Because we know that protectionism with people like those you explained at the top

> If you can get an extra lambo in your garage, by firing all your factory employees, and move your manufacturing to China, well...what do you think will happen?

does not guarantee better products/outcomes. Those who would use basically slave labor offshore for profits, will also do other nasty things for profits at home as well. Not a fan of dichotomy like these.

I want cheap Chinese electric cars here in the US.

Not sure I support that broad a statement.

Here in NY, we have had many instances of dangerous building fires, caused by cheap Chinese scooters, which are a favorite transportation mode for folks without means.

A number of these fires caused many families to lose their homes and meager possessions, because one tenant was charging crap batteries.

I kinda hate this "Chinese = crap" narrative, it's naive, it misses the forest for the trees.

Just because they are the biggest manufacturer in the world they also produce lots of crap, it's just statistically more probable that you gonna find lots of crap that's Chinese, but generalizing this over entire industries and all kind of products is just...naive.

It kinda reminds me of that documentary where a Chinese billionaire buys a plant in Ohio to make car glass and American workers looked like crap compared to their Chinese counterparts when it came to the craft, even though they did produce glass before already before the Chinese ownership.

It's the kind of narrative that people pushed on Russian army after their failures in Ukraine claiming huge incompetence and their incoming demise. Or when people were sure their economy was gonna collapse because this and that.

Just saying stuff doesn't make it true.

The longer we keep with those biases the more naive and vulnerable we'll keep being.

There's a huge amout of corruption, and almost no regulation.

It's a matter of demand, not capabilities.

He has told me that he does need to hire a lot of folks to ride herd on production; more than in other places, though (he has had many places that run his production).

If he does that, he finds they do an excellent job.

Nonsense. It has been shown for much longer and many more times that people have a capacity to act on the long-term. It might involve various social thought mechanisms like religion, moralism, and politics that prevent so-called progress, but evolution often favors societies who act on the long-term. This is a especially true in moments of sudden catastrophe. A classic example is Catholicism in the face of the plague.

It’s not that popular with the masses either.

Sure, it can be very popular with the people whose specific industries are protected, and there’s many who like it in the abstract - but if you’re the party in power when everything gets more expensive as a consequence of protectionist policies a lot of people are going to be very unhappy with you.

There may be very specific cases where very carefully tailored uses of it are good for certain long-term interests or risk mitigation, but mostly it is waste — and extremely subject to corruption from those invested in inefficient industries.

That's the "spherical cow on a frictionless plane in a vacuum" of economics.

Protectionism is probably a good idea when the competitor is temporarily subsidizing various industries to build a permanent comparative advantage that can then be abused, either by being an effective monopoly, or by shaping your enemies to be logistically unprepared for war.

I do totally agree with dragonwriter that it is vulnerable to corruption

I wonder what would happen to a Chinese CEO who pulled a stunt like that? I hear they send the next of kin the bill.