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125 sats \ 21 replies \ @SimpleStacker 10 Apr \ on: Is Foreign Investment Bad for Our Economy? Politics_And_Law
I think Musk is right about Navarro. From what I've seen, I can only conclude that Navarro wants the US to become 100% autarkic. It's both unrealistic, and blatantly ahistorical to think a country can thrive under an autarkic regime. The closest thing to an autarky is North Korea, and how's that working out for them?
Autarky is very different for large diverse economies. For instance, the Earth is in a state of autarky with respect to the rest of the universe.
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Yes, but autarky depend upon whether the economy has all of the necessary inputs to all of the various goods at every order of production. Does any complex economy have all of the various inputs within itself to attain autarky? This is one thing I seriously doubt. I don’t think we can become autarkic any more than China can become autarkic and trying to prove that we can get along without exchange of goods, some of which one or the other has a monopoly grasp on is folly.
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At a lower standard of living, yes.
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Of course, but isn’t that a given? They don’t care if the standard of living is throttled for the lower people because they don’t feel the pain at all.
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True, no disagreement there. An autarkic US wouldn't be as bad as an autarkic NK. But I still don't think there's any evidence that autarky would be preferrable, even for a large diverse economy.
I guess I just don't know what Peter Navarro's theory is. Why would he be against a factory owned by BMW but operated here? It's not like the US doesn't have its own car companies too.
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I don’t think that the U.S. could become autarkic while under the current regime of controls and economic laws. There are too many barriers to any kind of capital investment in, say for instance, mining for any kind of minerals. Mining is considered environmental destruction rather than economic activity and with that kind of problem, I don’t know if you could reasonably, in terms of cost, overcome the lawfare.
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It’s pretty much unpreferable by definition, unless the autarky exists with no state intervention, as with the entire Earth.
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The big problem is the difference in the marginal cost of inputs. Comparative advantage theory says that there is some point to buying even high cost goods depending on the advantage you gain by pursuing your own advantageous activity over doing everything autarkically.
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Maybe we can say that aliens don't exist because if they did we'd be trading with them.
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Aren’t we trading with them already? The aliens, I mean. I think we are going to find out how our world works in the near future.
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Are they using dollars?
The strongest proof yet!
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What makes you think we aren’t trading with them? Or even conflicting with them? How many of their craft do you think we have shot down and reverse engineered?
let's ask Americans who work for BMW in South Carolina
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I, also, think that Musk may be right on Navarro. Navarro is an academic not a builder or shaker of the real world, only a shaker and quaker of the ivory tower. To say that foreign investment in an economy is detrimental defies all previous experience and real world examples. To be generous, perhaps Navarro meant something else and misspoke in the spur of the moment.
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