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Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

There is a third option. Apply the same regulations to the manufacture of all products sold in your country. You want to manufacture in China and sell in the US, that's fine -- but you have to do it in accordance with US environmental rules.

That does two things. One, no more cost advantage to global manufacturing in whatever place has the least respect for the environment, which lets others compete better and removes the race to the bottom. Two, there are lots of different and potentially conflicting rules everywhere, so then you get more specialization as there is an advantage to smaller companies that only comply with the rules for the markets where they're selling.

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I've been advocating this strategy for years having direct experience in a highly regulated manufacturing sector business. I like to put it this way: The US has the responsibility to protect the world from the (externalities of competing in the) largest consumer market to ever exist. We currently do a pretty good job at protecting ourselves from that market, not just with environmental laws as you mention, but with safety and worker's compensation laws as well, but it is frankly a travesty to think that our current strategy is "good" by any definition but an entirely economic one, and as we are seeing now with this pandemic, even that is dubious. There is still an enormous toll on the environment and on our shared humanity when we allow business to off-shore their dirty practices, not to mention the loss of domestic security. Climate change and the Holocene extinction show that the externalities of business are everyone's problem, and we should start acting like it.

There's a fourth option: close down all U.S. trade ports for a month once a year. No paperwork or other administrative headaches. "Just" a dry run once a year.

Chaos monkey, but for supply chain. I actually like it...it would make our systems more robust.

That'll just mean stockpiling before the month it gets closed.

Not if it's unknown _which_ month. Then you'll have to keep a stockpile year round, which is precisely the objective of grandparent.

I think the power grid is tested like that once in a while after the 2003 blackout - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003#Lon...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04287-5

This is already partially done with Automobiles, for example. Comply with local pollution and safety standards or a lucrative market is closed to your exports.

I think you mean that for example, the US pollution standard needs to be fulfilled by Volkswagen if they like to export VW cars to the USA.

However the OP meant more than that: that the VW workers, employed for example in Mexico, who assemble cars for US export would get the same worker rights as they would get in the USA.

And the same would hold for pollution at the factory and so on.

That would make things cost a lot more money.

The reality is much of our economy is built off the backs of essentially slave labor. And we're all guilty of benefiting from it.

In the short time, I agree with you. However, this also reduces the incentive to produce in a foreign country. Hence, this would even move many jobs back to the country where the consumers live. This in turn keeps the consumers' money in their country. Hence, their total wealth increases, largely already because the outflow of money is reduced. With more money available at the hands of the consumers, things don't need to be much more expensive than now.

How does one enforce this effectively? Are companies required to self-regulate (chuckle), or does this require massive supply chain transparency?

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