Western countries all have a competitiveness problem.
But it is not quite the problem we think it is.
We keep telling ourselves that Asian economies are somehow more efficient — as though somebody waved a magic wand and gave them a permanent advantage over the West. China first and foremost, but increasingly countries such as India as well.
That explanation is far too convenient.
A significant part of the difference is much simpler.
Wages are lower. Labour protections are weaker. Environmental protections are weaker. And protections for almost anything else may be weaker still — if they exist at all.
There is a cost to protecting people.
There is a cost to protecting workers, to protecting the environment, to protecting communities and to insisting that industrial activity does not simply leave behind a poisoned landscape and a population that has to live with the consequences.
If you mine rare earths responsibly, they will not be cheap.
If you impose environmental standards, enforce workplace safety and insist that companies clean up after themselves, production costs rise.
Completely laying waste to an entire region is considerably cheaper.
Western countries generally cannot do that.
In parts of Asia, the political and regulatory system has historically allowed considerably more of it.
That can produce an extraordinary competitive advantage — at least on a spreadsheet.
You can destroy ecosystems, poison communities and tear social structures apart while externalising the costs onto people who have little ability to object.
The factory gets the cheap inputs.
The exporter gets the margin.
The consumer gets the cheap product.
And somebody else gets the poisoned river.
That is not efficiency.
It is cost shifting.
And we should be honest enough to admit that we do not particularly want to compete on those terms.
Nor should we.
But there is another side to this problem, and this one is entirely ours.
We have become grotesquely overregulated.
At some point, protection stops being protection and becomes a racket.
Rules multiply. Permits multiply. Compliance obligations multiply. Projects that should take years take decades. Businesses spend extraordinary amounts of money proving that they are allowed to do things they were perfectly capable of doing before the regulatory machinery arrived.
That is no longer sensible governance.
It is a system that feeds on itself.
And it needs to be dismantled.
Not environmental protection. Not worker safety. Not the rule of law.
The pointless layers of bureaucracy, procedural obstruction and regulatory theatre that have accumulated around them.
But even that is not the deepest problem.
The deepest problem is us.
We expect everything to be cheap.
We expect everything to be available immediately.
We expect abundance without consequence, safety without cost, energy without infrastructure, products without factories and prosperity without anybody having to do the unpleasant work required to produce it.
We have become extraordinarily well-coddled consumer animals.
There is no waiting anymore.
No tolerance for scarcity.
No patience for things becoming more expensive because somebody has decided that producing them responsibly actually matters.
We want everything.
We want it now.
And we want somebody else to pay for it.
That is not a sustainable economic model.
Competitiveness will not be restored by pretending that Western workers should compete with starvation wages or that Western industry should compete with environmental devastation.
Nor will it be restored by burying every productive activity beneath another mountain of regulation.
The reform we actually need is cultural as much as economic.
We need to relearn the difference between expensive and valuable.
Between inconvenience and injustice.
Between waiting and deprivation.
And between prosperity and entitlement.
Perhaps the first thing that needs to change is not the factory.
It is the consumer.
The snowflakes cannot be allowed to dominate the economic architecture of entire societies.
Because if everything must be cheap, immediate, risk-free and perfectly comfortable, eventually there will be nothing left that is worth producing.