The House Select Committee on China has laid out the breadth and complexity of the People’s Republic of China’s cornering of the rare earth production, refining, and manufacturing markets. The report allegedly
provides a roadmap on how the US can stop—or at least slow—the effort by its biggest global economic competitor to prevent the US from breaking into the market.
A road map? It’s really quite straightforward, if politically difficult.
The US has vast supplies of rare earths within our own borders. Canada, who would be better for us (and themselves) as a trading partner than as a State, has similarly vast supplies. We’ve just concluded a trade deal with Australia to export rare earth to us from its vast supplies. African nations have similarly vast supplies, although doing deals there would have more value in denying those earths to the PRC than in getting exports to us, vast as that value would be.
What’s needed, and this is the straightforward but politically difficult part—though the difficulty lies in timid politicians not those determined to do what’s best for our nation—is getting regulations, environmentistas, and climatistas out of the way of each of the mining, processing, and manufacturing phases of getting to the products of rare earths: primarily, but not exclusively, magnets and chips.
The report recommends a variety of market-manipulating measures, and those might be near-term effective, but the problems with government market interventions center on two things: the “government” part, and government interventions are open-ended; they don’t die. The best way for our government to manipulate our economy, our market, is to get out and stay out of the way.
And there’s be nothing at all that the PRC could do to stop us from doing any of that.