"A federal grand jury in Kansas returned an indictment yesterday charging seven defendants, including five current and former high-level officers of the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, Iron Ship Builders, Blacksmith, Forgers and Helpers (Boilermakers Union) for their alleged roles in a 15-year, $20 million embezzlement scheme."
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-former-presidents-boilerm...
In other words maybe there's just less corruption in Finland.
US domestic market is much larger. Uncompetitive industries can survive on domestic demand. Especially with some regulations that help. It doesn't even have to be explicitly protectionist regulation. Just regulate things the way Americans consider the best, instead of adopting international standards. That can create sufficient barriers to entry to allow uncompetitive industries and uncooperative unions survive.
I'd bet that's just scratching the surface. The only way any country has been able to develop their productive capacities is through public grants and subsidies. The history of US industry shows the same thing, research in materials, electronics, the internet, etc were all accomplished through publicly funded research.
Somehow the magical thinking here is that, if you allowed everyone to buy ships from anywhere they would buy more American made ships but because it is mandated that you buy American made ships for certain tasks, suddenly the industry is noncompetitive.
The reality of the situation is that the Jones Act is the only thing keeping the last vestigial of the shipbuilding industry alive. There are some inefficiencies in the industry it's self but for the most part, the primary drivers for the increased costs were related to the regulatory environment of the US(environmental, worker protection, etc), now there are even greater costs due to network effects of related industries having shrunk or died out.
Similar to posts about machine tools or electronic design, everyone talks about how in China its so much easier to get stuff done because the Fab shops are all next door and nothing like that exists in the US, you used to have more steel mills, fabricators and machine shops. Now there are fewer and further apart.
Network effects matter.
With these unions ("Boilermakers")? No chance. They can officially give their jobs to their _children_ upon retiring.
There is a waiting list for apprenticeships. You have to complete 8000 hours of apprenticeship, even if you are already qualified.
> By cushy contracts this means that the amount of wealth extraction from workers is not as great as it is in other American industries.
WA is ordering ferries at $1.5B per item. They cost 20 _times_ less if ordered from Turkey. This is not "wealth extraction from workers", this is "sucking on the teat of taxpayers".
It's about 7x.
> 20x discrepancy in salaries
Not salaries. The end-product costs.
[1]: https://www.usatoday.com/money/blueprint/business/hr-payroll...
And cushy contracts mean products that are considerably more expensive. Pretty much the only unionized industries left are those where they are somehow protected from competition. That's because union products cost enough more to drive them out of the market.
Similar with Boeing too.
Every country who isn't just getting exploited for their natural resources or labor has built their industry by protecting it.
In any case, the process really got going under Jimmy Carter. If we're talking about airlines, I guess you could point to the Airline Deregulation Act. The airline industry had been built in the first place by what people in this thread would call "protectionist" policies.
Stock buybacks are a big part of the story as well. These were illegal market manipulation I think from the Great Depression until the 80's under Reagan.
The problem here isn't the unions, it's the fact that we privatized building ships. It's yet another example that privatizing all parts of the government is a fundamentally bad idea. Government goals do not align with private industry goals and private industry, particularly in a well captured market like defense and ship building, gets to command insane prices because they know the US will pony up.
The reason the US was able to make advanced navy ships right up until the 80s is because shipbuilding was done by public industry. Insanely, Clinton and Reagan started the process of privatizing our fleet capabilities and it's landed us exactly where you think it would.
The reason we don't have ice breaker ships being built is because it's a niche market and ship builders are all too happy to say "no" or to charge an exorbitant price so the US military will go away.
But on the other hand, the same stats show a steady decline in the number of companies from 1950 that was only stabilised after the collapse in output, so it is probably arguable that the high-production situation was unsustainable. Economics can be complex.
The most recent classes seem riddled with various problems - see Zumwalt, LCS, Constellation. I suppose the Ford is relatively ok.
But let’s be real, as other countries rise up and we start losing our grip as the top dog, we're gonna feel the pain. It could be a slow burn or maybe a faster crash, but either way, it's gonna suck. We’re gonna have to go through some serious hardship to get back to where we think we should be. Not based on what we think we deserve, but what we actually do.
And it’s kinda mixed messaging too, right? We somehow believe our labor is more valuable than others, but at the end of the day, it’s gonna come down to working harder. Longer hours, more back-breaking labor, real work, not just sitting in an office chair all day. We’re not entitled to cushy jobs forever, and things are gonna get a lot harder before they get better.
They've created a market in which a US based company cannot compete economically, because the cost of production elsewhere will be less. There is no margin by which any competition can take place, whether or not the government throws a ton of money and stopgap incentives into the mix.
You can't manufacture chips, small household goods, general purpose clothing, electronics, or a whole slew of other things in the US because our legal regime fundamentally disallows any American participation in those markets through economic disincentivization. If you can't make any profit because you have to pay higher wages or taxes if you manufacture in the US, then you're not going to manufacture in the US, even if you're a patriot.
The US doesn't have a rational system designed to maximize value to citizens, it's a hodgepodge of conflicting regulatory grifts designed to maximally benefit the corporations who paid for the lobby.
> they're crap compared to ships from other countries.
That's exactly what "globalizing" is. You literally cannot, under the current regulatory regime, create a ship building company that can compete with other established interests and competition from other countries. You'd have to relax the arbitrary labor and wage constraints, fix taxes and tariffs for sufficiently long term outlooks that anyone would bother investing. To achieve that, you'd need good faith operators throughout the government willing to rock the boat, and if you think that will ever happen, I've got a bridge in Brooklyn for ya - I'll sell it cheap.
Why? Because efficiency is a tradeoff where you give up security and resiliency.
The US imports steel, and the protectionist regime almost killed the US steel: https://reason.com/2024/01/02/protectionism-ruined-u-s-steel...
> Batteries? Protectionism. Solar? Protectionism.
That's relatively new, and it _will_ lead to disaster. The US is already falling behind in battery tech compared to China and South Korea.
> Autos? Protectionism. Aircraft? Protectionism.
Need I remind you of Detroit and its handling of cheap Japanese imports in 70-s and 80-s?
Aircraft are only slightly protectionist, the US companies can (and do) buy foreign aircraft (Airbuses and Embraers are commonplace).
Investment can (and often is) different from protectionism. Typically, investment provides time-limited grants or other forms of support. If a company misuses them, a global (or local) competitor will outpace it.
Protectionism ensures that companies are indefinitely protected from global competition, so they don't feel as pressed to improve.
I am not a terribly smart person, and I don’t have all the answers, but I would argue it’s clear what we’ve done so far isn’t working, based on all available evidence.
Cheap labor cost typically is only a fraction of a high-tech product. If anything, China was not the world's biggest factory, but the world's biggest assembler. It's changing right now, and China is producing more of its own high-tech components.
So a small amount of protectionism (like a 10-15% tariff) might be OK, and it will compensate for this labor cost discrepancy. But not tariffs that simply make the local industry complacent.
If the Pharoah wants a fleet of aircraft carriers, the Pharoah will have a fleet of aircraft carriers.
The West plays nice as much as possible. China is playing to win.
I'm not seeing it. Chinese economic power and tech capacity might exceed US capacity in time, but I give it only p = .25 or so. China's descending into some sort of political chaos seems more likely.
> Our research reveals that China has built the foundations to position itself as the world’s leading science and technology superpower, by establishing a sometimes stunning lead in high-impact research across the majority of critical and emerging technology domains.
> China’s global lead extends to 37 out of 44 technologies that ASPI is now tracking, covering a range of crucial technology fields spanning defence, space, robotics, energy, the environment, biotechnology, artificial intelligence (AI), advanced materials and key quantum technology areas. The Critical Technology Tracker shows that, for some technologies, all of the world’s top 10 leading research institutions are based in China and are collectively generating nine times more high-impact research papers than the second-ranked country (most often the US). Notably, the Chinese Academy of Sciences ranks highly (and often first or second) across many of the 44 technologies included in the Critical Technology Tracker. We also see China’s efforts being bolstered through talent and knowledge import: one-fifth of its high-impact papers are being authored by researchers with postgraduate training in a Five-Eyes country. China’s lead is the product of deliberate design and long-term policy planning, as repeatedly outlined by Xi Jinping and his predecessors.
Emphasis mine.
And the West isn’t? I honestly am not sure whether I prefer Xi Jinping over one of the candidates in the upcoming US elections.
There are still thankfully some checks and balances in place, but if the loudest elements of one of the two major US parties has everything their way, I’d honestly prefer to live in the PRC.
Please, tell us how you came to this conclusion
American movies, however, are still quite popular abroad. Offhand, I'd say it's one of America's biggest exports. "Microcode" is the other one, if you mean things like CPU design: all the biggest CPU makers are in America: Intel, AMD, Apple, Qualcomm, etc. (Many of the CPUs are manufactured elsewhere, usually by TSMC, but all the design work is done in the US.)
That's just not true. As long as you are able to get an original ticket and not a resold one. But ticketmaster and live nation should be regulated because they're a middleman monopoly in all of it.
According to the 1st paragraph of the linked article, it is.
>As long as you are able to get an original ticket and not a resold one.
That's pretty useless if they all get bought up by resellers.
I'm not talking about original ticket prices, but rather the prices that normal people actually pay. According to the article, it's huge because of scalpers. Maybe that isn't true in your experience, but it seems to be true for enough people that they're writing articles complaining about this.
If you want to be able to build and retain the capability, you have to protect the machine that does the building: people, institutional knowledge and domain expertise, equipment, etc. Otherwise, you forget how to build, the machine evaporates. And here we are.
It hasn't. Jones Act _protects_ the US maritime industry, so it stagnated and died. Nobody wants the US ships unless they have to use them, they're crap compared to ships from other countries.
> and they still can't find builders.
That's because shipyards are basically a defense industry subsidiary. So they receive a fixed amount of orders, and it's known for years in advance. The shipyards are also unionized to hell and back, with VERY cushy contracts. So shipyards can't hire temporary workforce for a given project.