Category Archives: political economy

Gaslighting and Misapprehension

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The People’s Republic of China’s solar panel production industry is running into a glut problem that is seriously depressing prices, to the point that in the current shakeout, many of the PRC-domiciled companies may not survive.

One place where panel prices remain elevated is the United States (thank you, Federal regulations and continued dependence on overseas component supplies), and one PRC-domiciled company that’s likely to survive is LONGi Green Energy Technology Co, Ltd, headquartered in Xi’an, the provincial capital of Shaanxi. In an effort to get around US strictures on PRC companies, LONGi has become a 49% owner of the joint venture (with Invenergy, headquartered in Chicago) of Illuminate USA, and the venture has opened a factory in Pataskala, OH.

The good folks of Pataskala are concerned about LONGi’s connections with the Chinese Communist Party, and Congresswoman Carol Miller (R, WV) has proposed more general legislation that would seek to prevent PRC companies from getting clean-energy subsidies.

Naturally, Zhong Baoshen, LONGi’s Chairman, objects, and herein lies the gaslighting. He insists that LONGi is a private company, and he then tries to distract by pointing out that Illuminate USA is a private company.

That fact is, there is no such thing as a private company in the PRC. Under that nation’s 2017 National Intelligence law, all PRC-domiciled companies are at the beck of the government’s intelligence community to use all of a company’s resources to conduct espionage whenever and targeting whatever the intelligence community decides it wants.

That leads to the misapprehension: too many entities—private companies in the US, politicians at all of the several US governmental hierarchies—actually believe that blandishment that private PRC companies really are private and have no connection whatsoever with any arm of the PRC government.

A Union Win and a Business Loss

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The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers union ratified the contract its managers lately extracted from Boeing.

The union got

• 38% wage increase over the next four years for its members
• $12,000 ratification payment for each of its members
• guaranteed annual bonuses for each member ranging from a minimum of 4% to as high as 6% (the guaranteed nature defeats the purpose of bonuses, and converts the payments to an annual Christmas present)
• 401(k) Boeing match of 100% of each member’s first 8% of pay plus an automatic 4% Boeing contribution
• requirement for Boeing to build its next airplane in the union shops of the Seattle area

What did Boeing get in return? The company gets to restart its commercial aircraft production in the Seattle area, and so to survive.

That’s one outcome of the legalized extortion that is union strikes.

Economies, Culture, Regulation

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Greg Ip had a piece in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal touting the strength of our economy, especially in comparison with the European Union’s continental economy. Among other points, he had this regarding the difference between our economy and the EU’s, and this is what I want to focus on in this post.

More important is the role of technology. No EU company worth more than 100 billion euros, equivalent to $108 billion, “has been set up from scratch in the last 50 years,” while all six US companies worth more than $1.08 trillion were created in this period, Draghi said. America’s companies are also faster to adopt technology such as artificial intelligence, which explains much higher productivity in professional services, finance, insurance, and information technology services.

Ip missed, though, that that difference is from a combination of things that are not economic, but things that make an economy more or less capable, that make rapid technological advances possible. Those things are culture and the regulatory environment that puts bounds on what economic players are allowed or required to do.

Our economy has, until relatively recently, players much more willing to run risks and accept mistakes and failures on the way to grand success. That risk-taking runs the gamut from guys like Elon Musk (an outlier, to be sure, but he’s not that far extreme, except in the venues in which he’s chosen to operate) to heads of families striking out, many even before they have families to head, to start their own businesses, risking everything they have just to get started.

The EU has no one willing to run the risks an Elon Musk does. Even the Fiat acquisition of Chrysler was achieved less by a risk-taking entrepreneur leading Fiat than it was an acquisition supported, indirectly, by the US government and EU regulations, since the combined company would be governed by EU rules. Neither do EU individual families start new businesses at anything close to the rate American families do: they’re much more used to government presence in their lives and to reliance on government for their business success.

The EU’s regulatory environment is much more restrictive than ours, as well, for all the recent explosion of regulations governing our business behavior.  EU’s more socialist-in-effect governance that tends to cap performance so the laggards—for whatever reason they lag, good or ill—can keep up. EU regulations are especially restrictive regarding areas that our nation would consider competition and the outcomes of competition.

Gains from a willingness, or government limits on willingness, to run risks aren’t as available to EU economic actors the way they are here.

Minerals and Net Zero

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McKinsey & Company, the high pockets consulting company, has expressed concern regarding the Climate Funding Industry’s net zero by 2050 goal and the minerals available to achieve it. This particular concern is buried well down in the report.

Raw materials. Demand for critical minerals, like lithium, cobalt, and rare earths, is expected to surge, but current supply is only about 10 to 35 percent of what would be needed by 2050. This is a Level 2 challenge, where supply would need to be scaled, alongside managing demand for such minerals.

McKinsey defines a Level 2 challenge as one that

require[s] the deployment of known technologies to accelerate, and for associated infrastructure and inputs to be scaled.

One of the problem here, though, is that mining minerals like lithium, cobalt, and rare earths is an immensely toxic operation, both in producing and handling these raw minerals and in the collateral production and handling of the hugely toxic mining tailings that are inextricably associated with the mining process. Those tailings, too, while not precisely forever chemicals, do last a very long time and are subject to leaching out of whatever supposedly sealed off storage area they might be in, whether from long-term deterioration of the isolation materials or from human error (vis., EPA’s failure with the Gold King Mine near Silverton, CO).

Then there’s the end-of-life disposal of the materials and devices containing these minerals when those materials and devices have worn out or failed. The minerals are still in those devices, they’re still toxic, and we still don’t have the technologies needed adequately to handle that waste.

Then there are the intermediate steps of…assembling…those minerals into the finished net zero-supporting products. They’re toxic to handle there, too, for all that they’re much more easily handled safely than while digging them out of the ground and processing them into usable form.

And that bit about managing demand—that sounds akin to managing third world demand for fossil fuels, too—they shouldn’t have any; they should be consigned to poverty, or the rest of us consigned to poverty forking over the trillions of dollars it would take to prop them up.

Much of that mining, too, is done with child and other slave labor, but that’s really a side issue in this context. It would be straightforward enough to force an end to that, if only by mining elsewhere with legitimate labor forces and technologies. The switch needs only political will and actual sincerity, vice virtue signaling, on the part of the Climate Funding Industry members.

It seems we can’t get there from here (never minding that we really don’t need to).

Oops.

 

H/t Watt’s Up With That

Paul Paints with a Too-Broad Brush

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Former President and Republican Party Presidential candidate Donald Trump is painting with too broad a brush with his blanket tariffs. Kentucky’s Republican Senator Rand Paul is painting with too broad a brush in his criticism of Trump’s tariff proposals.

Tariffs operate solely in the international trade arena, for all that they have domestic effects. Part of what’s not recognized by either man, although less so by Paul than by Trump, is that international trade has very little to do with economics and very much to do with foreign policy.

Paul is correct that protectionist tariffs are net detrimental to domestic economies. (I claim that protecting nascent industries with tariffs is beneficial, but only if they’re withdrawn when the nascent industries are better developed. The difficulty of withdrawing protectionist tariffs when they’re no longer needed, though, more than overwhelms that temporary benefit.) Trump is mistaken to push the blanket protectionist tariffs on all imports, including imports from friends and allies.

Paul’s China People’s Republic of China tariff example, though, illustrates his broad brush error.

Consider a [PRC]-made widget priced at 50 cents competing with an American-made version at $1. By slapping a tariff on the Chinese widget, raising its price to $2, American manufacturers have the freedom to raise theirs as high as $1.99. The consumer is left with no real choice but to pay more.

Reasonable men can debate the size of that tariff, but such a debate misses the essential fact that the PRC is an enemy nation bent on supplanting us in the world and dominating our foreign and domestic policy decisions. We have no business feeding the enemy nation’s economy. That alone argues for the high tariff and not settling for a countervailing one of merely 50 cents to make the imported price the same as the domestic one.

There’s more to this, though.

Consider [PRC]-made electronics. When tariffs are imposed on products like smartphones and laptops, as Donald Trump is proposing to do, American consumers end up paying higher prices. … [The PRC] accounts for more than 90% of US laptop and tablet imports.

Especially in the electronics industry—an industry that reaches far beyond consumer computers and cell phones into all types of communications devices, chip manufacturing, main frame assembly, data centers, artificial intelligence, and on and on—the national security risk of trading at all with the PRC is far too high to be mitigated with jawboning and pretty pleases alone. That risk, after all, runs to cyber espionage and insertion of sleeperware into our several network nodes, intellectual property and data theft, and including spyware and other malware on imported devices’ chips at the very least.

Tariffs set high enough to discourage imports from an enemy nation like the PRC are an entirely valid foreign policy move. That the tariffs might raise domestic prices is a cost of our national security, of our maintaining our independence of action.