I do not want 'America's entrepreneurs' to start producing infant formula without any safeguards. That is recipe for disaster.
So how is that not losing American manufacturing to regulation? If other countries have laxer and more favorable terms for businesses and those business are succeeding, that's sufficient evidence to demonstrate that regulation stifles manufacturing.
You phrase your statement as though regulations are naturally occurring substances rather than the wishful, bureaucratic, and often violent mandates of government that they are. If the government has enough agency to compose such regulations, it should have enough agency to acknowledge and accept the resulting consequences when businesses vote with their feet and their wallets.
If we do not care enough about the regulation to have a tariff, then the regulation should not exist.
>You phrase your statement as though regulations are a naturally occurring substances rather than wishful and often violent mandates of government that they are.
Lol, what is this even? I'll bite though. Regulations are naturally occurring insofar as any other human invention is naturally occurring. All laws are regulations on behavior, and all laws are wishful. There is still murder even though we have laws against shooting people. For me, at least, that is not a reason to do away with laws, but to each their own.
Then you've confused cause for effect. Economic freedom is a driving force ,not a consequence, of investment. You're solution amounts to imprisoning or punishing companies for pursuing their economic interests.
Tariffs don't work. If you want a recent example, tariffs didn't get Trump what he wanted with China. Free trade is going to happen whether you like it or not. Imposing tariffs only creates a greater incentive not to do business in the United States, get out of an industry entirely, or to participate in a black market.
>Lol, what is this even? I'll bite though. Regulations are naturally occurring insofar as any other human invention is naturally occurring. All laws are regulations on behavior, and all laws are wishful. There is still murder even though we have laws against shooting people. For me, at least, that is not a reason to do away with laws, but to each their own.
I never said one should do away with laws. There are well-written laws and laws that should have never have been composed. Almost all regulations interfere with the exercise of one's rights even if there is no victim involved. They are simply blunt instruments of the government to exercise at its whim.
And the comparison between trade policy and murder is laughable. No one's rights are being taken away when a company chooses to trade/build in another country with full consent and acknowledgement. The same cannot be said for murder.
Yes, I am so glad you understand. When 'economic interests' of a business run counter to 'societal interests' because of trivialities like pollution or contamination of infant formula leading to death, then society, using government, enacts regulations so that the harmful action is no longer in the 'economic interest' of the business because if the business takes that action then they will be punished.
>No one's rights are being taken away when a company chooses to trade/build in another country
That depends heavily on that country's stance on human rights.
As far as infant formula goes, you can't regulate away what you call trivialities. Anyone who has ever worked in manufacturing, particularly quality control, will tell you there will always be defects. The regulations that exist now just leads to our current situation with mass recalls of even perfectly safe baby formula. If these recalls get too expensive, these companies will move to other locations if not go out of business entirely.
> That depends heavily on that country's stance on human rights
Define "human rights". A government that picks its "societal interests" is one that picks it's implementation of human rights. Suffice it to say, such governments aren't very interested in protecting those rights. Some may go so far as to violate them.
More seriously though, I do not know how to bridge the gap between us. We clearly have wildly different beliefs, and our languages differ too much. I wish you the best of luck in the world where government is the root of all evil, for I cannot join you there.
Deindustrialization will hit China and the rest of south-east Asia in time too. China right now is experiencing the boom we experienced post war.
The "laxer and more favorable terms" include the fact that people in those countries are willing to work for pennies a day.
Unless you're proposing a substantial decrease in wages in the US, companies are not going to decide, of their own will, to bring those low-skill manufacturing jobs back.
> Total production of U.S. factories peaked in 2007 before falling by 18% during the Great Recession, according to the Federal Reserve’s industrial production report, which measures the volume of goods produced rather than the market value of those goods. The manufacturing sector has nearly recovered from the recession; output in 2015 was within 3% of the 2007 level.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-manufacturing-dead-outp...
What it really regulation that was at fault for masks being so delayed? The entire suplly chail for meltblown is missing.
There are more tooling engineers in the city of Shenzhen than in all of North America combined.
A basic masks that an average citizen had to wear to take the metro does not even come with any medical certification, what regulation was getting in the way, the need to file taxes?
This is because tariffs are not high enough to compensate for Chinese workers being paid below US minimum wage.
We have huge price increases because the governments printed money for so long. Price increases were always predicted by free market economists. You don't make anyone wealthier by printing money. You don't build factories, make people smarter or increase resources. All it does is redistribute wealth to the first people that get to use the new money (banks and wealthy elites) and increase prices.
But now we have two options: control inflation by causing a severe downturn that will be painful, or control inflation with supply-side economics.
We need to match supply and demand -- either by reducing demand with a recession, or by increasing the supply of goods and services. Increasing the supply side of the equation will be better for everyone.
Not really. The unemployment checks did result in inflation, but the huge increase since November is because higher order supply chain issues (that started with the pandemic, ships waiting for unloading for many days, longshoreman on sick leave due to COVID, lack of empty containers, trucking industry problems, big swings of spending from services to products due to working from home, semiconductor shortages completely fucking up manufacturing schedules, then a few new waves of COVID in China, and so on).
There's also a cascade effect that happens because if something is out of stock people will buy something else, so the price of that will go up initially, then it will also go out of stock, because the next batches are sitting in containers somewhere.
> You don't make anyone wealthier by printing money.
That's not how it works.
Public spending has a fiscal multiplier, if that's greater than 1 then it does increase wealth. Public services, infrastructure, education, healthcare, all have high multipliers. Of course some have less than one, eg. giving tax credits to Amazon for moving their HQ, end of life hospitalization is arguably overdone in developed countries, a large chunk of military spending, spending public money on sports/stadiums, etc.
On top of this printing money during a pandemic is extending credit in time, so the private sector doesn't start a contagious bankruptcy chain.
...
Then after all this the Fed did wait too much to increase rates. (Mostly because the unemployment numbers were/are still high.)
Inflation only hurts when some buyers of a scarce good are benefiting more from money printing than others. This doesn't apply to consumer commodities.
If you give money to businesses that for the last 50 years have simply become experts at dealing with international supply chains... You’re probably just going to have the money sent abroad.
Yes. Almost all of them stem from before the internet. Publication requirements prevented accidental trademark infringement and provided public notice. Similarly for foreign entity registration. Business licenses linked business addresses to the tax registry. Hairdressing because many barbers provided shaves, which involves a sanitary component.
Southern Cal wanted a desalination plant. Spent a TON of time in development. Shot down. Repeat time 100x, kind of crushing I think.
But before we build extremely expensive desalination, more effective and lower cost actions must come first. Reforming water rights law to stop insane use it or lose it incentives (e.g. flood irrigation of almond trees). Renegotiating water treaties. Increasing water efficiency in agriculture. Xeriscaping. Higher water prices that will hold down demand and provide a self-enforcing incentive to reduce waste, leaks, and low value water consumption. And better finance water works.
Reduce, reuse, recycle.
YOU have decided that another solution "MUST" come first because supposedly you understand the economics better. But these guys were willing to stick some money behind their idea. Govt cannot understand why private enterprise works, and this shoes it. Why not let them lose their shirts if it is such a stupid idea (hint, it's not and the folks talking down the economics are going to have massive egg on their face in 5 years).
In private enterprise without the blocking power of the red tape its likely a number of solutions could be brought to bear.
More market rate water pricing (hello alfalfa for china). Actual development of additional water sources (despite billions we get bupkis despite massive population growth).
Instead, we are getting local residential water use regulations that are comically extreme, and on a % basis do almost nothing.
And yes, the penalty rates for certain residential water use make that "extremely expensive" desalination plant look very very cheap.
Literally every proposal is met by some govt or other do gooder saying it's not good enough and there is something better to do - meanwhile nothing happens. That is until enough stupidity collects in a room and we get multi-billion dollar expenditures on things like hydrogen with almost no natural market demand.
It depends on your goals, if you want to absolutely destroy the global economy and wealth in 30 years for a short term shot in the arm, then sure.
We need to unleash America's entrepreneurs to create more stuff to soak up this excess money. More housing. Lots more housing. More products with fewer roadblocks to bring products to market. The fact that it took over a year for American masks to come to market, just in time for them to not be needed, in large part because of regulation is a sign of how bad things have gotten here.
We need more energy too -- wind, solar, nuclear, and yes fossil fuels too. (Our current policy of begging Saudi Arabia to provide us more oil, when we have plenty in our own backyard makes zero strategic sense. Not to mention how high fuel prices are enriching our adversaries like Russia.)