I can't, off the top of my head, think of a single significant car company in the UK that is still totally British-owned. Neither can I think of many manufactured products that Britain buys from the US. Cars? The only ones that appear to have had an impact of sorts are Jeep variants and Ford's Mustangs. In general, nobody really wants manufactured products very much because they have all they want available closer to home. Even online buying doesn't alter the import taxes they would have to pay. Are Apple products really American-made in the true sense of the claim?
Folks in the UK would rather have a Mercedes if they want expensive and big, and for some, that translates into Bentley if they want ultra expensive. Cadillac? Are you kidding me? BMW sells well, especially the smaller, more "sporty" Series 3-as-was. I believe that when it became known that BMW has/had? a factory in the US producing the Z sports models, sales in Britain shrank quickly. Rightly or wrongly, the German reputation for engineering is high, the American one not. By the way your own folks buy Japanese, many of you think the same, regardless of Slobodan's pet phrase to the contrary! :-)
Trump slapping on tariffs and taxes or other tricks will not make people want to buy stuff from him they didn't want to buy already. But hey, I bet he doesn't believe it either; it's the promises game that wins political power. That he knows very well. Cranking life into rustbelt corpses will produce nothing but debt and worse to come when renewed hopes and aspirations are once more dashed by cruel reality. Perhaps, by then, he will have left the country for a retirement where nobody can find him. St Petersburg is apparently a beautiful place...
The irony in all this is that the US still does manufacture many things, it's just that it's being done by assembly line robots: (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_States). But even as I write this, I laugh to myself, I mean it's not as if anyone really wants to hear facts. Mythology beats reality every time. There are still people around who think the war on drugs is accomplishing something.
Trump's electioneering about getting manufacturing jobs back got him some rust belt votes but even they must realize by now that it's not happening. The very idea that Trump was working on their behalf is hilarious. It's not clear who he is working for but I'm not alone in that confusion. Take the way he talks about tariffs. He frames tariffs as some kind of weapon that he can use to browbeat other countries, many of whom should be (and have been) profitable economic allies and trading partners for years. He has peddled the notion that other countries have been screwing the US, and those arguments have found believers despite decades of evidence to the contrary. As if everyone else is "the enemy", when they clearly are not. But then, there are people who think the earth is flat, despite having no pictures from the edge, which should be kind of easy to get.
Just one more example from the balance of trade discussions. At one point in the last year or two, Trump criticized Canada because during some arbitrary period (month or quarter or something) the US bought more goods from Canada than Canada bought from the US, and thus he presented this as some kind of unfair treatment of the US by Canada. This is simply beyond stupid. It's drunk bar talk. But it got headlines, along with some criticism by analysts who know something about trade, but they were utterly drowned out.
The rust belt's issue still is that they don't believe anyone else is looking after them either, and they have a point. That hasn't changed. But as is seen on these pages, there are many people in the US who do not believe that the purpose of a country is to help look after its citizens. As soon as someone loses a job or gets sick, they're perfectly happy throwing them to the wolves. It's as if people really believe that the purpose of everything is to help make wealthy people wealthier. The willingness to take personal credit for when things go well and to apportion blame when things go badly to the very people who are having troubles is quite something to behold. It's as if luck doesn't exist despite it probably being the biggest factor affecting our lives. Did I hear a quote attributed Thatcher once, that there is no country, just individuals. It's everyone for themselves! That's fine if that's what you want, but I can foresee a problem recruiting cannon fodder for future wars. You can see the argument, why should I go die for a country that treats me like sh*t? It's a valid point of view.
There was an entry earlier in this thread (or maybe another, I get confused) from Slobodan who presented health insurance as a kind of moral hazard because it encouraged people to not look after their health. This presupposes that illness is due to personal neglect, which is only ever partly true. The notion that that minuscule moral hazard is utterly overwhelmed by countervailing benefits to every participant in that insurance system is wilful ignorance, an example of ideology replacing thought. Every study I've seen reports of shows that the US spends roughly twice as much as other developed countries on health (per capita), but has worse outcomes, all while a significant percentage of the population has no health care. Even if you draw healthy error bars on those numbers, it should raise concerns, shouldn't it? I suspect that the kleptocracy in the US does a good job of hiding those reports from public view. It's easy to do, just drown it in an incessant 24/7 media data dump about celebrity ass sizes.
Somewhere I referred to a book by Joseph Heath called "Filthy Lucre". Heath is a U of Toronto philosophy professor who has made a career of analyzing various illogics in public policy. That book is a terrific read. The first half is a examination of a list of items that the "right" repeatedly misunderstands, moral hazard being just one, the other being trade with other countries. The second half of the book (the larger "half") is a skewering of various things that the "left" repeatedly gets wrong, because of ideology repressing thought once again. I can't recommend it highly enough, from time to time it addresses almost all the issues raised in these pages in a very instructive way.
