trade.gov/trade-guide-anti-dumping >A product is considered to be “dumped” if it is exported to another country at a price below the normal price of a like product in the importing country. Anti-dumping measures are unilateral remedies (the imposition of anti-dumping duties on the product in question) that the government of the importing country may apply after a thorough investigation has determined that the product is, in fact, being dumped, and that sales of the dumped product are causing material injury to a domestic industry that produces a like product. So, the less competitive a country's industries are, the more money its government rakes in, AND those same industries are shielded from competition by that same government.
Seems like these laws are a perverse incentive for governments to handicap their nation's industries and for those industries to enrich themselves (suppliers, workers, shareholders), all at the expense of the consumer >Are blue collar workers overpaid golems?
Yes. It's one of the more interesting schisms within the Republican party, free trade v. protectionism. The free traders sound reasonable at first but then you realize the world is full of policies ranging from unfair competition to outright economic warfare (like Chinese solar panels). Being a free trade purist and pretending the enemy isn't lobbing economic mortars over the border is a disaster.
Connor Peterson
There are plenty of built-in home-turf advantages, cost and time of: >shipping >translation >etc If any of our industries can't compete even after those natural advantages are taken into account, they deserve to be mortared, rather than dragging down all other domestic industries that rely on them.
Noah Sanders
Plus, if selling the same good for less is "economic warfare", I hope we get more "war", not less
Anthony Mitchell
Bump
Thomas Jones
They deserve it right? Until the Chinese government reaches into one of their unrelated funding sources and subsidises a local industry, wiping out the cost of shipping, customs, taxes, translation, wages, everything, and a Chinese solar panel costs 1/3 as much as one produced here. When it would normally cost 120% but those disadvantages were all subsidizes away.
There's nothing natural about this, it's an intentional attack on one of our production sectors. You're not advocating laissez faire, you're advocating surrendering in the face of an attack.
Wyatt Perry
Sure, as Friedman and others have said, going out of our way to make maple syrup when Canada is naturally blessed in maple trees just makes us all poorer at the end of the day. That's in a mutually cooperative scenario, though. You're not acknowledging the intervening effect of foreign government actions so your opinion isn't very persuasive.
Joshua Russell
>selling your enemy a product at a loss is an effective strategy for beating them Reminds me of the Napoleon quote: >Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
Wyatt Collins
Oh no, you thought the goal was to keep subsidizing it, even after domestic production is destroyed? That makes no sense. They're not doing it because they're good people who think we deserve cheap solar panels. Their aim is to destroy years of capital investment and knowledge/expertise and then kill their own subsidy before it becomes self-defeating. You understand we can't just turn an industry on and off like a switch? Once that human expertise is scattered it's gone. Training wasted. Capital investment wasted. Not be cause China is better or more efficient at making panels like Canada is with maple syrup, but because they took their own resources from other areas to make it temporarily cheaper. Theres nothing Rothbardian about that. There's no mutual global growth. It's a simple seizure. At least act like you take this discussion seriously.
Dominic Watson
Bumping so I have time to respond, because I do take it seriously and appreciate you making those points
Tyler Fisher
My position is that the benefit of China's subsidy should go to the domestic consumers of solarpanels (as it naturally would without any intervention), not our government and possibly-subpar solarpanel manufacturers. That way, the people best suited to ramp up solarpanel production have the capital to do so. Who is to say which price drops are due to which intention? Would it really be any different if Canada's maple trees went extinct suddenly? My point is that the people in each industry are better suited to evaluate the risk of a cheap supply being cut off: If someone thinks China's subsidy is unsustainable, let him put his money where his mouth is and be rewarded if he is correct.
Ayden Evans
>If someone thinks China's subsidy is unsustainable, let him put his money where his mouth is and be rewarded if he is correct. Absolutely, this is pretty much self-balancing in most cases. If it emerges from lower wages, less OSHA-style oversight, then it actually means we should leave solar panel manufacturing to China. Doing it ourselves is wasteful, compared to free trade and local specialization which is mutually beneficial. This breaks down when the Chinese advantage isn't geographic, but a result of direct subsidiary. They got that money from some unrelated taxable activity and put it into creating an artificial advantage. It's definitely a challenge to know when this is happening and what to do about it. I started paying attention in 2016 because that was a high point for protectionism in the Republican party. People like Peter Navarro made a good case that we were seeing warfare, not competition, in a few select areas. Ever since then I've been much more a moderate on free trade v. protectionism, and I'm willing to listen to industry insiders. Some of them should give up and stop trying to make their widgets in a high-tech OSHA country, but a few of them are right to feel unfairly targeted, and I don't want to see their investments destroyed just for our rivals to jack prices up again in a few years. We're at a critical juncture right now where wages and worker protection are becoming less of a disadvantage to domestic manufacturing. If those industries and their accrued expertise survive into the era of automation, that's a big benefit for America compared to outsourcing it all. You brought up shipping costs - because of that, all automated production should be in America unless the raw materials are elsewhere. One thing that might stop us onshoring that production over the next couple decades, is unfair competition from our rivals.
Camden Jenkins
The OP seems to have bizzarely changed the quoted text from "exporting country" to "importing country" and then completely misrepresented what anti dumping is and how it works. Anti dumping tarrifs are extremely rare btw
>listen to industry (((insiders))) about why their industries should get special treatment You didn't specify how it's functionally different when the lower price is natural vs artificial. In both cases, there is a possibility of the price moving in either direction. I think the evaluation and response to those possibilities is best left up to the people who are actually involved.
Yes, it's sad that people make investments that turn out bad, but the same thing happens with natural disasters. I don't think it's good to try to resist the will of a system as large as the weather or a country.
Ryan Lopez
>how it's functionally different when the lower price is natural vs artificial One is mutually beneficial and leads to growth. The other is temporary, for purposes of destroying a foreign sector, and is beneficial to one party but net-destructive even from a Friedman/Rothbardian perspective. And you're being dishonest, I DID specific all of this. >industry insiders Are how intelligent policy is formed in America. Businessmen. Not marxist college professors like everywhere else.
Christopher Hughes
Lower price than the importing country is just one of many ways of "causing a material injury...". The linked description is what's misleading. Being rare doesn't make it ok. Of course it's rare: would you keep selling a product for less money when you could sell it for more money when the consumer pays the exact same (inflated) amount?
Logan Hernandez
But how does it destroy the foreign sector? The goal of this scheme is to come out on top right? So they would have to raise their prices enough to make back all they gave away. If people in the domestic market see that coming, they will be prepared to undercut the price hike. The only side it hurts is the side literally gifting value to the other.
Your economic warfare strategy is for the government to block and collect all the golden bullets the enemy shoots at our industries instead of letting them use the gold to arrange for their own trivial defence.
Eli Martin
No, he said tariffs enforcing the anti-dumping rule are rare. Presumably there's a high legal bar to passing protectionist policies. As we saw in 2016, they're fiercely unpopular too.
Robert Richardson
>No What are you disagreeing with?
Jack Mitchell
>But how does it destroy the foreign sector? The goal of this scheme is to come out on top right? So they would have to raise their prices enough to make back all they gave away. No, the funding comes from government subsidy and thus from separate, unrelated funding sources. Which is what I said here: "This breaks down when the Chinese advantage isn't geographic, but a result of direct subsidiary. They got that money from some unrelated taxable activity" >If people in the domestic market see that coming, they will be prepared to undercut the price hike. Not if it's been 15 years and every American who knows how to make PV panels has been scattered to the wind. Knowledge bases can be scattered and effectively destroyed quite easily. >The only side it hurts is the side literally gifting value to the other. Sometimes the subsidy required to tip domestic manufacturing over the edge is much smaller than the benefit of destroying a foreign sector entirely. I suggest looking into historical instances of this instead of just speculating. I already recommended Navarro's view on Chinese solar panel dumping. >Your economic warfare strategy is for the government to block and collect all the golden bullets the enemy shoots at our industries instead of letting them use the gold to arrange for their own trivial defence. Ok Chang.
Thomas Smith
Retarded and myopic. The goal of dumping is to obliterate competition then jack up the prices long term. Monopolists likes Rockefeller used these kind of tactics to steamroll his competition.
Eli Diaz
You. You misinterpreted that user saying "anti-dumping tarriffs are rare" and changed it to "dumping is rare."
