Patreon: https://bit.ly/3v8OhY7Richard Wolff is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a visiting professor at The Ne...
The thing with protectionism, is that it works best in the context of trying to subsidize an industry in which you can’t really dominate the competition or at least compete. It’s what first Japan and then South Korea did with their silicon and technology manufacturing (prop it up at losses until it matured and can be competitive in the world market). If the whole policy dumbs down to “no we’re not gonna buy it cheap because China bad”, then the policy is not very likely to be successful.
Western countries peddled the lies of neoliberalism so much that they started to believe them, and they’re starting to realize way too late that it was always a myth to keep the poor impoverished and they’re slowly going to be left behind.
the US is trying to subsidize an industry in which it can’t really dominate the competition or at least compete, though. I’m just a simple country lawyer but it seems like the difference is that US subsidies have lost all effectiveness due to intermediation by layers of profit-seeking grifters— they throw tens of billions at Intel and instead of new fabs getting built, Intel trims up its bottom line and fires a bunch of people.
AFAIK, the US isn’t doing much in the way of EV production, it subsidized Tesla for a while and probably keeps doing it, but there’s no comprehensive plan behind it to stop the reliance on batteries on China for example, at least in the short to mid term. Again, that’s all as far as I know.
The thing with protectionism, is that it works best in the context of trying to subsidize an industry in which you can’t really dominate the competition or at least compete. It’s what first Japan and then South Korea did with their silicon and technology manufacturing (prop it up at losses until it matured and can be competitive in the world market). If the whole policy dumbs down to “no we’re not gonna buy it cheap because China bad”, then the policy is not very likely to be successful.
Western countries peddled the lies of neoliberalism so much that they started to believe them, and they’re starting to realize way too late that it was always a myth to keep the poor impoverished and they’re slowly going to be left behind.
the US is trying to subsidize an industry in which it can’t really dominate the competition or at least compete, though. I’m just a simple country lawyer but it seems like the difference is that US subsidies have lost all effectiveness due to intermediation by layers of profit-seeking grifters— they throw tens of billions at Intel and instead of new fabs getting built, Intel trims up its bottom line and fires a bunch of people.
AFAIK, the US isn’t doing much in the way of EV production, it subsidized Tesla for a while and probably keeps doing it, but there’s no comprehensive plan behind it to stop the reliance on batteries on China for example, at least in the short to mid term. Again, that’s all as far as I know.