Copyright thedispatch
China enjoys a near-monopoly position in the rare-earths business. Not because China is simply blessed with the minerals the way the Permian Basin is blessed with oil but because the United States and most of the other rich countries have made it very, very difficult to process that stuff in their countries. Rare-earths refining is, environmentally speaking, an ugly business, one that makes the environmental impact of fracking for gas look like a rowboat trip across Lake Como. But, as with the extraction and processing of oil and gas, there are better and worse ways to do it, and American firms historically are among the world’s best at solving that kind of engineering challenge, as the U.S. energy industry itself so powerfully demonstrates; there is no reason to think that the rare-earths industry could not develop—and, more to the point, could not have developed—here in the United States, given the right regulatory environment and incentives. But American policymakers chose a different path—the wrong one. As C.S. Lewis argues in a different context, regress is the most progressive thing you do when you are on the wrong path—the sooner you turn back to find your way to the right path, the better. But the Trump administration has not turned back toward the right path: Instead, it is stuck in the freshest economic thinking of the 1860s, trying to magic new supplies into existence through raw subsidies and bargain-basement financing through the Bank of Uncle Stupid. It is not as though there isn’t real political and legislative work to be done, and lots of it—but an administration headed by a profoundly lazy and monumentally stupid man served by a Chalmun’s Spaceport Cantina of half-bright retired middling talk-show hosts is not up to the job.
