Comment by PaulHoule

So if X% of the economy benefits directly you might say 100-X% of the people would benefit secondarily because the people who benefit would have more money to buy services, building, etc. Trouble is in the short term that X is probably less than 5% so that multiplier effect is not that big.

The industry that has the most intractable 'national security' issues in my mind is the drone industry. The problem there is that there are many American companies that would like to build expensive overpriced super-profitable drones for the military and other high-end consumers and none that want to build consumer-oriented drones at consumer-oriented prices. [1] Drones are transformational military because they are low cost and if you go to war with a handful of expensive overpriced drones against somebody who has an unlimited supply of cheap but deadly drones guess who ends up like the cavalry soldiers who faced tanks in WWI?

There is a case for industrial policy there and tariffs could be a tool but you should really look at: (1) what the Chinese did to get DJI established and (2) what the EU did to make Airbus into a competitor for Boeing. From that latter point of view maybe we need a "western" competitor to DJI and not necessarily an "American" competitor. There are a lot of things we would find difficult about Chinese-style industrial policy. If I had to point to once critical difference it's that people here thought Solyndra was a scandal and maybe it was but China had Solyndra over and over again in the process to dominate solar panels and sure it hurt but... they dominate solar panels.

[1] I think of how Microsoft decided each project in the games division had to be 30% profitable just because they have other hyperprofitable business lines, yet this is entirely delusional