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Isolationism isn't the solution. The world needs to be better at working together, not splitting apart.
We can have both a local manufacturing sector and imports.
The last few years have shown us that we need to produce stuff here because the supply chain can explode and were caught with our pants down.
I hate to break it to you, but a lot of these countries aren’t interested in “working together”. In fact they want to sell you something for cheap, get you hooked, and put your own means of production and any competition out of business. This makes you dependent on them, and they can then use this to hike up prices, and exert political control.
There’s no reason Canada can’t make its own cars. Or computer chips. Or food. Or drugs. Etc etc. Relying on a single external source for a good or service really screws you over when that country goes to war, or goes nuts.
It’s not about isolationism. It’s about making sure there is competition to keep prices down, and making sure there is more than one source to get these goods and services from.
Sure if you're talking at least a 10x on the price of equivalent consumer goods, which isn't going to drive prices down whatsoever. China both subsidises manufacturing AND devalues their currency to keep manufacturing costs low and exports high. There's no way to do that in the Canadian economy or any single western economy without either tanking it (huge deflation) or saddling the country with so much debt to invest into the industries and then subsidise long enough to be cost competitive that it would never be able to make the credit repayments.
Well then, I guess we should all just become slaves to China since it’s not worth putting a fight. 🙄
Equalizing the playing field was part of the legislation that Canada just got rid of in order to import cheap (subsidized and possibly made with slave labor) Chinese cars.
Someone else mentioned the US. We had those industries in the US, and we let them wither on the vine. Now we can’t manufacture cars because one of the controller chips is single sourced and the country that it comes from is tied up in some sort of “geopolitical tension”. Our clothes are made in sweatshops by slave labor. And many of our generic drugs are coming from countries that don’t have quality standards so they don’t work at all, or worse they actually make people sick. But hey, at least they’re cheap!
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
I definitely do not think the Trump administration has a plan, other than to bankrupt the US.
I will never understand how its cheaper to:
The labor is cheaper there sure, but all the shipping back and forth should have evened some of that out. It’s nuts to me.