Sorry to everyone for the delay. Though it’s not unusual for this blog to have long pauses between articles— it’s definitely never been the intention to have this sort of gap for what should be a follow-up/sequel. The trade wars that have played out so intensely over the past few months have had quite a bit of relevance on this topic, and so it was put on hold until now. Without further ado…
Without reaching into the bucket for motivations like civic duty, I’d like to simply companies as basic widget work units. Some sort of simple black box that takes costs, resources, and opportunity to churn out an output (perhaps represented by stock price or some other form of validation).

Costs would be external imposed necessities: taxes, regulation, tariffs(cough)
Resources would be materials for production: physical and intellectual
Opportunity is well… opportunity: Market, timing, trends and user behavior
So far, governments have by an almost absolute margin only thought of incentives in terms of monetary costs. The country-wide deal hunting spree set off by Amazon was an example of it in play— come and we’ll increase your bottomline. The current threat of tariffs to move companies back to the US is the reverse— come back or we’ll destroy it.
Continue reading “If we don’t use money, what do we use?”