> Nobody prevents you from buying local right now, so that's a red herring. If you want to force others to do the same, you should pay their increase as well. Are you prepared to do that?
That's what governments and elections are for. People vote, government make it more complicated for foreign companies to compete on the local market. People pay a bit more for for a bit worse service, and tax rate for everyone gets lower because of reduced unemployment benefits and increased tax income. Everyone locally gets it a bit better.
I'm not saying that one or the other option is clearly better. There are many ways in which "fully open", "fully closed" and "somewhere in between" policies can fail or succeed. It's always matter of balance, but favouring local companies is not bad per se.
When I go to vote, I vote for the government and policies that will make my life and life of the members of my community better, not the government that would make the world better in total by making it a bit worse for us. It doesn't work that way.
Forcing others who disagree with you to go along, yes. That's a very big hammer, and should not be applied lightly. (I'm not saying it should never be applied at all; there are fundamental aspects of society that only seem to work with that pressure applied.)
> People pay a bit more for for a bit worse service, and tax rate for everyone gets lower because of reduced unemployment benefits and increased tax income. Everyone locally gets it a bit better.
"a bit worse" is downplaying it quite a bit; sometimes the result is quite a lot worse. And when you're talking about services with network effects, sometimes the result is "fundamentally not the same service at all". If you're stopping people from participating in the same Internet as everyone else, you could just as easily be slowing your own local economy and breaking opportunities for them to create the next service that'll actually be the best for everyone. And unless you're prepared to make your country completely self-sufficient with no reliance on the outside world, "increased tax income" isn't going to help you when it turns out the services people actually want aren't made in your country and never can be.
As an alternative to dragging others down, if you really want to spend a pile of money boosting your local economy, and you want to do that via government, how about supporting local businesses as they improve, and encouraging them to compete with services provided elsewhere? "Keep up" is always better than "wait up".
That's what governments and elections are for. People vote, government make it more complicated for foreign companies to compete on the local market. People pay a bit more for for a bit worse service, and tax rate for everyone gets lower because of reduced unemployment benefits and increased tax income. Everyone locally gets it a bit better.
I'm not saying that one or the other option is clearly better. There are many ways in which "fully open", "fully closed" and "somewhere in between" policies can fail or succeed. It's always matter of balance, but favouring local companies is not bad per se.
When I go to vote, I vote for the government and policies that will make my life and life of the members of my community better, not the government that would make the world better in total by making it a bit worse for us. It doesn't work that way.