While I agree with the sentiment, I’d say this qualifies as news. Elons not buying shake shack, he’s buying a social media platform with a very opaque algorithm that has the power to influence a large chunk of the American public. Even if he tanks it, twitter has shown that through network and data ownership combined with sheer inertia many people will remain on an app even after its been revealed to have its thumb on the scale for one side.

170 million people

Where’s that number coming from. Maybe you mean the 165 billion installs , but that’s not active users and double counts people installing on multiple devices. Tik tok has 50 million dau Of those maybe 10% is actually “speaking” and creating content that the other 90% consume so around 5 million people.

And those 5 million people aren’t silenced, they can still go on to one of multiple apps that provide the same service and allows them to get there message out. He’ll they could come on to the fediverse and post blatant ccp propaganda and no one will do anything.

Full protectionism does cause problems with inflation and degrading the competitiveness of firms, but full neoliberal globalism leads to a race to the bottom on wages and working conditions.

The answer is somewhere in the middle, we shouldn’t be putting blanket tariffs on a country or the entire world. But we also shouldn’t turn away from possibly helpful protectionist policies.

Tarriffs can help in new and developing industries to make sure they aren’t strangled in the crib by foreign competition. A large reason for the success of the development of south Korean and Taiwanese economies was due to initial protectionist policies . The tariffs have to be understood to be temporary though but they can help in getting an industry off the ground.

I’d argue electric vehicles are an emerging industry that will be very important if the world shifts to a greener economy. Letting China take over that market and dominate it would be detrimental to the strength of our economy long term.

One of the main supporters for this was the UAW. Real rich people don’t care about this, if this hadn’t passed they wouldve just sold there shares in American auto companies and invested in Chinese companies, or moved manufacturing to China for higher subsidies, lower labor costs and even bigger profits, or use that as a threat to lower wages here. Under globalism capital is free to move to wherever there is the most profit.

This isn’t a rich vs poor situation, it’s a worker vs consumer situation.

On one hand this will slow the ev transition.

On the other car manufacturing is one of the few industries left in America with some union density and decent wages and having to compete with subsidized Chinese evs that are made with a fraction of the labor costs would destroy that industry.

Globalism hurts workers and helps consumers. One of the triumphs of neoliberalism is to get people to identify as consumers first and workers second.