Comment by flamble | Hacker News Reader

Comment by flamble | Hacker News Reader

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The offshoring of the production of consumer electronics devices is mostly the result of the free-trade policies of said countries, coupled with market forces. The growth centred around manufacturing has been the basis of Chinese prosperity and requires no speculating about devious motives to account for.

As for the Chinese government's massive spending and subsidization of key industries, it's largely due to being free of the particular ideological constraints which force the US government to entrust everything to the market (except the military industry) which has predictably led to brittleness and vulnerability.

The American approach does resemble the Chinese one in a sense. Whereas the Chinese government prefers to directly subsidize e.g. semiconductors, the US government pours unfathomable quantities of capital into a military capable of dissuading any country from capitalizing on the US's dependency on any of their industries. When this approach breaks down, as in the case of China, things tend to get very dicey.

> The offshoring of the production of consumer electronics devices is mostly the result of the free-trade policies of said countries, coupled with market forces.

This fails to explain why everything moved to China and not Mexico or Brazil or India.

> As for the Chinese government's massive spending and subsidization of key industries, it's largely due to being free of the particular ideological constraints which force the US government to entrust everything to the market (except the military industry) which has predictably led to brittleness and vulnerability.

Entrusting everything to the market works great when it's a level playing field. When a country is doing things that would be an antitrust violation if done by a company, that requires another country to stop them. Typically through the use of trade sanctions, i.e. tariffs.

> The American approach does resemble the Chinese one in a sense. Whereas the Chinese government prefers to directly subsidize e.g. semiconductors, the US government pours unfathomable quantities of capital into a military capable of dissuading any country from capitalizing on the US's dependency on any of their industries.

In other words it's completely different?

I understand now. Unfettered market freedom is the best way to organize things and at the same time, large-scale government intervention is an unfair competitive advantage.

> This fails to explain why everything moved to China and not Mexico or Brazil or India.

Of course, no industries moved from the US to Mexico, Brazil or India over the same period as China's rise.

> In other words it's completely different?

Yes, in the sense that a portion of massive Chinese government spending goes directly into producing things that people need, and almost all of massive US government spending goes into funding imperialist violence.

Tariffs don't do much to hurt the other country. What they do is hurt yourself by making your consumers pay more for things.

If you want to make your country more competitive, you want Asian-style industrial policy and export discipline - as found not just in China but in Korea and Japan.

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