That's a genuine question, by the way. I'm curious.
I'm not sure if this is practical to actually implement, but if you increase tariffs based on how many of each item you're shipping, it would eventually be cheaper to manufacture some of them in the United States.
Example, first million widgets have no tariff. Next 500,000 are $0.02 per widget. Next 500,000 are $0.03 per widget and now it's cheaper to make those last 500,000 in the US.
And for companies with smaller runs, like 50,000 widgets, the volume savings might not make up the extra cost of dealing with Chinese manufacturing (shipping, time zones, language barriers, etc.)
The biggest trouble would be setting those values at reasonable levels based on different industries. Not sure if you could actually do that in a way that scaled to EVERYTHING manufactured in China.
Reminds me of the concept of "protecting players from themselves" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L8vAGGitr8)
Good idea.
Today the supplier can not only sell to the company but to the consumers directly significantly cutting company's ability to level the price so the company is forced to drop the more expensive suppliers
There is an incentive for now. When the current supply shock goes away, the old market pressures will reassert themselves, and those companies whose supply chains are narrowly focused on the lowest-cost/highest-quality producers at the expense of diversification will outcompete those whose supply chains are diversified.
The parent questioner is asking, in essence, how can we turn this incentive from a one-time shock into a continued incentive to maintain diversification? As it currently stands shocks are far too unpredictable and episodic to serve as a market incentive. In practice, people don't diversify unless there's a constant and ongoing pressure for them to do so. It's much easier and cheaper to find a good supplier and rely on them as much as possible.
We don't generally make our roofs asteroid impact proof, either.
The thing is that these dependencies are a feature and not a bug on several levels, both in terms of trade promoting peace and the efficency involved. Put the should we philosophical questions aside and there are a few precedents to look at and hypothetical solutions.
One way is through subsidies for deliberate overproduction are the way done for food - but that is also a market where the fungibility and nutrition encourages varierty to some degree. Again it is inefficiency by definition - generally done for things where it is believed/claimed to be better to have the waste than running out.
Another is in "national security" pork where it is often more an accident of the pretext than neccessity. Needing American screws for DoD gear.
Some sort of international robustness treaty/trade deal could be devised per sector that say any country may subsidize or tarriff industries up to say N% of their basic demand but once it gets beyond that they need to stop or start tapering off, perhaps with varied threshholds. That would no doubt be a bed of weeds as everyone tries to privledge their own interests and plays games with classifications.
You lose some efficiency but gain in resilience. Nowadays big internet companies have all sorts of Disaster Recovery plans.
Are you keeping your own data center in addition to the AWS/GCP/Azure? Because that's the exact same premise.
But I can see how you came to that reading, and it did give me a chuckle.