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> There are solutions to this. Obvious solutions. But it would imply paying more for stuff.

Well, even if you do, you are up to myriad of other issues.

The progressing general business unfriendliness of the West will not go anywhere. If it does not go, the situation will not change even if you put 1000000% tariff on Chinese goods.

I myself been working on setting up a small knock down kit assembly factory 6 years ago in Richmond, Canada. It was a nightmare. We also attempted going across the border to Washington with same results.

If doing even something as simple is that is a guaranteed to fail endeavour, than, what else you think you can do?

Was it a regulator paperwork hurdle? Regulations themselves? High cost of labor? No skilled labor available? High cost of warehouse/manufacturing floor space? All-of-the-above?

All of the above, times 10.

The Ease of Doing Business index is a complete BS.

Western countries in their majority should not be far away from countries they scorn as "third world" for how hard it is to run a business.

If you calculate costs purely on paper, running a factory in South China is already more expensive than in USA. It was so for quite some time.

You do not see Chinese factory moving to US in droves, despite some early optimism.

Chinese entrepreneurs saw for themselves that behind attractive land, utility, services, and some times labour costs, hides an impassible bog.

Trump just fought China with tariffs. That is not the answer and I don't think is one of the "obvious solutions" referenced. Let me put it this way...

Should we allow a factory in Indiana to avoid environmental regulation if they just pay a 30% tariff? Is it ok to have a 5% mortality rate at a factory in Alabama if they pay a 60% tariff? Should U.S. companies be allowed to just pay fees to become exempt from FDA/EPA/OSHA/etc. rules?

I know some will argue that it is the case in the U.S. A mining company can break the rules, kill a dozen workers, then pay a million dollar fine and go back to business as usual.

But we don't investigate, we don't fine, we don't punish in any way foreign companies that don't follow U.S. environment/labor/safety rules. We open the door and put their products on the shelf right next to U.S. products. The answer is not to levy a tariff to make them price-neutral. The answer is to ban them just like we should ban U.S.-made products that don't follow the rules.

If a company can pass inspection and certify that they meet U.S. rules the same as U.S. manufacturers, and still have a price advantage, I say let them clobber U.S. competition. But the U.S. company gets regulator inspections as part of their taxes. Foreign companies have to pay for U.S.-recognized inspectors on their own dime.

Same thing for U.S. soy farmers selling into China or Norway. They should have to meet the standards of those countries and pay for the inspections that prove it.

I think this was howard dean's big talking point before they made him look crazy.

Should smaller countries just close their borders if they don't have a large enough economy to support compliance with ~200 other countries requirements?

Even now I know factories that only export to the EU, or only ship to America because supporting 2 sets of complex regulatory compliance requirements isn't manageable given their team size.

> Should we allow a factory in Indiana to avoid environmental regulation if they just pay a 30% tariff?

There are problems that tariffs are a solution to, like currency manipulation. Lack of environmental rules is not really one of those problems.

> The answer is to ban them just like we should ban U.S.-made products that don't follow the rules.

The real problem is that there are two problems, which currently sort of cancel out.

The first problem is that the existing rules in the US are effective but prohibitively burdensome. The second problem is that the same rules don't apply to China. Businesses solve the first problem by invoking the second.

We can't solve just one. If you imposed the existing rules on China, things would become unreasonably expensive. If you stopped imposing them on the US, there would be as much pollution in the US as there is in China. We need more efficient rules. Which is hard. Worse, it's not sexy and nobody wants to do the work.

But in a sense we can have one solve the other in the opposite direction too. Apply the same rules to other countries and they can't be avoided by leaving the US, which then creates pressure to fix the rules so that they're not prohibitively inefficient, since they can no longer be avoided.

> If you imposed the existing rules on China, things would become unreasonably expensive.

For a time, yes. But the large market reachable by meeting those requirements would lead to innovation in trying to meet those requirements. (Or in trying to cheat those requirements, which would require some care to enforce.)

They can also be enforced via a ratchet upwards, so that there's time to adapt.

> The first problem is that the existing rules in the US are effective but prohibitively burdensome

Is this an argument to repeal the XIII Amendment in the US?

> Should we allow a factory in Indiana to avoid environmental regulation if they just pay a 30% tariff? Is it ok to have a 5% mortality rate at a factory in Alabama if they pay a 60% tariff? Should U.S. companies be allowed to just pay fees to become exempt from FDA/EPA/OSHA/etc. rules?

People keep talking about environmental regulation, but I'd say that they alone do not account even for a few percents of all problems hampering US manufacturing.

Same is for labour rates, US labour rates in non-flyover states are already lower than in South China...

Seeing people keep talking about that, and fail to see way bigger elephants in the room.

> The problem in the US is that everything is aligned against making stuff here. The unions have been in damage control mode for decades, trying to avoid losing the factories that employ two hundred to the more automated factories that employ twenty, but then as a result losing 100% rather than 90% of the jobs to China.

Short-termism around corporate earnings has done more damage to U.S. industry than unions ever could. And to be clear, I don't think China is any better, despite popular (misconceived) impressions to the contrary.

> But it would imply paying more for stuff because it's not being made in a polluting sweatshop in an undemocratic country which is acting like the nation state version of a 19th century robber baron.

That's increasingly not applicable with automation as well as the plunging cost of renewable energy. There's natural gas being flared in the Dakotas because it is uneconomical to deliver it. And as I understand it both North and South Dakota are not known for an overly restrictive regulatory environment or leadership. It's more a matter of volition IMO.

> The unions have been in damage control mode for decades, trying to avoid losing the factories that employ two hundred to the more automated factories that employ twenty, but then as a result losing 100% rather than 90% of the jobs to China.

Eh aren't they basically non existent? Like 6.2% unionised in private industry and that tends to be more in other industries.

I find it hard to blame them for this later migration. Hell if you'd take their lobbying on foreign policy they'd probably be fairly protectionist.

At the end of the day I think the major dealbreaker is that everything in china whether it's low skill labour or high skill labour like engineers automating things is cheaper and that the capabilities exist. (Some part of bumfuck Africa or SEA might also be cheaper but not have these capabilities) There's also plenty of competition there driving those prices down vs...well what's left in the US and EU.

> Eh aren't they basically non existent? Like 6.2% unionised in private industry and that tends to be more in other industries.

That wasn't the case when this started. The decline of unions in the US and the movement of US manufacturing to China has pretty well gone hand in hand.

> Hell if you'd take their lobbying on foreign policy they'd probably be fairly protectionist.

Protectionism apropos of nothing is a non-starter, because there's no argument for it. You can say we need tariffs on China to account for currency manipulation and prevent a single undemocratic nation from monopolizing important world markets, but you can't win an argument that says food workers should pay more for transportation just to benefit auto workers who already make more money than they do.

But they do often win arguments about not automating away jobs, because there is less money to be made automating them than there is in getting paid to do them when they're not automated, since the automation would apply to everyone in the industry and just lower prices. So we've been fighting automation for the sake of jobs even though it's the main thing that can make higher priced US labor competitive with lower priced foreign labor, and then we lose the jobs anyway.

> trying to avoid losing the factories that employ two hundred to the more automated factories that employ twenty

Do you have an example where this happened?

We will pay of course in due time, but you meant that of course. Complacency has a cost.