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When EU was faced with insurmountable competition in the global food market they set up common agricultural policy and straight up fueled their agriculture with
by scotty79 3y ago
When EU was faced with insurmountable competition in the global food market they set up common agricultural policy and straight up fueled their agriculture with tax money since then making EU number one global exporter of food and beverages.
I wonder what obstacles there are for doing the exactly same in another key sector that is manufacturing means of energy production.
And chip manufacturing in the future probably.
If the obstacle to competitiveness is the high cost of labor due to European people being so rich it's only fair to alleviate the problem by using the tax money. It already worked for agriculture.
- Gravityloss 3y agoThis makes total sense, up to a limit when it's about strategic resources. Food is certainly a strategic resource. But if you subsidize it so much that you export massively, that doesn't make sense. Energy technology and chips certainly are also strategic resources.
- SiempreViernes 3y agoThe main obstacle is that the EU became deeply neoliberal in its thinking, judging state subsidies as worse than slave labour. For example, when the US rolled out the cornucopia of state protectionism that is the IRA the EU has mainly responded by saying "actually, that's not very free marked of you USA".
- lock-the-spock 3y agoThe EU has its own subsidy programmes as well but it is a lot more complex. You need 27 governments to agree to make something happen, from 400.000 people Malta to 80.000.000 million people Germany. The small countries are terrified to be squashed by German and French power to give subsidies to their own national company, ruining the single market. In fact you have the same issue in the US but the states have no direct say, and statistics are not done the same way - so you don't see the impact the same way and don't have discussions the same way.