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this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2026
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It’s amusing to me that the same folks to deride Chinese car manufacturers because they are somehow cheating by getting support from the government are the same people demanding that the US government artificially protect the US car industry by blocking Chinese imports. The point being that neither side actually objects to government participation in the market. But, one side uses it to make better products and service consumers, and the other does it to protect worse products from market forces.
"A free market is self regulating" until someone makes a better product for less money, I guess.
We tasted some of that self regulating 'free market' a while ago. Banks were having huge profits from the housing bubble until the subprime crisis hit, banks went into default, and the losses were picked up by public money.
My profit. Our losses.
The point both of you deliberately overlook is that China is not participating in a free market anyway. They never played by those rules so there‘s no point in treating them the same way as anyone who does. There is a lot of hypocrisy to be found in politics and economics around the world and China itself is a prime example of that. But a measure to defend yourself from an obvious case of economic warfare is the most understandable thing in history. Your criticism is misplaced and irrational. I mean do you seriously think a monopoly is desirable?
When has the US ever participated in a free market?
Man..interweb really drinks that anti-China koolaid.
Decades of propaganda works. Centuries of racism helps as well.
We've had of ecocomic warfare already. It was just fine for US companies to hollow out domestic manufacturing so China could build the manufacturing infrastructure that could have been built in the US.
But now that a Chinese company is building things that undercut a US company, you want protections for US billionaires that weren't afforded to US workers.
Are you ignoring the whole subsidies thing on purpose? This is not BYD attacking Tesla. This is the Chinese government attacking western industries.
If the Chinese government is losing money on each car they export, soon China will be bankrupt. It only makes sense to buy more China cars at cheap rates and bankrupt their country.
Also, there is no proof of subsidy, it's just made up Western cope.
USA subsidized Detroit $80B since 2008, and that's ignoring state graft for building assembly plants. What the fuck did they do with that money, attack Eastern industries?
Well, it was $79.7B to be exact. And what the US government did with that was not cut checks, but rather, purchased stock in the companies.
When it sold the stock it bought from manufacturers, it sold for around $70B. When they sold the approximately $2.4B invested into Ally (an auto financing firm), it sold for $17.2B.
So the money spent in 2008 actually made a profit. It was not distributed to the manufacturers or finance companies at all. Just used to shore up their value to prevent them from going out of business – and more importantly, probably, make sure investors didn't lose money, or at least not too much.
When you take into account inflation and the overall market gains over that time, they absolutely did not make their money back.
When you take into account that the original assertion was tht eighty billion was given to the auto manufacturers, I don't think my comment deserves the reaction it got, not a reply like yours.
Would you rather they ended up with zero dollars?
Yes.
The only terms under which I could potential accept tax money being used to save a company from a collapse leading to massive layoffs, is if the resulting company is also made entirely employee owned.
Well, that's not how it would happen and you know it.
China defends its interests and follows what rules it deems advantageous. Just like everyone else does. It may upset you but they're just better at playing this game than most countries nowadays.
Because they don't have a class of politicians and billionaires stuffing their pockets.
Nobody's immune to that
We should be critical of our manufacturers but we should also not forget China is basically getting its R&D for free by stealing tech from everybody (all do, but some more than others).