marcusverus

> This sort of protectionism can work temporarily but isn’t really sustainable.

This policy isn't about trade. It's not even about automobiles, really. It's about hard power.

A nation's hard power in peacetime can be estimated (in part) by the number of tanks / planes / ships it has available, but in the event of a hot war with a great power, that static figure is matters less and less over time. In a protracted war, the far more important factor is the rate at which new tanks / planes / ships that can be manufactured going forward. Thus, in the context of America's strategic competition with China, our heavy industry is just as important a component of our hard power as are our existing stockpile of armaments.

If someone proposed that we send a sizable portion of our tanks/planes/ships over to China, we would easily identify that as an absurd strategic blunder. Why would you reduce your armaments stockpile while increasing that of your main strategic adversary?! Well, opening our automobile market to the Chinese would undoubtedly result in the equivalent outcome for armament manufacturing capacity. It would mean less domestic armament manufacturing capacity and more Chinese armament manufacturing capacity (subsidized by Americans!). To allow such a thing would also be an absurd strategic blunder!

We can all wish that the world was a peaceful place, and that the era of great power wars is behind us for good, but to mistake our wishes for reality would be very dangerous. Strength is the only source of security. This policy is a means of preserving what strength we have left.

This argument doesn't really stand up to scrutiny, IMO.

Say you have a section of urban highway that is severely congested. If roads are a profit-center, congestion is a strong market signal--demand outstrips supply! More people want to use your product, but your supply is insufficient. The obvious solution is to build more supply. Until you do, you're leaving money on the table! Quick, expand the road! Build a tunnel! Do something!

The exact opposite logic applies when roads are a public good. They become a cost-center, and any concern about meeting demand becomes subordinate to a thousand other concerns. The costs of building and maintaining roads remain real and immediate (They cost money! NIMBYs hate construction!), but the benefits of building and maintaining roads become abstract and distant (the benefits are: fewer complaints? More economic activity in the long run?) The laws of supply and demand no longer apply, and you find people saying insane things like "Why should we expand that congested highway? Expanding it will only draw more cars, and then it will still be congested!". In a free market, such nonsense is unthinkable. No business would ever say "Demand is so far in excess of supply that increasing supply is pointless!" Yet as soon as market incentives are removed, this nonsense becomes the default.

Every day on my commute, I spend ~30 minutes driving 80 MPH on private highway, and the instant I hit the public highway I am in bumper-to-bumper traffic, as one of the most congested stretches of 4-lane highway in one of the largest cities in the country is reduced to two lanes as it passes under another highway. It costs me 30 minutes of my life every day, and there are no current plans to resolve this bottleneck. The notion that public roads are saving me from evil rent-seeking capitalists is just silly. I prefer self-interested capitalists to incompetent public administrators.

This isn't to say that roads should be totally deregulated--incentives matter, and the state has a legitimate role to play in ensuring that consumers are protected from malicious actors. But the incentives associated with public ownership are so perverse that it's hard to imagine a private option resulting in worse outcomes.

> at worst they strip the infrastructure of all value without any maintenance, getting taxpayers to build it again.

The worst-case scenario for privatization is the default scenario with public ownership!

The argument for private industry was never that they would always charge lower prices per unit, but that they would produce things more efficiently--at a lower cost per unit. Of course public providers can charge lower prices. Their sales revenues aren't their only source of funds! So the mere fact that they charge lower prices doesn't necessarily indicate lower total cost, since the low prices may simply be a subsidy which is shorn up with tax dollars.

A case in point would be the Mamdani stores that are being launched in New York City. They'll be offering groceries at a steep discount. Socialist activists could then turn around and write headlines like "private-owned grocery stores charge x% more for groceries than public providers", but would that mean that public groceries have overall lower costs than private ones? Obviously not. It would be foolish to use price data to argue that the public model is somehow better than the private one. You would need to know whether the point-of-sale savings represent actual savings to the consumer, or whether the difference is being paid in some other way.

It doesn't do consumers any good to pay $50 less their utility bill if that $50 savings is made possible by charging an additional $60 in state and local taxes.

It's also the equivalent of:

- 16% of New Mexico's GDP

- ~200% of New Mexico's annual budget

- $29,620 per household in New Mexico

Absolutely bananas.

Africa's dysfunction isn't due to capitalism nor would be improved by the alternatives, as evidenced by the total collapse of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe when it was taken over by collectivists. Similarly, the proportion of Indians living in extreme poverty in India has been reduced by ~90% since it shifted to a market economy around '91.

Hilarious inversion of reality. Top marks.

Socialism failed so hard that the overwhelming majority of socialist countries recognized that socialism is inferior to capitalism, bailed, and adopted capitalism. Now that capitalism has brought about AI, socialists unironically suggest reverting to the inferior system, in hopes that it will have (magically) been rendered superior... by a product of capitalism.

This is the self-defeating contradiction at the heart of progressivism: it is a cult of good intentions. It doesn't matter if the promise of socialism has already been proved, on a global scale, to be illusory. It's the intentions that matter, and in their minds no amount of failure will ever tarnish good intentions.

I'm convinced that susceptibility to such pre-enlightenment "thinking" is a Great Filter.

> It is an assymetric issue - the right radicalized far far more then left. And spend years demonozing anyone left of center, demonizing groups and now is actually sending thugs to be violent.

This is obviously untrue. The left have openly celebrated assassination attempts on Trump and even high-profile left-wing personalities openly share memeified calls for violence against him (see Comey sharing an 8647 meme). The left also openly celebrated terrorism against Tesla because they disagreed with budget cuts spearheaded by their CEO. The democrat VP nominee openly gloated about the impact of said terrorism on Tesla's stock price at a political rally. There is no analog to this on the right. Pretending otherwise is shameful.

> One is a name of political ideology.

The point, which you managed to miss, is that Nazism the most evil label which can be applied by the secular left, as there is nothing more evil in the secular pantheon that Nazism and Adolph Hitler.

> It is a name consistent with reality.

One guy made an arm motion that, if taken out of context and interpreted in the most hysterical and bad faith manner possible, could be interpreted as a Nazi salute, ergo you're justified in calling everyone to the right of Mitt Romney a Nazi? You are my case in point. I appreciate your assistance.

Trump has a 30% approval rating and will never run for office again. Rest assured that anyone engaged in a sophisticated right-wing propaganda racket would not be talking about Donald Trump.

The internet is awash with seething tribal hatred. It's impossible to honestly believe this is only an issue with the right. The "demon-crat" attack is roughly analogous to the left's "nazi" attack (nazis, after all, are the secular-progressive equivalent of demons, with Adolf Hitler being their Satan), and the latter attack is infinitely more common than the former, even on HN.

The solution to this problem is straightforward, isn't it? Just add mass. Propulsion is the technological bottleneck.

An entire worldview predicated on butthurt.

SpaceX has a history of promising insanely ambitious technological progress on insanely short schedules, then delivering insanely difficult technological progress, often behind schedule. To bellyache about this--as though it's the timeline that matters and that the delivery of insanely ambitious technological progress is beside the point--is transparent, unserious and tiresome.