The need for recruitment points out an essential imbalance between “progressives” and most all other western worldviews. “Progressives’” only interest - when you get right down to it - is power over others. It is their essential motivation and organizing principle.
Others, like conservatives, libertarians, anarchists, are at an inherent disadvantage as their default position is ‘live and let live’. They aren’t obsessively trying to tell everyone else what to do or what to think. This, I think, is a fundamental political disadvantage. The evidence for this proposition can be seen in the fact that whenever “progressives” are defeated, they are right back, full force and usually doubled down. They never go away - rather like cockroaches.
My point was that China has more companies competing than the US had/has.
You answered my question. It doesn’t matter how China got to the current state with regard to whether it currently has multiple companies competing. They either have more companies competing than the US or it doesn’t.
Maybe I should have phrased my question differently. Does it seem appropriate that China has more companies competing for a given market than the US did when it faced little foreign competition?
This sounds very similar to the US position in the 1960s. The US was unable to leverage the largest manufacturing base with the largest economies of scale to compete with Japanese auto makers.
I am not arguing that China’s system is ethical. The CCP cheats, it lies, it manipulates and it has been allowed to do so for a very long time.
What I am arguing is that a free society requires free market capitalism. For free market capitalism to work there needs to be competition. Monopolies are terrible for free market capitalism and are the equivalent of being government owned.
It seems to me that when a few companies become dominate in a market, it has a similar impact as a monopoly.
I admittedly have a bias which is that large organizations are extremely inefficient. Being large does give economies of scale, but at some point the inefficiency/performance will overcome economies of scale. If economies of scale are a bigger driver than performance, I speculate that Japan would never have been able to compete.
When I say protected, I am referring to several things outside of duties. One is allowing corporations to become monopolies or the equivalent with a few major players. Another is regulations. The regulations often protect corporations from startup competition. These regulations significantly enhance the benefit of scale. It could also be direct government subsidy or indirect government subsidy creating labor laws or consumer protection laws that interfere with competition. Another protection is a messed up capital markets system. Although this last one is the hardest to concretely illustrate, it is probably the biggest.
The narrative has always been that foreign competitors beat domestic companies because of low cost labor. You are disagreeing. I don’t think you have it correct either. Any new factory will initially be more expensive than an existing factory for multiple reasons. High capital expense for new equipment and facilities, low utilization, and lower skill sets in almost every function due to inexperience combine to make new factories more expensive than existing factories. In the case of China, high duties for any incoming materials for product sold in China also add to the cost.
I do agree that simply having low labor cost doesn’t provide a competitive advantage on a level playing field unless of course you pay a welder nearly the same wage as the market price for an engineer and or prevent jobs from being eliminated.
I am not a free trade person nor a protectionist. I am a fair trade person. We should have had the same policy with China that China has with us. If they have had a 50% import duty for materials and goods, we will have a 50% import duty on goods from China.
At this point, it will take a better strategy than what we should have done 20 years ago. Maybe if we would have zero tax for goods manufactured in the US and 40% tax on goods not manufactured in the US it might help, but capitalism requires competition and that competition includes labor competition.