Posted by tosh 4/12/2025
This is getting frighteningly close to a Russian-style economy. As in, a handful of powerful, connected "insiders" will be allowed to operate businesses, and will dominate... while everyone else gets wiped out, by acts of government. The furthest system possible from the free-market paradigm that built the American economy as it stands today.
Russia is not a prosperous nation.
Note that this is not an exemption for companies, but an exemption for goods:
> A new list of goods to be exempted from the latest round of tariffs on U.S. importers was released, and it includes smartphones, PCs, servers, and other technology goods, many of which are assembled in China.
What a gift. What a great idea. That'll surely spur innovation and domestic production and have no effect to further insulate the giants from competition.
So it’s actually an incentive to build in China.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43665766
Then you don't pay the tariff.
Electronic imports, no/low tariffs.
Import material to produce electronics, high imports.
It seems like some of these comments are missing how competition works.
Competition happens within the same type(s) of goods, not across them.
That is, the companies making the goods still affected by tariffs aren’t in competition with the companies making goods now exempt by tariffs.
Yes, its true that they will have a better chance at thriving under these exemptions, but whether they thrive or not should have little impact on the other companies.
To be clear, I’m not arguing in favor of this decision — or any of the tariffs, for that matter.
I’m just simply arguing that competition isn’t really the angle to use to argue against this particular decision.
Not true, for example smart phones replaced home computers for most people. Those are two very different goods, but since they can accomplish the same thing for the average person they end up competing.
Nor is it cheap or easy to build a company that would likely be able to appeal tariff exemptions…
They have a Trump Derangement Syndrome in a worship sense.
“They’re not stupid. I know enough of the players involved to know they’re not idiots.”
“They’re not just in it for themselves. I get that this has become non-conventional wisdom, but I am going to assume for this that the goal isn’t merely grift.”
TLDR: don’t worry, it’s 5D chess. Keep on bootlicking your way to success while your stock gets trashed by these policies and we double down on anti-science rhetoric which will hasten our decline. I guess most of these leaders will have cashed out before it all implodes.
He is, and always has, gambled with other people's savings.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/fre...
It's unsurprising that more of them would die during a massive recession and a global pandemic.
Those numbers are meaningless without a similar count of small businesses opening.
Without context for how many people are born every year, one might read that and conclude that we're about to all die out.
Effective restoration and reconstruction of Constitutional governance will necessarily be dramatic. It's still doable, but optimism is more of a survival strategy than an obvious conclusion at this stage.
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/well-timed-options-...
(Besides, at this point I wouldn't be surprised if Trump's Russian oligarch friends were among these traders.)
The government is allowed to announce policy before doing it! Even if it affects stock prices!
It actually is that broad. Futures traders often rely on industry-specific periodicals, which are “public”. Same for anything in the (high monthly cost!) Bloomberg terminal. So posting on a specific social media platform, where subscribing is free? That’s 100% public.
Again I'm not a lawyer, and I don't care what law is applicable here. But surely this warrants further investigation.
The US had the smallest drop in support for an incumbent party.
Generally one of the two participants wins those.
There's a really serious systemic problem with the party that chose him in its primaries, and there is nothing to prevent it from happening again, but my point is that a 49.8% mandate given the circumstances is... Well, it's not one of overwhelming sentiment.
I don't know about you, but I certainly don't trust all the companies that make the voting machines. For instance, does Musk own stock in some of them? Do their owners vote Trump?
[1] https://bsky.app/profile/mattblaze.org/post/3lmgt4ufllc26
He did not, he got <50% of the total votes at final tally. People who parrot this are under-informed, or lying to claim a mandate his administration lacks.
The problem today is that US and European capitalists are in power and do not want to admit that the Chinese economic model of government-controlled economic direction, though not perfect, would work better and help all the world's people rather than the select few. As China becomes the dominant economy, the rest of the world has to follow to stay competitive. So these are the death knell of a dying economic and government system. The US had the chance to bring real change for the people with Bernie Sanders, but that was scuttled by the capitalist non-democratic forces, allowing for the rise of Trump. US citizens have been hoodwinked by linking socialist thought, where caring about your fellow man is undemocratic, i.e., socialism.
Is it better? For some reason average European lives better then Chinese, inequality is also not so huge
The US reconstructed Europe after WW2 using its own funds mostly and has subsidized its defense spending for the past 80 years and counting.
Europe also has enormous amounts of resource wealth expropriated from its many colonies around the world, plus significant ownership stakes in resource supply chains in those countries that persists to this day. Every single Russian oligarch, plus dictators in Asia and Africa have stashed their wealth in European banks.
You want the US government to provide more subsidies to US tech companies so they can stay competitive? Because that is what China is doing for its tech sector.
Subsidizing companies is not the problem not sharing the wealth with the workers is the problem. US not subsidizing it companies is bullshit fed to you. As Boeing, Tesla, SpaceX, Microsoft from the tel-cos to the power suppliers to banks and hedge fund all have been subsidized by American tax payers or are still being subsidized with and you get share buybacks. Americans are being bullshitted into loosing their social and healthcare subsidies in favor of giving it to corporations but the sharing back of the wealth in conveniently forgotten
Do you have in mind any examples that make your case the strongest? In particular, examples caused by subsidy to the company, and not to the population[1].
[1] like this one: https://www.gov.cn/zhengce/202501/content_6997459.htm
The problem is these companies are thieves, mostly. They just take the money and pocket most of it. Infrastructure be damned.
And when the house of cards inevitably tumbles down, they don’t pay the price. The gains are private, but the losses are public.
US companies always favor tomorrow, not next week. They look to enriching themselves NOW. But in doing so they take on a debt. They put everything on a metaphorical credit card. Eventually the competition is too hot and they have to pay their debt very quickly, and they shutter despite their subsidies and long-running success.
Better than putting that money in the military, isn't it?
You're acting like the tariffs are a big conspiracy by the "private capitalists", but the "private capitalists" are the most opposed, if you look at the reaction of the market.
Not sure why you mentioned Bernie Sanders, but he has been one of the most pro-tariffs politicians in America for many decades. That's one of the reasons the left has been caught so flatfooted by this and seems to have no response: the policies they have supported forever have been shown to be disasterous.
The desire for transactional wins and power overshadows all. Trump will unironically ally himself with a turd like Elon, or a turd like the UAW dude who glazed him on "Liberation Day". The state control of business is missing... perhaps we'll see that develop with Tesla.
It's a weird movement, because the baseline assumption is that the country is ruined. So any marginal win is celebrated, any loss is "priced in" politically.
Every dictatorship is unhappy in its own way but they all involve:
Myth of the strong man dictator
Erosion of rule of law
Undermining independent judiciary
Arbitrary detention and arbitrary enforcement of laws
Separate paramilitary groups
There are signs of all of this in the US just now.
Donations to presidential inauguration fund to get access to the president was already tradition in the US. Trump government just exploits it without shame.
This being favored by the decision
If they’re following the law they’d have to declare the purchase when they come home.
And then they can ask you for your Form 4457 that you filled out and presented to CBP before you left the country. Don't know what that is? Oops. Full duties owed on that iPhone then, thanks.
Donald Trump is the poster child of American capitalism gone right, he's an aspiration for wealthy capitalists across the nation. Generally people have felt that if only we could get an American businessman like Trump in charge of the country, running things the way a true capitalist would (as opposed to how those dirty awful communists/socialists tend to run things), then the country would start going right for a change.
Well now we have that, and in short order the country has Russian-style crony capitalism from the top. This would not happen in a country that actually cares about free markets. But we don't. Everything we consume is owned by like 10 companies. If you want to get a start in the market you have to get access to capital they control, or meet regulations they set, because they've captured the government regulators through bribes.
Trump is just taking this whole system of favoritism we've been living under and making it official. I for one am for it because honestly people pretending there is no corruption is worse than the corruption at this point.
This is the same guy who went bankrupt 3 times, including a casino?
The same guy who'd be as rich as he is today if he had invested the funds bequeathed by his father?
The one who had a TV show based on him that was incredibly manipulated to make him appear richer and wiser than he really is?
Same thing, these companies essentially run these industries and nobody else can get in.
If you want to make a competitor to Nvidia it would take you 20 years if you started RIGHT NOW. Hope you have a few hundred billion dollars lying around :P
The distinction between domains and companies fully disappears in an oligarchy.
For my next computer, e.g., for a Web server, considering an AMD processor, Gigabyte mother board, Western Digital disks (rotating and/or solid state), main memory, video display, etc.
Just checked, none of that comes from China!!! The businesses are in Taiwan, South Korea, the US. Manufacturing is in Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia, South Korea. The processor design, the US. The equipment for manufacturing the chips, Holland.
So, for my startup, I'm happy!
For a smart phone -- not much interested.