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I am generally opposed to corporate subsidies in principle, but international trade gets really complicated, really fast.

As with so many issues surrounding the film industry, I've come around to the view that the best way to approach X may be to forget about the film industry, at least initially, and frame the question as, "what would we do if this were happening in the widget business?"

Maybe trying to compete with them furriners by offering even bigger subsidies is attacking the wrong end of the problem.

Take widget manufacturing. Suppose the U.S. had become the global leviathan of widgets long ago for straightforward commercial reasons. Fine.

Now suppose that underlying technological and market shifts are rearranging the market dynamics, putting a world of hurt on long-dominant legacy firms structured to thrive in an environment that is rapidly changing. Can they adapt?

But suppose that in addition to underlying structural changes in technology and markets, foreign governments decided to get into the widget game. Maybe widgets are a national security priority. Maybe widgets have been culturally fetishized -- the way the performing arts became fetishized in the Golden Age of Hollywood -- and the pols get caught up in the glamour, the red carpets, and the lifestyles of the rich and famous ... and allow themselves to be seduced by the mystique. Whatever.

But suppose a growing number of foreign countries decide to get into the game. It can be a very slow process to do this organically, by developing a domestic market and then a domestic production base that matures to the point that some of its stuff is exportable. In the short run, they can't compete on purely qualitative terms, or in an unrigged market given the enormous sunk costs, infrastructure and concentrations of human capital built by the legacy U.S. giants over a century or more. So they cheat. They throw subsidies at U.S. companies -- perhaps in cash, perhaps preferential market access -- to bribe them to shift their operations abroad.

We would object to this if it were done in widgets, or automobiles, or airplane manufacture, or any other economic sector. And in fact, we have been objecting for a long time. This is where the WTO is supposed to set the rules. Trade distorting subsidies are forbidden. Theoretically.

At this point, things get incredibly complicated in the blink of an eye. Countries bent on cheating will look for non-tariff trade barriers. And WTO rules have to be enforced; the biggest problem with China, for example, is that we cut China a lot of slack on cheating for decades, for reasons rooted in the Cold War strategic calculus. But this went on too long, and China got used to cheating. Long after the point at which China had become a middle class country in global terms, and long after the point at which China needed to grow up and accept its obligations as a reliable, constructive trade partner, China remained piratical. That's what Trump is now trying to unwind, but that's another story.

The film industry is no different. Foreign subsidies that are outright bribes to U.S. companies to shift their operations abroad are no more defensible than similar subsidies in the widget game. The film industry provides more exciting photo ops and sexy starlets, but the economic calculus is something apart from that.

Perhaps instead of trying to out-bribe would-be foreign competitors, we should be attacking the other end of the problem. Assess the value of the production bribes for each Hollywood production that moves overseas, and impose a commensurate tariff or penalty. Level the playing field through enforcement of fair trade rules, not by outbribing the cheaters.

Yes, this would get complicated, and I don't know enough to fill in the blanks. But this would still probably be better than establishing a de facto Ministry of Culture to allocate bribes, aka "production incentives," to offset foreign bribery. The Ministry of Culture route will inevitably lead to a suffocating degree of conformity and adherence to a party line. This is exactly what the woke left has been trying to do anyhow through the DEI mafia and its myriad tentacles in the big studios, which are now largely owned by Big Tech companies subject to activist group and government pressure on myriad fronts. This has already proven to be absolute poison to the creative independence of filmmakers, as well as to their incentives to first and foremost serve the customers, with success measured in ticket sales, not box checking on ideological litmus tests.

That's a clumsy way of putting it, but the focus on competitive subsidies seems to me to be the wrong approach. What a number of foreign countries are doing with regard to the film industry is clearly predatory. How about treating it the way we would treat predatory pricing in widgets?