because I’m about to be on the job market, I’m like very aware of how good it would feel to believe in this MAGA stuff, at least until the promised revival of manufacturing just doesn’t happen
like idk if the MAGA people really get that
If you keep out imports, domestic manufacturing doesn’t have to raise production. They can just raise prices. I think some have noticed this and don’t like it, but idk what they’ll do about it.
You’re probably not going to incentivize a firm to invest in manufacturing by putting tariffs on their suppliers.
The kind of people who get an extra x% efficiency out of chemical vapor deposition in Asia tend to try and make a billion dollar app here, and who can blame them? Even Elon Musk went and became a dotcom millionaire first.
But it doesn’t take any explicit agreement for domestic companies to raise prices when the overseas competing product has gone up like 30% or more. It’s not illegal to do it, just to talk about it
you can ban prosecute an oligopoly for making an explicit cartel agreement, but you can’t legally compel them to “vigorously compete”
yeah a typical cartel of say a dozen organisations requires regular meetings in the stereotypical smoke-filled rooms to figure out exactly how best to stiff consumers – how many members does OPEC have, oh huh exactly twelve, neat – but if market concentration whittles that cartel down to two or three “competitors”, well it’s easy enough for them to keep an eye on each other and “compete” in ways that don’t involve cutting prices without any need to explicitly coordinate at all!
