How is it so hard to just not do this

Trump is just reducing American consumption so we can hit our climate goals. Art of the deal strikes again! The winning never stops

Shipping stuff is cheap if you have alot of it for example

https://freightify.com/ship-containers/china puts a 40ft container at max $6000, which in practice can fit around 26000kg, so per kg you are paying around 26 cents per kg shipped. You would get even better deals I assume if you had contracts setup to do bulk business with freighters

Surely we can charge more than 1B

You can get Chinese prices if your citizens are willing to work like the Chinese, no one in the West will.

Autarky is also largely a degrowth argument, most Westerners already feel like they should consume even more so it’s impossible to win unless your voters fall for Donald Trump esque arguments. The modern Westerner lives one of the most opulent lives in the world history on the back of cheap third world labor.

edit: If you believe the Trump admin has a plan, they are trying to thread needle by devaluing the US Dollar just enough to incentivize manufacturing, but keeping it high enough that the average US consumer doesn’t feel the hit. They then leverage tariffs for preferential trade deals with other countries. I don’t think its really working but its the only way you could revitalize manufacturing in the west at this point

While America we are still tryna make a HSR from BakersField to Merced for the past 30 years

Who will ride this? god knows, we will somehow have full self driving cars by then

I see they have learned from the Europeans

Mostly spent time alone, I was too naive to understand how broken I really was, would be nice to back to that

When I travel I sometimes get sad seeing how far Western culture as come and changed societies, feels like the McWorld has won (Even as someone who aligns very much with that culture). Would be hypocritical to judge them though