TikTok, Trade Protectionism, and You.
How the US Raises Prices, Lowers Quality, and Kills Competition.
The discussion of TikTok being banned has once more begun circulating the dark corners of the internet as the US political apparatus continues sabre-rattling in the run-up to the 2024 General Election. Members of both parties, seeing the weakness of their domestic policy on all fronts, has resorted to the defense most typical of such feckless politicians: industry protectionism and market manipulation.
Let's take a moment to talk about electric cars. What are the options available today in the United States? How is their quality and how expensive are they (realistically) to own in the freest Capitalist country in the world?
If you’re tuned in: there are really only Ford and Tesla and, unfortunately, only the latter has any foothold on the market. Ford is trying, but as a traditional vehicle manufacturer in the United States, it is limited in its ability to move from the familiar territory of petroleum and into the psychosis that is the tech-sector.
And what if you want something better than the slop that is a Tesla or Ford Lightning? Sure, you can look for a Kia, Honda, Nissan, or Toyota, but good luck finding one that is affordable to the average new EV-buyer. In fact, this morning it was announced that Honda and Nissan, two heavily US-supported companies, would be joining forces in an effort to compete in the global EV-industry, breaking their own protectionism in an effort to compete in a market quickly running away from them. And why are they doing this? To compete with Chinese vehicle manufacturers that are building better quality cars at a much lower cost to the consumer.
It is true that despite years of US technological favoritism and protectionism of the failure-prone Tesla for more than a decade, Chinese EV-manufacturer BYD (Build Your Dreams) has overthrown the bumbling Musk as the top provider of electric cars and supplied more of their vehicles to the market in the final quarter of 2023 than Tesla and making up about 17% of the global battery-electric-vehicle market total. And while Tesla holds about 20% of the global market (a trend that slips daily), when we look at countries as suppliers to a global market, the numbers become much more clear in terms of the international-lens that I wish to supply here: where Tesla holds 20%, they are one company and essentially the only US-based EV-maker in the international market, BYD is one among many and just the top 4 Chinese EV-makers hold 30% of the global market between them.
Yet, do you see a BYD dealership in the United States? Have you ever had a chance to see what their Han, Tesla Model-S competitor, can do? To try out the perfect little Wujing Hongguang Mini for your inner-city needs? Of course you haven’t, because the Tesla Model-S costs $75k, the Han only $44k, and the US isn’t going to allow a faltering US company to meet its end by fair competition in the market though fair taxes and import fees; placing a 25% flat-fee for importing one of these vehicles to begin with, there is no viable path for the US car-dealer to actually get these on the lot for an affordable price.
Just a few days ago, Democratic Senators decided this was a national security issue. Fair trade with China and competition for US industries to actually engage in is a theater to our national security.
And naturally, that takes us to TikTok, another ostensibly Chinese-company that is being targeted by US market interventionism under the guise of national security when the reality is that the US tech-industry is stagnant and uncompetitive; especially in the social media market. And tell me I'm wrong. Tell me that Twitter, Threads, Reddit, Bluesky, etc. are honest competition to TikTok anymore. If you look at how these companies fall over one another in an effort to mirror the success of Bytedance, you can see that the US companies at least believe they are.
But that isn’t the case and these apps are all on some form of deathbed. Yet they keep on churning, keep garnering cloud investment while supplying worse and worse digital products. And what happens when the US is no longer the king of tech? What happens when the suppliers can no longer offer the product they initially sold you at the same quality, price, or enjoyment?
It is ironic, of course, that our great Capitalist nation, the bastion of industry and free competition, has resorted to the tactics of the dreaded “socialist" to maintain their power; doing as they always do and cherry-picking the policies that they think work best for their own interests while remaining wholly blind to the inconsistencies of their logic. This is no surprise, the US has ALWAYS done this and one need look no further than United Fruit Company and the industrial-colonization of Latin America in the beginning of the 1900s.
Photo: Corbis via Getty Images, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
