Peter S. Goodman

Where the pandemic was at its worst.

Where the pandemic began, a country that not incidentally we decided to have a trade war with,

not a great way to reliably get the stuff you need.

And computer chips, the most advanced ones, are made overwhelmingly in Taiwan.

Taiwan is, of course, a self-governing island that is claimed as part of Chinese territory by the People's Republic of China and its government in Beijing, which means that, you know, there is the not-zero risk that on any given day,

the Chinese military could show up and take over, and that could be an enormous disruption to the computer chip supply.

And we have to think about resilience.

The way to think of it is we need some insurance.

It's not that globalization is bad.

It's that globalization without insurance against the risks that are an inevitable part of life, that's not so good.

It looks like the government saying we're going to have to play a direct role in making sure that certain things are built in the United States, and that's going to require subsidies.

So along comes the Biden administration, and the Biden administration breaks from doing

generations of free trade dogma, this idea that we just let the market sort out what gets built and where.

And they say efficiency only takes us so far.

The government's going to have to play a role in making sure that certain things like computer chips are built in the United States.

And this becomes the Chips and Science Act.

This landmark piece of legislation that's got tens of billions of dollars in subsidies given to companies that build computer chip factories in the United States.

One of those companies, Taiwan Semiconductor, actually participates in the writing of this bill.

Mm-hmm.

And that company, TSMC, ends up with a $6 billion plus grant to then build this complex of factories in Phoenix.