Comment by itopaloglu83

> It would be foolish to sell off a great value like ASML or others that adds incredible value. But one should also not get mad when other countries do it, because they see their industries as valuable things as well.

This reads like a straw man argument. No one gets mad when other countries do it. At most, you see complains of protectionism being unilaterally imposed while benefitting from your competitor's openness. See for example the criticism directed at the likes of China for preventing foreign companies from even investing in their domestic market without a government-minder-as-a-partner scheme, while China throws a tantrum when there is even a hint of suggestion that Chinese companies should be subjected to the same type of treatment when operating abroad. See the case of TikTok, for example.

The next question is: why did China give Tesla this unprecedented deal?

The answer I heard at the time was to get local suppliers and workforce up to Tesla standards.

It appears to have worked out for China quite nicely.

Just for cars. Microsoft has been independent in China since the late 90s, although they had to find a partner to do Azure.

> China has been moving towards more openness to foreign investment over time

After they lost most of those same foreign investors that got tired of handing over their IP, the "local partnering" (what often resulted in state/court backed judgements against the foreign investors), ...

The disasters "wolf warrior" politics, combined with the above mentioned issues. And the stringent monetary policies limitation on moving money out of China did not help (translation: We want you to put money in, not being able to pull it out).

This has resulted in a reduction of foreign investment by almost 70% (given the 15 year average). What used to be easily be 200 a 250B investments per year, has now dropped to barely 100B, and is still declining.

They are controlled by their respective governments, but realistically that power is limited, because they know that "Western" powers would wage war if necessary. So in reality there is a tacit understanding between corrupt local governments and foreign powers to keep access more or less free.

What about them? The claim, or rather implication, was that Western powers would never allow equivalent protectionist policies, such as preventing the export of key industries and skills, to be enacted by other countries. Yet such protectionism is routine in China (and many other Asian countries), and "whole hell" did not break loose.

A few more than half century old examples don't change what we can all see is the case in the present day.

> And the west always said that China is bad for doing it.

"The west" criticizes China because the ruling regime imposes a series of arbitrary restrictions to foreign companies, including outright banning them, while demanding that Chinese companies should have unrestricted access to foreign markets.

You are now faced with an exceptionally rare event where a member of "the west" enforces restrictions that are similar to the ones China broadly imposes on foreign companies, but does so on an isolated incident. And you call that irony.

It’s not ironic. The Chinese are engaging in this behaviour, while they have had full access to western markets, arguably detrimental to the west.

So now Europe are doing the same thing.

What do you exactly mean? I am familiar with YPF nationalization.

"only has lawsuits that happened to them" that is not entirely true. Yes, lawsuits and sanctions happens, but the Venezuelan government played an awful game that they exactly knew what would happen to them. Full corruption and power play that didn't play out well. This is a list of many of the nationalizations Chavez did. https://www.reuters.com/article/world/factbox-venezuelas-nat...

Isn't Venezuela a defacto dictatorship now? Not sure the 3% is correct under these conditions.

And the huge American military force currently positioned off their coastline, blowing up boats!

> You're talking about it as if it was a bug, it was not. I'm pretty sure a generation of MBAs got raised and retired really rich shifting manufacturing jobs to China. The narrative about them not being open is just a way to cope with their rise now and get rid of any blame.

IMHO it's both. It did make sense to introduce China to the Western markets, even leaving the MBA BS aside, just out of moral fairness. It was the right thing to do ethically, the execution was just fucked up - in no small part as you say due to the rise of neoliberalism.

> Lol, when you have to convince people that working in services instead of manufacturing is the future, that's what you get.

Yup. The problem with anything manufacturing is the associated pollution, energy usage and the healthcare costs from dealing with old-aged former physical laborers... we shifted all of that to China.

> Europe is shifting to a continent of pensionists, highly educated people that live with their parents til their 40s

Not by choice though. The problem is that real estate markets are fucked over, in the hot markets where the jobs are, even as a gay DINK couple (aka landlord's dream - two full time incomes and a very low chance of them adopting a child which makes noise and causes complaints from other renters) you don't stand a chance.

> Personally, I'd rather pay extra for high quality goods made ethically than some planned obsolescence or plastic garbage.

Nitpicking a little, but the Chinese also make high quality stuff. It is not advertised as much though.

> offshored manufacturing pollution

One might be tempted to say that offshoring the manufacturing pollution was the point - the Silicon Valley is the US' top Superfund site for a reason [1]. Now it's not Western countries that get to deal with the legacy of a few decades of exploitative capitalism, it's China, Taiwan and India which are out of sight, out of mind to us.

> Personally, I'd rather pay extra for high quality goods made ethically than some planned obsolescence or plastic garbage.

Indeed but that's a niche market which means R&D costs alone make products so much more expensive that it's basically impossible to compete... and for the stuff that is made domestically, manufacturers love to go for "planned obsolescence" and other strategies to turn consumer spending into recurring revenue - always remember BMW and subscription seat heaters.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/09/silic...

> What we should be doing isn't going back to trade barriers, it's creating sufficient tax incentives to sustain a domestic industry for strategically important products and then letting other countries do the same and consumers choose which company they want to buy it from.

Trade happens because not a single country has or can produce all the (strategically important) products it wants, without trading with others.

I don't see what the meaningful difference is between trade barriers (assuming by that you mean tariffs) and tax incentives for specific industries. Moderate, targeted tariff policies, especially ones that gradually decreased over time, can achieve the same effect of bolstering domestic industry while still allowing a healthy amount of foreign competition.

> For me consumerism seems much worse than free trade. Buying clothes and use it once, change the car each year or other similar behaviors seem unsustainable because nobody cares about the generated garbage or the energy/material requirements.

I don't believe in putting the responsibility on individuals. Billions upon billions of whatever currency are being poured into ads, marketing, influencing, lobbying, propaganda (and whatever other manipulation mechanism I'm not thinking of), employing some of the most brilliant mind of this generation, to ensure that individuals are consumerist. Because that's what will make companies the most money, and "making more money" is the only incentive this society has in place.

Show me the incentive and I show you the outcome: the outcome is enormous externalities. We need to fix the incentives, not expect individuals to somehow act against them en masse.

You should realise this is quite the conflation. Might as well say we are going back to the age before penicillin because that was also "back then." I personally don't advocate for a return to the past for its own sake.

perhaps the US is doing that for other reasons (RFK Jr.) but the good news is that in the post US hegemonic order, that country can go ahead and collapse into flames and the rest of the world won't be taken down with it.

> free for me but not for thee

That's rich, coming from a country which outright bands foreign corporations from even operating within their borders, and those who they allow have to operate through a state-controlled corporate minder.

I know how China operates and I'm not at all sympathetic to their cause

You're not saying "governments have interests" (which we can agree is obvious), youre saying the public principles invoked are contingent on whether they advance those interests and get swapped out the moment they don't. That's not a banal "laws protect interests", it's a claim about which interests and when the rhetoric changes.

"Window dressing" from the cited comment isn't about the existence of law, it's about the story told to legitimate a choice already made on interest grounds. When a principle helps the home coalition's position, it's foregrounded, when it threatens it, it's narrowed, reinterpreted, suspended etc. The principle is the sales pitch and the selection and timing are about power.

Countries push openness most intensely in sectors where their firms can penetrate foreign markets (finance in the 1990s, software/IP heavy goods in the 2000s etc). Because openness abroad protects their capital, openness at home is celebrated until it starts eroding strategic capacity. Then come security reviews, export controls, local content rules, subsidies etc and everything is wrapped in principled language.

> Internal competition and level playing fields are promoted as they pressure companies to improve their competitiveness.

Until internal competition threatens a national champion in a strategic race. Then we let consolidation happen (or subsidize it) and call it "industrial policy". We laud the disciplining function of foreign competition until the foreign rival is big enough to discipline us, then it's "unfair trade", "security risk", "systemic rivalry" etc

For decades, openness to China was "win win globalization". As China's capability rose, the same flows (capital, tech, data etc) got relabeled as channels of leverage. Now we create controls, seizures/forced restructurings and targeted decoupling justified by a different principle than yesterday's.

So basically your "policy serves interests" is a truism that ignores the commenter's claim about how principles are instrumentalized. I mean free markets, antitrust, IP, security, sovereignty etc aren't a tight contradiction free doctrine. States pick the item that best advances leverage at that moment and explain it with whatever noble language fits. It's a realistic description of how advanced economies behave when the balance of advantage shifts.

There used to be a concept of enlightened self interest, in which countries agreed to play by universal rules that they benefit from in the long run, but which might not be in their favor in every particular case.

Now, we're in an era of petty self interest, in which no one trusts anyone else, international institutions and laws carry no weight, and everyone is poorer and less safe in the long run.

However, laws and regulations are also in place to prevent strategic interests from being captured or even threatened. The motivation is rather obvious and to the point. Where is this window dressing you speak of?

And yet the sale was allowed - 7 years ago - and only voided now under cloak and dagger, via a never-before used law. The window dressing is the entire "international rules based order" we hear so much about. If it's all just interests, then you can't complain about Russia invading Ukraine, Israel annexing land from various neighbors, China taking Taiwan and seizing TSMC, etc.

Having a rival third-party perform an action that threatens your competitiveness is obviously not acceptable.

And yet that being acceptable is the entire basis of the free market system. So yes I'm just whistling past the graveyard, but the hypocrisy is real and there should be no crying about principles later. The embrace of "the strong do as they will and the weak suffer as they must" - just as the west's relative strength is at its lowest ebb in perhaps hundreds of years - is at the the very least a bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see if it pays off.

>China wants all the access to the rest of the world and wants everyone to buy their products... but they do not want to reciprocate.

There's a history with the West where they have been manipulated and taken advantage of in a way that the US never has.

It's possible their desire to force companies into partnerships is genuinely based on a fear of that happening again.

You say that China wants everyone to buy their products. There's also the implication that this is bad for the US economically. However China wouldn't benefit if their customers are poor.

I think it depends on how many gloves are taken off. China in its position would want to sustain global trade and actually more and more respect the current international order, if there is any.

But I don't think the other players want that order to live forever, so we will see. I just hope we don't get WW3, and that's good enough for me.

Like… China?

[dead]

"Dumping" (selling at an artificially low price) is widely considered an attack on economic activity of the competitors, even though it may spur the economic activity of the consumers of the products being dumped.

In this regard, the Chinese government pouring large subsidies into solar panel production both spurred the economic activity around installing solar panels, and attacked / thwarted in around production of the panels themselves, if the production happens outside China. Only the US was able to somehow develop solar panel production.

I'm not really disagreeing with you as it's not like there is a 100% true definition of a free market, different people can have different conceptions, but the original Adam Smith / classical view is that a free market should essentially be 100% driven by the private market on supply and demand - with as little government intervention as possible on either side of the ledger (subsidy or blocking)

Corporate internal markets are well-known as non-free, and when a sufficiently large company is picking and choosing winners in a national economy that's also not a free market.

I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to spot the difference between Apple and the Chinese government.

The amount of what-about-ism in this thread is amazing. No, large companies with semi-monopolies using their power to influence government organizations is not part of a free market either. But OP never claimed that it was.

The whole point is that when in some market there is some nation trying to disturb the free market mechanism in its favor, other countries can't just be naïve and stand by doing nothing. They have to counter act and this is what happend in The Netherlands.

> argument I have heard about the US taking 20% stake in Intel is that when a company asks for federal money then it’s only fair if the federal government gets some equity in return

Great forward-looking concept. Terrible ex post facto. The precedent set is that the government can demand equity for past favours at any time.

Also, now that the U.S. owns a stake in Intel, where does that leave competitors? We're already seeing a push to force AMD and Intel to merge [1].

[1] https://www.tomsguide.com/tech/us-government-considering-cas...

>You can’t socialize losses and privatize gains.

Companies do this all the time though.

For example, here in Louisiana the utility companies do this. After a major hurricane, Entergy will fix and upgrade tons of infrastructure and then get to tack on a +$15.00/m on to your utility bill for the next 5 to 10 years to recoup the costs all while they are making millions in profits each year.

Why pay for it themselves when they can just force the public to do it.

> You can’t socialize losses and privatize gains.

Yes, yes, and yes.

We kept doing this, a bank or company stretches too much after making record profits, and then cries for federal funding and free money.

The federal reserve is a lender of last resort and they shouldn’t have given that much money without any collateral etc. Even if they just kept the stock and then sold it afterwards, we wouldn’t be in this much debt. We spend trillions covering private losses, this was plain stupid.

if we are not a communist country (everyone seems to think that we are not) why the F would we socialize losses?!?

They are as commie as it gets but lets say heavily promoting socialism, nationalizing private companies, subsidizing farmers etc etc… and it is getting worse by the minute

:)