>a real war with the PRC wouldn’t be so open and shut. They aren’t a 3rd rate Middle Eastern military with Soviet era surplus armaments.

Not a quick done-and-done-with pushover like Iraq or Afghanistan, then?

I think manufacturing is going the way of agriculture. You have a free-trade ideology that wants are infinite, and increased productivity and lower prices just mean people buying more stuff. In agriculture, this really does not work. There is only so much people can eat. The only way they can really increase their consumption is to eat animals which eat other animals. This has not been much of a success. No one shows any great desire to eat, say, foxes or mink, which live on beef. At sea, the situation is a bit different. Tuna is an example of a fish which is very high on the food chain, but it is cheap and despised. People pay for crab, which is proverbially a bottom-feeding detritovore. By now, of course, all kinds of shellfish are being raised in captivity, and fed mostly on corn, like so many steers in a feedlot. The result of all this is that farmers increasingly make their living by some form of being paid to not grow alfalfa. Just at the moment, it is ethanol production.

Something similar is happening in the major manufactures, such as automobiles. Productivity increases, with more and more robots, but there is really very little additional desire for new automobiles, certainly not enough to absorb the ten or twenty percent annual productivity increases which are to be expected when robots really get going. Airplanes cost more than automobiles, of course, but they are also much harder to fly than automobiles are to drive, and this difficulty really does not lend itself to being overcome by automation. Aviators have a lot of funny stories about people who turned on the autopilot, and flew into disaster. The man who fatally crashed his Tesla in Florida while watching a Harry Potter movie would have been a fairly representative case. This is true for a wide range of manufactures– more money gets you a device which is more complicated, and harder to use, and sometimes, more dangerous.

Even at the top of the ladder, this applies, in areas like health care. Plastic surgeons sometimes do terrible things to women who go to them, wanting “to be made beautiful.” Something like half of American medical expenditure is in the last month of life. What costs is a doctor futzing around when he doesn’t know what the hell he is doing. Perhaps, the worst horror would be the cases of young children, generally little girls, killed by dentists in the course of cosmetic dentistry, giving general anesthetic without the services of a board-certified anesthesiologist.

If you have a system in which people are expected to make their livings from jobs, naturally they will fight over jobs, and this fighting will express itself in import restrictions. The import restrictions won’t do much good, because they won’t do much about productivity and robots. Americans like machines, on the while, and there is very little support for a “Butlerian Jihad.” Donald Trump is not a very intelligent or well-educated man, so, unlike, say, Bernie Sanders, he is not able to see the necessity of finding ways to get off the treadmill, things like guaranteed income.

Look, no one would ever choose to do assembly-line labor, for its own sake. It is just that assembly-line labor has been economically structured as the preferred destination for people with no education and no skills. All they have to do is to endure the pain of repeating the same motions every forty-five seconds for eight or ten hours, and the same thing, next day. Only new, the machine can do it better.

Whether its NAFTA, TPP, or TTIP, I expect any renegotiated deals to possibly address ad blocking and make it illegal.

Another possibility is that DMCA-like laws be required that they be modified to remove that requirement for commercial or private financial gain.

Beause of the requirement, you can only be charged with a crime, if you make some kind of money off circumventing DRM, so personal non-commercial use of circumvention tools is not a crime, but I would expect a re-negotiated TPP, TTIP, or NAFTA to possibly mandate this be changed