Pylimitics

Capitalists love to talk about markets and competition — up to a point. But when market competition gets difficult, like when the capitalists in question are faced with a competitor offering a better product, or a better price, or really any other advantages, well…then they reveal that they hate competition, and their real preference is to keep selling whatever they sell with no interruptions or, for that matter, any need to make improvements (other than increasing profit margins).

This might be particularly true of capitalists in the US; I don’t really know. But it would certainly agree with the way US society has made it ridiculously easy for mediocre white men to succeed. It’s not really connected, but that iconic image of fat, lazy, boorish American white guys? It didn’t come from nowhere.

The lastest example of capitalists hating markets and competition is the US auto industry. Cars are more than a century old now, and the auto industry in the US has developed to cater to some unique aspects of the country and culture. Wide roads, even in cities. Cheap, heavily subsidized fuel. More personal disposable income. Hardly any public transportation systems (there’s a negative feedback loop involved in that one, but never mind). Anyway, the cars needed in a lot of the rest of the world tend to be smaller, more able to cope with narrow, very old roads, and much more expensive fuel.

Some fool of a bureaucrat just recently complained about never seeing US-designed RAM pickup trucks in India, claiming it was because of trade restrictions. Well guess what, it’s also — maybe mostly — because a hulking, thirsty US pickup truck doesn’t match the market needs there.

But sometimes automakers from other places come up with cars that match the market needs here very well. US capitalists of the automobile persuasion, back in the 1950s and 1960s, fell into a typical mediocre white guy pattern and just assumed that the market they were serving wanted whatever they offered. It didn’t occur to them that a diminutive air-cooled economy car from Europe might be a success. Enter the Volkswagen Beetle.

What a lot of people are looking for right now is an electric car. If the price, the range, and the charging times meet their needs, they might just buy one. Electric cars in the US are expensive, and range has been an issue (an issue possibly unique to the US; this place is huge and we have a lot of distance to cover).

US auto makers have not been late and not very good at electric cars. Could be that mediocre white guy problem again. Anyway, you know who’s making electric cars that are low priced, have good range, and fast charging? Auto makers in China, like Xiaomi. Thus the mediocre white guys of the US auto industry have responded as predicted. They fought really hard…to get 100% tariffs slapped on their would-be competitors.