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Capitalism is all about competition unless it's not.
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2025
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Capitalism isn't about anything other than keeping the ruling class rich and in power. How it chooses to do that has varied throughout time. During the 20th Century the lie was that "American Style" capitalism was fair because the capitalists would promote Laissez-faire style economics ("Free Trade") out of their mouths, while actually building monopolies.
With the rise of Trump-style 'conservatives' Republicans have adopted a new strategy, Mercantilism. Mercantilism doesn't even pretend to be fair or free. The word 'Competition' doesn't even appear anywhere in that article because competition is bad for Capitalists and they see no reason to continue to lie about that. They actively oppose free trade.
Even if 'Capitalists' possessed the ability to feel shame for being hypocrites (which they certainly do not), calling them out for not following along with the principles of 'the free market' does no good since they have abandoned advocating for that a while ago.
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Good, let's do it. I'm tired of our tax money keeping shitty car companies floating.
And no competition. I'm pretty sure that they can shave some of the price off from that massive jump that came with COVID due to [checks list] "supply chain issues" and yet never went back down after...
Tariffs be damned, I will not buy an American brand car. They've been mediocre my whole life and it's always been easier to source parts for Hondas and Toyotas. I'm not sure how repairable any EV is, but I doubt American brands will top the charts of value in repairability in my lifetime
I'm not sure how repairable EVs are either, since my 2013 Leaf never needed repairs in 12 years. Just tires and wiper blades.
Yeah that's a good point in a sense. Mechanically I think they're a lot less repairable (or at least a lot less at home repairable), but from the angle of needing repairs, they also need less repairs because most of what tends to fail on ICE vehicles is all the mechanical stuff attached to the engine. Even on my hybrid I repair a ton less and my mechanic said that because all the accessories are electronic since they can't be belt/chain driven because the engine is off half the time that they're ultimately more reliable in the end - it's the mechanical aspects of them that fail on ICE vehicles.
Got a subaru as my first non-american car. The old CVT torque converter is wearing out after 120k miles, but she survived being lightly t-boned with just a door repair
Manual swap time
After 25 years of other brands I finally went Honda and I can't believe how happy I am with it. I never have problems.
Over the years I think Honda and Toyota are the two brands I most commonly see an old guy managing to keep running well for 30+ years and hyper focused on wanting to break 500k miles or dreaming of hitting 1 million miles someday
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Oh no! The type of capitalism where we have to compete!
Make it go away, Daddy Trump!
Sadly, I think it was Biden that put a 100% tariff on Chinese EVs. Fuck Trump, but come on, Biden, don't do this shit for them. I really like that new Xiaomi YU7.
The issue is not so simple. Blocking BYD has a lot to do with protecting American manufacturing jobs. That's not to say Biden's tariff was the right answer. But it is a more complicated problem to solve than it appears from the perspective of a single car buyer.
Sucks to suck, our car companies suck and they absolutely should loose and be forced to fire people if they can't compete. Give me my cheap and decent Chinese cars please. I live in a capitalist country so lets act like it instead of being fucking pussys
It the country wasn't so hostile, also pretty racist when talking about Chinese (99% of the time people say Chinese not CCP as an insult to anything about creativity, invention, culture, whatever), to Chinese consumer big ticket goods, I'd imagine BYD and other would build manufacturing plants in the US. If things weren't so hostile, the Chinese battery companies like CATL may be willing to build batteries in the US without major concern of a hostile nation stealing their battery tech
It isn't even a truly political idealism conflict that causes the split. Americans were fine with South Korean and Taiwanese products when those countries were military dictatorships. Vietnam has the company VinFast selling cars in the US and it's political structure is a lot closer to China than the US. Americans have never shown appetite for reigning in how American companies treat labor in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Really not even domestically like in makeshift housing that American farmers pack migrant workers into or meatpacking plants. So it's really just rich/powerful people not liking to see non-European descendants take the leading role in global trade of high margin goods and services that are often cutting edge technology
If China was still primarily a labor country, damn near no one would care about Chinese domestic issues like famines. In my mind the inevitability will be another wave of xenophobia that will eventually target India and the Indian diaspora as their military and domestic military and technology companies develop
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But it would also help american people. Which is more important, I wonder.
Stop giving them more reasons not to allow it
Good. Fuckem. They make shitty, oversized trucks that are a danger to pedestrians and people who drive reasonably sized cars anyway.
My boss in the UK got one. In bright red. It looks like he's driving a fucking fire engine.
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Maybe GM could, I don't know, innovate?
As an European living in Asia and can't help but cringe at American cars. They're so far behind. And it's the car country. Japan has better cars and better rail. Embarassing.
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I mean, didn’t Japanese and Korean automakers already do that?
Yes. They did. That's called competition. It forces companies to improve by destroying them, except they don't want that. And politicians don't want that, cause it makes corruption unstable.
Killed Detroit too, though. But, eh, helped other parts. It's life.
Thus already in the 90s with the TRON OS a different approach was chosen by US regulators - threaten Japan with sanctions if it's allowed to compete with Windows inside Japan .
They can't threaten China, but they can prevent Chinese competitive goods from entering US market and improving its economy again.
Bad economy - poor and stressed people, poor and stressed people - worse political decisions, worse political decisions - good for middlemen which in our age shouldn't exist frankly. We have the technologies for direct democracy, it's not 1920s.
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