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Elon Musk calls for Radio Free Europe and Voice of America to be shut down
(finance.yahoo.com)
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this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2025
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That's not the style of investing Trump is probably thinking about. He's all business so it will be business investments in terms of subsidies, tax incentives and government contracts.
"Human capital" == "handouts" in Trumpland.
I think Trump is similar to other austerity conservative economists hence the cutting of the "fat" : Radio Free Something, VOA, USAID etc etc (even military spending). The idea is to cut a lot of services which will reduce government spending, then juice the industrialists with tax breaks and subsidies. The supposed resulting growth will then help pay the debt off.
Rich people pay for their own stuff. They don't use government education and healthcare. And they don't consume VOA. Hence someone like Trump can basically ditch it easily when looking to cut costs. Even if he was told it's for propaganda, he wouldn't give a fuck about cutting it. It's not important to him. Same with President Musk.
Yes to all of that. I think that is exactly what they plan, and that is exactly why reindustrialization won't happen. You can't reindustrialize with a pauperized, indebted, poorly educated population, particularly not while you also enact racist policies that cause reverse brain drain and shortages of skilled labor. The only question i have is whether they are really so dumb that they believe giving tax breaks to oligarchs and applying some tariffs is sufficient to bring industry back, or if the whole thing was conceived from the start as just another cynical scam.
I think you'll find that industrialization happened under exactly the conditions of a pauperized indebted, poorly educated population suffering under racist policies.
Part of the challenge of reindustrialization is that the working class in America has gotten used to being part of the professional managerial class, has gotten used to things like OSHA, safety, comfort, etc. For 3 generations, at least, the cultural zeitgeist has denigrated laborious work.
What they're doing looks like an attempt to solve this. Assuming they can even create industrial jobs:
Under these conditions, the vast majority of men are going to accept dangerous jobs in infrastructure and industry with moderate pay.
A smaller minority of people are going to be organizing resistance and revolution, just like they did during the industrial revolution, but that's why Thiel is talking about using AI to make sure people are on their best behavior. If you can tightly surveil the workplace and the social behavior of your workers, you don't get much labor organizing, and therefore you tank revolutionary potential of the proletariat. Then the only thing you have to worry about is the lumen, and you solve that with a militarized police force, concentration camps, and the industrialized prison system.
I am not saying this is going to work, I just think it's important to do the thinking work to understand what these people are thinking and how their actions fit a systematized world view. We need to do this to understand the risks and to guide our actions and further analysis.
Ultimately, I think the USA has everything it needs to be second place in the industrialization game - except a market for its goods. By the time the USA industrializes enough to export more, Europe will likely be dependent enough on Russia and China that they will not align with the US economically. The only leverage the USA has on them right now is fossil fuels, which honestly might be enough to keep them as a market, but we'll see.
Without a capitve market, the USA will struggle to export, even if it does industrialize without a fatal debt spiral. The only other solution I can see is to isolate the entire Western Hemisphere including Canada, Mexico, and the entirety of South America and then them into their market. But they're so poor after centuries of oppression it would require some very creative financialization schemes.
I think that's a wildly optimistic take on the likelihood of all of what you described to succeed. I just don't think this strategy is as well thought out and rational as you assume it is, and it will probably run into serious problems as soon as the first contradictions (of which this strategy is chock-full) make themselves visible. But i guess we'll see.
P.S. I also don't think that you can conclude that just because something worked in the 19th century that it will also work today. Industry has changed a lot since then and has different requirements in terms of the kinds of skills needed. Which is why i think it is accurate to say that pauperized labor can't drive reindustrialization because it will suffer from very low productivity and thus low international competitiveness. Unless the US stops both imports and exports and becomes totally inward focused, this strategy won't work.
Imperialists are nothing if not optimistic. They fundamentally believe that they will win and that they will win because their ideas are supreme.
I don't know that it's well thought out. I think you and I have to think it out, because we don't have the same priors they do. But I think they are intuitively navigating their ideology. They don't need to fully understand everything they're doing for it to be ideologically congruent. For example, I imagine they said "We need to build more shit here in America!", they were then confronted with business leaders saying they can't find people willing to do factory work, so the next thing they ask themselves is "How do we get more people to do factory work?". They try a few things like propaganda and pay incentives and it doesn't work. So the next thing they ask themselves is "Why don't people want to work?" And that's when the flood gates open: "Liberal arts education. Soft men. They think the work is beneath them because poor brown people do it." etc, etc. So they do this "brainstorm" and then for each thing they go, "OK, how do we counter this?"
Is that "well thought out"? I mean, it's at least basic managerial behavior that we know happens in corporate, and that's where these people all come from, so I just imagine they did the ritual and came up with a task list. And now they're executing it.
That happens all the time in corporate. They never see it coming, but it happens every single time they do something like this. Those serious problems are not interpreted as contradictions, because that would require the possibility of self-awareness and humility. So instead what happens is each contradiction is seen as a moral failing of the people tasked with executing. So the bosses just double down on it with righteous fury, threatening to punish anyone who doesn't make it happen. This gets them in a cycle of getting rid of honest people and hiring yes-sycophants . This cycle continues for as long as the boss can stay in power. The longer the cycle continues, the deeper the chain of sycophants gets. First it's just the direct reports to the boss who get hired, fail, admit defeat, and are then replaced. Eventually they find someone who can survive the game, and they survive the game by replicating the boss's behavior, meaning they cycle through people, rather publicly and brutally, until their direct reports are all sycophants all playing the same game.
That's totally fair. I think that the bosses of America, however, only know how to look back to "what used to work" and don't really have a culture of doing new things while under stress. So most of the ruling class is going to look back to the industrial revolution and attempt to replicate any conditions they think existed as a form of magical thinking.
I don't think it's physically possible for the USA to become internationally competitive at all. I don't think any strategy will work, I don't think any means will bring about the conditions of competitiveness. The USA is too far behind. They squandered every opportunity to learn from Japanese industrial success, choosing instead to punish Japan instead of importing their ideas and spreading them. That was 50 years ago. Now, not only has China adopted best practices, they've got multiple generations of management thinkers and practitioners using a dialectical approach to production, they've got the edge on research, they've got the edge on population, they've got the edge on infrastructure, they've got the edge on international cooperation, they've got the edge on waste management, they've got the edge on power production, they've got the edge on central planning, they've got the edge on currency stability, they've got the edge on productive labor force....
I do not think there is ANY path to international competitiveness for the USA. They will be forced into junior partner status. I doubt the USA could maintain even a number 2 status for very long. The BRI is creating the conditions for a massive transformation that can only be solved by the USA bombing everything, which means that they won't be investing in competition, and since the USA can't bomb China because their bombs rely on Chinese parts, the USA will fall further and further behind China and anyone else that avoids America's hellfire.
In essence, the USA is cooked, but the leaders don't know this. And that's sort of the lens I am using to interpret the actions of American leadership right now. What would a bunch of corporate zombies do if they fundamentally believed the USA was the best and will always be the best despite the evidence before them? What would the combination of that level of fanatical optimism and liberal brain-rot result in and how is it resulting in the behavior we're currently seeing?
I think that's a quite astute analysis. Thank you for elaborating.
Investment goes where money is so it has some attraction. Probably industry will come back but to a limited degree because the supply chains have not been built AND you have to train workers up. These typically take years to establish especially for stuff like cars and chips.
In the meantime the pain of inflation is going to bite even harder for regular people.
This is probably the only opportunity for regular Americans to organise and get those jobs/wages and make sure to rip off some capitalists who are high on Trump juice. The domestic market is protected by tariffs. Get the bag. Take as much share of profits from the capitalists as possible. Get the employee healthcare and max it out etc.
When those industries go belly up in a few years, those opportunities will be gone.