The bread and butter of progress is competition and I think a lot of American companies “won” like Boeing or Intel in the 90s and no one else could compete.
Unfortunately winning is disastrous because it makes you complacent.
Perhaps the most flagrant and dumbest example is Internet Explorer 6.
I do not approve of raising tariffs on foreign vehicles because it will dull our edge in the long term. Protectionism is a short term bandaid.
Tariffs are a good way to ensure you still have a domestic capability. If Germany/korea/japan/China outcompete all US auto makers and they die, along with it goes a ton of jobs, manufacturing knowledge & capacity, cultural influence, an ability to keep capital flowing domestically, downstream suppliers, and ability to change factories from autos to military equipment in wartime. If China just keeps taking industry, then all we have left is an outpouring of all capital and a bunch of “content creators” left. Not a good prospect.
US auto companies already try to compete globally in situations with/without tariffs. That provides plenty of competition too.
I completely agree with you, but it’s still funny how we were ok with the companies moving the jobs out of NA (so, we lost all the things you’ve listed) to save themselves money. But when it comes to saving money for the consumers, suddenly we’re not allowed to do the same thing, because it doesn’t help the bottom line.
Intel was famously not complacent. Perhaps a long lapse starting a decade ago. But even then “complacence” was not the problem. Ditto for Boeing. Managerial focus on just milking the cow has been the fundamental problem: and they milked frantically—not complacently.
I can't tell if I'm missing sarcasm here but ...
Intel was paying customers Billions a year not to use their competitors products in the early 2000s. So not complacent about breaking the law to stifle competition but also complacent about actually building competitive chips that could win in the market.
Well even with 100% tariffs BYDs new sub 10k vehicles will be far cheapet than anything else the US market has to offer