I don't think one can really jump on China "for hoarding" masks when they are using them for goodness sake. A buck and a half billion people are shot if seen outside without them for goodness sake.
China? Nah. They make it, it is their choice to sell it or not. Whatever that is.
In the decades since trade was opened with China, a few things have happened.
It became cheaper to have things made there (wherever 'there' is) and shipped here than to make them here.
Why is that?
Often cited, the cost of Labor, allegedly much higher here (but that is really an unfair and unlevel playing field).
But beyond that, there is a much deeper and perhaps not so obvious reason it is cheaper (money wise) to do business there.
In the US, the moving targets of various environmental restrictions has virtually guaranteed noncompliance with the next iteration of revised standards, requiring expensive refits to manufacturing facilities, especially in regard to atmospheric emissions. That regulatory uncertainty, not just used to stifle manufacturing, but the first strike weapon in the War on Coal, held any cost/profit analysis hostage to the whim of a carefully shopped for Federal Bench.
Imagine a delay of over a decade in hoops to jump through, often moved, changed in size, and once successfully transited, required to go around and repeat the process, just to place a pipe in the ground to ship liquids which would be more expensive and dangerous to ship by truck or rail.
The pipe for the Keystone XL spent more time sitting on top of the ground waiting for permits, repeated environmental assessments and lawsuits to be resolved than it has transporting oil.
The Dakota Access Pipeline, delayed by the previous Administration, now completed and in operation since June 1, 2017, faces environmental review on the ruling of one judge, and possible shutdown, even though since that operational start date only one half barrel of oil has been spilled (21 gallons) and over 483,630,000 barrels of oil (multiply that by 42 to get gallons) have been transported.
The question of "How clean is clean enough?" became an academic contest of decimal places, not on the bottom line, but in PPM and PPB and PPT of emissions, each successive power of ten in cleanliness and purity of emissions requiring similar exponential capital outlay to achieve, and once complied with subject to changing regulatory standards, even as the refit to facilities was in progress.
Sure, that dome of brown air I saw in the late '70s was gone from over Gary, Indiana, but so was the industry which held it up, swept off in a wave of NIMBY to foreign shores where those who arbitrarily set whatever standard for emissions remained consistent.
With decades of ramping up regulations, bigger and "better" trade deals with other countries stopped pollution at the same borders those manufacturing facilities crossed. ERTL toy moved to Mexico, along with foundry jobs casting everything from brake drums to the manhole covers the wheels they stopped drove across, and even as those jobs fled, industry, and even prospectors for our own mineral wealth were locked out of more and more land in the public domain, as successive administrations seemed to have contests to see who could remove more millions of acres of America and the natural resources on and below them from being catalogued and utilized.
Does China have more resources, or is it a question of having the determination to actually exploit them?
Is their apparent lock on Rare Earth Elements more a question of Geology and Geochemistry, or is it a question of their government being determined to produce them, while ours is determined we don't.
I and a colleague found a deposit of Niobium/Tantalum Rutile in the '70s which I expect will never be produced, by virtue of its location. We found it quite by accident, out knocking on rocks for fun, so while I am not in any way economically devastated by that, I will use that as an example.
In another more egregious example, Forestry regulations and concerns over the alleged inability of species to handle the minor disruptions of harvesting mature timber ensure that millions of acres of prime timber remain as fuel load to cloud the skies of States a thousand miles away in fire season (without regards for "emissions"), rather than being utilized as the resource they are, and further endangering the lives and property of those who live nearby, and the lives of those sent to fight fires which should never have reached the magnitude which those do.
Those regulations, as so often happens, crafted by people using the distorted view of preservationists from 1000 or more miles away, people who really have little or no first hand knowledge of the area.
Hardly limited to vast tracts of Federally owned land, similar regulations prevent the harvest of much smaller private plots, not even allowing the removal of deadfall timber for salvage as lumber or firewood, even timber planted generations ago by ancestors of the current owners, when well-managed removal would reduce fuel loads which threaten the very habitat that preservationists allegedly seek to preserve (even though legally, they have no access to the land). The absence of the open spaces which would be generated by that mature timber removal and replanting on a selective basis guarantees an absence of microenvironmental diversity essential to truly flourishing wildlife.
No America, we can't blame the Chinese. This is a self-inflicted wound.
Following the siren's song of "preserve this, and don't pollute that, in the name of NIMBY" we have run the ship of domestic manufacturing and harvesting/utilization of resources squarely on the rocks while the galleys of international trade row merrily past singing the mantras of globalism, powered by economic, if not political slaves at the oars.
While we don't hesitate to harvest wheat when it is mature, we quail at the thought of harvesting a tree, which similarly has a window of maturity in which it can be utilized as a resource--with the exception of those corporate plots planted and harvested for the making of paper products and some building materials.
We have decided that those creatures in Nature who have adapted for the existence of their species cannot move to the next tree, even as we have made humans jobless and homeless so some owl doesn't have to build a new nest, or isn't disturbed by the noise on the other side of the mountain.
While the lesson of the ages, written in the fossil remains of countless species says "adapt or die", we somehow assume that nature does not, and place the pressures of economic uncertainty on our domestic industry and population through regulation and lawsuits while ensuring that those far from the penumbra of that jurisdiction, who do not comply with the standards we impose upon our own, benefit from that noncompliance in terms of trade and the acquisition of skills, techniques, facilities, and methodologies for the extraction and refining of their resources, while our resources languish beneath a veneer of "pretty" and our people have their retirement party, not at the mine, nor at the mill, nor at the factory, but at McDonalds or WalMart.
And now, perhaps a peek at the problem with relying on others to produce that which we need, even in a domestic and peacetime situation. Imagine, too, if in the 1040s we had relied on Japan or Germany for resources essential to the War effort, and that peek at this vulnerability, at first just economic, now becomes a view at an open and economically disemboweling wound.
If we are to remain a truly great power, then we should be great enough to use and make our own.
