Volkswagen is trying to implement a comprehensive cost-cutting programme with up to 100,000 job losses, double the amount previously planned, by 2030 and the potential contraction or closure of several plants.
Volkswagen is trying to implement a comprehensive cost-cutting programme with up to 100,000 job losses, double the amount previously planned, by 2030 and the potential contraction or closure of several plants.
A fair argument can be made that the Chinese government considers EV an imperative and interferes and subsidizes, so it’s not fully free market. Thus any country with industry competing with China needs to decide if they care and if they care, how to respond to advantage conferred by China government policies. Whether that’s similar incentives for their domestic industry and/or tariffs to try to level the playing field.
That’s only a “fair” argument to make if one assumes that orthodox neoliberal policies such as the EU’s ban on state aid are somehow the universal ethical norm. Will, they aren’t.
If we made neoliberalism our dogma and the Chinese are outcompeting us maybe our dogma is fucking wrong.
There’s a reason I explicitly mentioned state aid as an option. So it’s a fair argument because currently they are disadvantaged. Advocating for equivalent state aid wild be on the table
I reject the framing. It is us Europeans that chose to be “disadvantaged” because we made the political choice to trust in the mumbo jumbo of neoliberal economics, because we thought we were going to be “advantaged” by the invisible hand of the market gods. We made a bad policy choice. Instead of calling it a “disadvantage”, our political institutions should do their own self-criticism.
Ok, I find this very bizarre. You lament that neoliberal economics is bad but should not be considered disadvantaged?
I guess we are reading the word “disadvantage” slightly differently. You, I suspect, use it purely descriptively. I am interpreting it normatively (disadvantage viz. the proper rules). I am not pushing back on the descriptive bit. I am pushing back on what I consider to be normative baggage smuggled in by the framing. Aka maybe I’m reading too much in a word.