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#13 | Posted by SpeakSoftly at 2026-08-21 05:01 PM
If our government could order our industries to do their bidding like china does we'd be a lot more competitive.

LOL. No, we wouldn't - it's called "industrial policy" and it usually ends poorly for the industries involved and the economy in general due to mistaken notion that "government knows best" and results in misallocation of capital (and labor) and uncompetitively mispriced goods.

For example, right now, the buildout of datacenters resulted in lack of labor to build housing... Trump's immigration policy doesn't help.

"Industrial policy" of Japan in the 1980s and 1990s lead to several "lost decades" and loss of competitiveness in many other sectors. Same is actually happening with China and Germany.

We've had several experiments with the "industrial policy" and protectionism - in steel, cars, yachts, "renewable energy" etc. - most recently with Trump and Biden administrations trying to "re-shore / on-shore" manufacturing in places and sectors where there was either no real organic demand or it was not price-competitive and was cheaper to buy elsewhere... IOW, money down the drain once the government "program" was over.

We're plenty competitive in the global market, including "manufacturing", in the services companies choose to provide and the goods companies choose to make, based on the input costs, TCO, potential market size and available expertise - cost or quality is what makes companies competitive, not government edicts.

Most of the problems are that the governments (federal, state and local) increase input cost via several mechanisms - "minimum wage", taxation, regulations, mandates, resources misallocation (e.g., energy / electricity) etc.


Also, Maybe you have enough time to grow your own food because you're a loser, but most of us have other jobs.

You've just described what David Ricardo called "comparative advantage" - it's cheaper and less burdensome to buy the goods with a fraction of what you can earn elsewhere - that's why "industrial policies" don't work in the long run.

But that would be exactly the kind of "industrial policy" that government could demand - e.g., supplying a certain percent of "local", "farm to table" or "organic" food or non-caged chicken eggs, etc. - that would raise costs and made products less competitive vs other states or countries.

Competitiveness is about price - and governments' "industrial policies" inevitably raise costs and "price goods and services out of the market" - especially when the "market" is increasingly global and technology can make it cheaper somewhere else.
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