Comment by saint_fiasco
Comment by saint_fiasco 2 days ago
I don't disagree, you can definitely build more industries with tariffs and protectionism. I just don't see the point.
I'm a consumerist at heart. As long as consumers get to consume, it does not matter to me whose industry is doing the producing.
I get that your foreign suppliers can turn on you and raise prices. I think the money you make during peacetime by not putting tariffs will let you buy more weapons and bribe more allies so that the foreign suppliers don't try anything too awful with the supply chains. Stockpiles can buy a lot of time to restart industry in an emergency or at least find a different foreign supplier.
Take a look at Russia, they are sanctioned by half the planet and they still keep going on a reduced industry because they had huge stockpiles of tanks, artillery and so on. Imagine something like that but with a military that doesn't suck. Nobody would even dare try a sanction.
The point is that unfortunately geopolitics ends up in an eternal competitive state.
Losing your industrial base and giving it away to a geopolitical competitor is almost certainly an error in the long run.
Large industrial bases also are correlated with healthier middle class societies, according to Vaclav Smil, and in my experience, he’s exactly right.
So losing the industrial base is fine for you, a service sector worker, but it’s bad for the country and it’s bad for society, if you want it to have a healthy middle class.