Comment by close04 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by close04 | Hacker News Reader

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Sadly even eliminating all bureaucracy isn't the Holy Grail of saving the local workshop. The company has to pay German level taxes, the workers have to pay German cost of living, and most business owners also want to enjoy the fruit of their labor and that fruit in Germany usually wears a Porsche badge. These are the obvious and "easy" ones but probably not the most important ones.

The difficult problems are the entire ecosystems, supply chains, and tight integration that are just on very different levels between Germany and China. Every part of the supply chain has to be optimized or else it eats into the margins. China is a beast at "extreme supply chain micro-optimization". It would take decades to build equivalent ecosystems elsewhere, and in the meantime implement artificial barriers to keep China less competitive on Western markets.

This is true for all of Europe and the Western world at least.

This video [1] highlights just how big a gap there is between China and everyone else.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/h7McXnWRCQY

Germany has such a supply chain for some sectors (e.g. cars, chemicals). The question is do we want to protect it to some extent or let the free market do its thing?

Almost 50% of the energy consumption of the German chemical industry is natural gas. Its competitiveness is at the mercy of countries with no duty to Germany and they're the root of the supply chain.

> let the free market do its thing

The problem with the free market is that there's no such thing. Every market is regulated to some degree, the state has its finger on the scales somewhere. It needs to for things that are are strategically important or for the welfare of the citizens. It can be subsidies for fuel, tariffs for some import, market abuse regulation, there's always a mechanism in place to keep things on a specific track. As much as the 4 year democratic cycle allows in specifying that track.

The free market suffers from the same weakness communism does. It relies on deeply flawed humans. The more flawed, the more likely they'll be the ones pulling the strings. And they'll tear apart the fabric of society to make more money.

Natural gas can be replaced with coal gasification, and Germany has an endless amount of coal. It would probably even be cheaper, although much dirtier. China is already doing this.

Agreed, however there are only two ways to handle this, race to the bottom and then everyone has Chinese working conditions and salaries, or it is about time that we build our walls and kind of, no kidding, make each country great again, which is why right wing parties are going up all over the place.

I still remember how it was in most European companies before we started offshoring everything, textil, shoes, TVs, mobiles, software,..., the whole bunch, with the colonist mindset that of course the "slaves" would never have the skills to master the end to end production themselves, what a joke, naturally as humans they have exactly the same skills.

And it isn't only China of course, we even do it among ourselves across European countries, for the new factory in some random eastern country, a bunch of folks in western Europe join the job center line.

All for the bank accounts for the managers of course, as employees get thrown around like pawns in the MBA chess, more akin to mediaeval lords managing their feudal servants.

> race to the bottom and then everyone has Chinese working conditions and salaries

I think it’s doable to be competitive even under Western conditions assuming you have the rest of the ultra optimized supply chains because you can find ways to support them even with just a nudge here and there, compared to when the only German part if the business is the one who says “designed un Germany”.

> or it is about time that we build our walls and kind of, no kidding, make each country great again, which is why right wing parties are going up all over the place.

Right wing parties are going up to say they’ll make the country great again. Can’t think of a significant time in history when these parties actually did make a country great.

They didn't of course, however when they happen to have such an easy speech to sell about who is to blame about factories closing down, queues increasing sizes at the job center, no longer able to afford the same supermarket basket size even when employeed,....

It is no accident that in a way we are reliving the same uptake they had during the big depression, and there doesn't seem to be any way to counter that.

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