There are already flying taxis in China. There’s drone delivery of meals too.
About the leaps taking place in China, some will say we need to catch up. Others will say that in addition to catching up, we need to keep advances hatched in China out of the U.S. They would be incorrect, twice.
It can’t be said enough that trade isn’t war, it's mutual enhancement. That’s why we do it. Which means the answer to some and realistically all of the striking advances in China is to remove U.S. barriers to them. The barriers don’t improve us, rather they set us back. And for obvious reasons. When we can’t divide up work with others, we’re less productive.
Americans already live this truth now. Georgia is known for carpets, Michigan for cars, Texas for oil, Southern California for entertainment, and Northern California for technology.
Thinking about where production of varying stripes takes place in the U.S., imagine how poor Americans would be if each state erected barriers to the genius of other states, all in pursuit of autarky. With work, everything we do comes at the expense of work we don’t have time to do. Which means we divide work up as a way of accentuating our specialties, and then we trade our productive fruits.
What’s true for all fifty states loses none of its validity when countries enter the equation. If anything, the above truth is enhanced. Instead of Americans only getting to divide up work with 330 million people to the betterment of every American, Americans get to divide up work with billions of people and machines around the world.
Except that we’re not dividing work up with the rest of the world enough. We know this because the Chinese enjoy flying taxis plus they can have meals delivered to them by drone, among other things. And by most accounts the Chinese can buy cars much more cheaply than can Americans. That’s not right, plus it’s not good for Americans.
Presently they can’t buy BYD automobiles even though Chinese cars are supposed to have spectacular qualities, and then as you’re reading this the world’s biggest drone company (DJI – based in Shenzhen) finds itself on the verge of having the sale of its drones restricted in the U.S. Why?
Again, we Americans would be much poorer if our states were walled off to American production, so why damage the U.S. as a nation in the way we would never damage U.S. states? Rather than ban Chinese imports, we should see them as work done for us so that we can focus on other things to our economic betterment.
It’s the beauty of openness to foreign production. The city, state, and nation that’s most open to outside production benefits precisely because the openness creates the figurative truth that every commercial advance is taking place right next door. And just as “imports” from next door free us to do the work that we do best to our betterment, so do imports from the other side of the world.
The Chinese seemingly “beat” us to drone-delivered meals, but they can only “win” if legislators harm every American by depriving them of global expertise. If the rest of the world can’t do for us, then American labor will be wasted on things others can do for us, all at the cost of what we could otherwise be doing.
