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Comment by shivasaxena | Hacker News Reader

> 50 years later (aka now for most of the west): "Why did we lose all our industries ? Why is it so hard to find a job ? Why is all the know how in China now ? Why is China buying our ports/airports ?? Why is our social model collapsing ? Why is our health care system collapsing ? Why is our pension system collapsing ?"

Answer would be because we shielded our firms from foreign competition by putting in place such anti-competitive policies. Our firms had no incentive to be efficient since they had a captive market for half a billion consumers they could bleed dry.

Concrete example for this would automobiles and VW v/s BYD/Xiomi in particular.

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Since you are insisting, I think you should be forced to compete for your job. It will be against another dude in a third world country, having 1/100 of your life expenses and being able to dedicate over 70H of his time for the job, since he has no other obligations/social relations.

Isn't it nice, you'll be able to afford a meal per day and enough to maybe buy a sleeping bag so you can enjoy the under bridges better.

In case your haven't noticed, with remote work and globalization we do compete with people from developing countries, and even westerners nomading in asia.

In most of my jobs I have had team members based out of eastern Europe, Ex-USSR, India, Israel, nomads from SEA etc.

And still pre-AI most people in our industry did amazingly well despite these cost of living and wage differences since often than not they are also motivated enough to dedicate over 70h+ to our jobs when required(for me this week will end up being a 70h week).

So unfortunately I can't support our inefficient domestic middleman retailers push to block foreign competition so they can bleed us dry by selling 2eur wine opener at outrageous 5x markup.

Delocalising everything to Asia certainly did not play any kind of role, you're right. It's such a simple problem that it can only have a single cause, which can be summed up in a single sentence as you did so nicely, one could even shorten it to "regulations bad" and be happy

> Our firms had no incentive to be efficient since they had a captive market

Efficient compared to what ? Chinese working conditions ? Good luck lmao

If slave labor, 1950s style working hours, state controlled economy and international dumping is what you want the EU to compete with one to one we're dead

The lesson here is that some people would be very happy to reintroduce slavery, if their eggs gonna be cheaper (feel free to swap my example with any other).

This is downvoted but an entirely valid point. The EU was, after all, founded on ideals of bringing peace through economic cooperation, by making the common market gradually larger. Along the way it dismantled all sorts of inefficient protectionism inside countries.

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