bearing that trademark, and so the US buyer can't ship their goods out of China anymore.

Because of this, people are being advised to register in China even if they never plan to sell anything there.

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Or produce locally where possible to avoid that altogether. The risk is higher than then higher production costs in many cases. Its not nationalist drivel to support your own area when it is feasible.

No, inefficient production and ignoring comparative advantages is bad regardless of what language you use to play it up.

Ideally, one factory’s more-efficient production method would result in a larger economic pie that would be fairly distributed amongst everyone.

In practice, especially when you consider regional trade barriers and the lack of perfect and instantaneous wealth redistribution, many people care about factors such as, “will my friends and family still have economic opportunity if this factory is offshored?”

This concern may at first seem like nationalism or nativism, but through a bit of moral algebra we’ll reveal it as that blessed market motive of rational self-interest. Put simply, factory workers in foreign countries won’t help raise your children, watch over you in times of ill health, or take care of you in old age. In the United States, such aid is also unlikely to come from the anonymous shareholders and C-level executives who’ll reap the main economic benefits of any offshoring.

These incentives aren't enough for any single rational actor to change their behavior.

At the national level, sure, there's an argument for protectionism. But, not at the individual level as whenchamenia suggested.

Local means worse. The West has terrible production infrastructure when compared to places like Shenzen. It's a serious disadvantage on many fronts.

That's not entirely true. The US is good at capital intensive or high skilled manufacturing like most other countries aren't. That's why it's viable for a lot of car companies to open plants in the US. It's just that most of the supply chain requires more labor and less capital, which the US economy is not suited towards.

The US buyer can ship their goods, they just need to ship it to a warehouse in the US and then apply the branding domestically. But it does suck and blow.

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