Couldn't the constitutional court have acted before the election took place? Forbid that candidate from running in the first place?
The reason this looks sketchy in the first place is that it happened after they saw the election results, and one gets the feeling that if another candidate won they would not have annulled it.
He wasn't exactly super popular before the race, polling below 5% so nobody was really concerned about him, plus the court needs to be called upon to act, as they can't intervene without a complaint being lodged.
Because they are doing so to erode your manufacturing base through unfair competition.
From a national security standpoint this can be deadly in a hot conflict.
From an industrial strategy standpoint, it’s the same as any other monopolist practice - they will erode your base, take over your market, then raise prices to fleece your population’s wealth while increasing their own.
Industrial bases are economic strongholds that shouldn’t be lost, particularly not to great power competitors.
> From a national security standpoint this can be deadly in a hot conflict.
What about a cold conflict? How much do the tariffs and protectionist policies cost in the middle to long run?
For example, the Jones Act costs billions per year and has been going on for a lot of years. How many additional aircraft carriers and submarines and so on could the US have bought with that money?
Tariffs and protectionist policies are unfairly maligned. They are effectively the only way countries build and rebuild industries. The idea that they are bad is an invention of bad economists who don't study history. See the book "How Asia Works" for an accurate economic history of the growth of industrial power in Asia, how it was based on Germany's ascension before it, and how it was al built on the RIGHT kind of policies. https://www.gatesnotes.com/How-Asia-Works
Tariffs that merely offset subsidies in the other country has zero net effect on competition, and doesn't harm producers on either side unduely.
The net effect is merely a net transfer from the foreign government to the domestic one.
Tariffs that go BEYOND the subsidies in the foreign country has a net protectionist effect. This CAN cause stagnation in the industry in question. But less so if there is still healthy domestic competition.
Subsidies are potentially the most destructive measure. This is especially true for protectionist subsidies, and less so for export subsidies. But in general, subsides sets up a cash transfer facility between a government and local industry, often removing incentives to innovate. In turn, this means that the subsidies need to increase year by year to have the desired effect.
This can lead to the subsidized industry dying a sudden death once public patience for the growing subisides (and so the subisides themselves) come to an end.
Read “How Asia Works” on how subsidies can be used effectively.
The book calls it “export discipline”, that is, you keep the subsidised firms on their toes by demanding them to be exporters and win the global market, thus making them remain competitive.
I don't disagree, you can definitely build more industries with tariffs and protectionism. I just don't see the point.
I'm a consumerist at heart. As long as consumers get to consume, it does not matter to me whose industry is doing the producing.
I get that your foreign suppliers can turn on you and raise prices. I think the money you make during peacetime by not putting tariffs will let you buy more weapons and bribe more allies so that the foreign suppliers don't try anything too awful with the supply chains. Stockpiles can buy a lot of time to restart industry in an emergency or at least find a different foreign supplier.
Take a look at Russia, they are sanctioned by half the planet and they still keep going on a reduced industry because they had huge stockpiles of tanks, artillery and so on. Imagine something like that but with a military that doesn't suck. Nobody would even dare try a sanction.
The point is that unfortunately geopolitics ends up in an eternal competitive state.
Losing your industrial base and giving it away to a geopolitical competitor is almost certainly an error in the long run.
Large industrial bases also are correlated with healthier middle class societies, according to Vaclav Smil, and in my experience, he’s exactly right.
So losing the industrial base is fine for you, a service sector worker, but it’s bad for the country and it’s bad for society, if you want it to have a healthy middle class.
Most of the country works in the service sector. It's not like I'm some kind of out of touch elite.
The ones who are most hurt by tariffs, most affected by higher prices, are the working class. Sure, the workers of the specific industries that are lucky enough to be protected, the ones with the most persuasive lobbies, will certainly benefit. But every other worker will be a little worse off.
If you are concerned about the people who got hurt by globalization, maybe the government should collect money from people like us and spend it on people like them. They can set up the tax in such a way that rich people pay the most.
But if you use tariffs to help the people who got hurt by globalization, you cannot set it up in such a careful way. It's a blunt instrument that hurts productivity across the board and increases the prices to the end consumer. It becomes an implicit tax that poor people pay the most. An actual explicit tax would hurt much less.
> The ones who are most hurt by tariffs, most affected by higher prices, are the working class.
Perhaps in the short to medium term, the people who had their livelihoods decimated and partially compensated for the decline in their standard of living by buying cheap imported products, will be most affected.
But tariffs should be a component of a longer term plan of tradeoffs to revitalize the protected industries.
> If you are concerned about the people who got hurt by globalization, maybe the government should collect money from people like us and spend it on people like them.
That idea is past its sell-by date. It's the neoliberal Democrat's response to the economic damage done by globalization: put the losers on welfare indefinitely. IMHO, that money should be
>I don't disagree, you can definitely build more industries with tariffs and protectionism. I just don't see the point.
You don't see the point of building up, say, your domestic chip building capacity? Really?
>Take a look at Russia, they are sanctioned by half the planet and they still keep going on a reduced industry because they had huge stockpiles of tanks
Russia can "keep going" because they have vast reserves of fossil fuels that Europe, currently, can't live without.
> Because they are doing so to erode your manufacturing base through unfair competition.
I wouldn't say it's unfair, if other countries actually value domestic manufacturing then they'll provide the subsidies and incentives to cultivate it.
For the same reason we disallow severe product dumping - it's a ploy to build marketshare in an attempt to become hostile to consumers down the road. We don't let companies dump products for a reason.
China subsidizes EV manufacturers. Non-Chinese manufacturers can’t compete with the companies that get tons of free money from their government and go out business. Now only China makes EVs, so they can raise prices.
> Sure, but if they raise prices, then US manufacturing becomes more competitive again.
Manufacturing isn't something you can just turn on like a computer program. It takes time develop the infrastructure, talented labor and product designs. For something like cars we're talking about many years. It took China decades of concerted effort and heavy subsidies to get where they are now. Without subsidies, starting this process takes even longer and may even be impossible.
Accordingly, if you already have this industrial capacity it would be mind blisteringly moronic to let it slip away from you. What can be destroyed in a few years will take many more years to build back, and won't be built back at all unless you reverse the moronic policies that let it get away from you in the first place.
It's a favor in the short term but a blow in the long term because you lose ability to manufacture. Manufacturing capacity is a use-it-or-lose-it thing.
They should probably allow companies to keep doing what they are doing now as long as they call it "rent" instead of "buy" in their marketing materials.
Normally this honesty would cost them money because their competitors would have better (more persuasive) marketing, but a law could force every company to be honest at the same time so that the relative ranking of each company does not change.
The short term effect of pain is that it is unpleasant. There is no need to appeal to long term effects when someone is clearly suffering right there and then.
So by your logic, why should I work if I suffer at work? There are plenty of longterm factors and trade offs to consider. Temporary pain shouldn't be avoided as much as it is today.
You shouldn't suffer at work if you can work without suffering.
This sounds like I'm being pedantic because no one would never be in favor of suffering for no benefit, I'm arguing against a strawman.
But in the context of babies suffering, it might surprise you to learn that doctors used to give zero thought to their suffering at all, believing that they don't become conscious until they grow a little. Apparently when they screamed in pain it was like a mechanical autonomous response to a stimulus, not real human pain.
They weren't just being sadists. Applying anesthesia is always risky and if you can get away with not doing it then it's sometimes worth engaging in a bit of rationalization to ease the conscience.
Being forced to do rote exercises sometimes makes you creative. Solve a thousand trivial multiplication problems and you will spontaneously discover lots of shortcuts, patterns, intuitions that can warn you when you make a mistake and so on.
A common issue I notice when people discuss the terrible state of math education in the US is that teachers demand that you solve a problem a specific way, such as multiplying two-digit numbers by drawing base-ten blocks and applying the distributive property.
People who are good at doing multiplication in their head think the method makes perfect sense and don't know what all the fuss is about. But I believe that those people learned how to apply the distributive property "by themselves". That is, by adults forcing them to multiply two-digit numbers over and over until they developed an intuition of the distributive property by necessity.
When people who didn't go through countless drills are taught the base-ten method directly, they have a harder time understanding it. So ironically it is the students who "mindlessly" drill trivial computations over and over that are more prepared to have a "true" understanding of the distributive property, while the ones whose teachers believe drilling is for chumps and try to just explicitly show them the true distributive right away, they end up memorizing the words of the distributive property without understanding it.
That's the part I say went out of fashion. The scientific consensus used to be that a stimulus can subconsciously influence you for a while. Like if you saw an ad targeted towards old people you'd subconsciously fix your posture and walk with a straighter back for a little while after you saw the ad.
Those studies failed to replicate, but some people still believe in them because they are so intuitive, they seem to match their personal experiences. Like seeing kids go hyperactive after eating candy because candy reminds them of Christmas and Halloween and birthday parties and other occasions in which they are allowed to play and be noisy.
People in South America have never seen sugar rushes in real life, and every single child is given sugar every day. A common breakfast and afternoon snack includes coffee(!) with lots of milk and sugar.
If genes were involved we would expect the prevalence to be different, but there is no way that not a single South American child has the right genes for sugar rush.
Yes, that's the point i was making - kids who have lots of sugar don't seem to be affected, as it's just their baseline, whereas kids who don't have a lot of sugar do seem to exhibit it.
Curiously, my friend's partner's Argentinian, so... .
It might depend on how literally you mean "have lots of sugar".
If the dominant component really is physicalist/biological then things that actually contain sugar but don't look like they contain sugar will cause sugar rushes. For example fruit juice, ketchup, pizza.
If it's cultural/psychological then only things that are "sugar-coded" will produce the effect. Like candy, syrup, ice cream, soft drinks.
If you feel like doing some mad science, see if you can give your kids a rush using sugar-free coke or something like that.
Sadly, I've informed my daughter that she can't have coke until she's 22 :)
Also, I'm 'one of those' and avoid sugar-free alternatives.
For sure though, I can't say I've much noticed it in the likes of fruit smoothies and such, nor when she has a lollypop or some other sugar-laden thing that takes time to consume.
Same here in South America. We even give children coffee and it causes no apparent issues. Admittedly this coffee is taken with lots of milk, but even that is only because children don't like the bitter taste. Over-stimulation was never even a consideration.
I thought sugar rushes was a culture-bound syndrome in which children in the US go hyperactive and other children do not. From the article, it seems like it's something even more mundane than that, and children in the US never got hyperactive from sugar at all.
Not every cheap product has to be low quality. In particular, lots of products are used by poor and rich alike.
Everyone uses the same smartphones (the poor people use phones about as good as rich people used less than a decade ago), everyone drinks the same soft drinks, everyone takes the same cold medicine (the generic ones are pretty good), everyone uses the same social media, the same operating systems (even the richest Microsoft customers have to put up with their adware)
Yes, but is there any evidence that this sort of thing would be anything but low quality? I'm friends with an unusual number of college professors. Every single one looks at announcements like this and tears their hair out. "If only I had a chat bot that could act as a TA when students have questions about my lectures" is so far down the list of things they'd like to have to solve problems.
> "If only I had a chat bot that could act as a TA when students have questions about my lectures" is so far down the list of things they'd like to have to solve problems
I care about their problems a little bit, but I naturally care about the problems of the students a lot more. The point of colleges is to make it easier for the students to learn, not for the teachers to teach. The teachers are a means to an end.
If colleges announce that they will use AI as TAs and the students tear their hair out, then I will worry.
The reason this looks sketchy in the first place is that it happened after they saw the election results, and one gets the feeling that if another candidate won they would not have annulled it.