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You know, we were just talking a few posts downthread about how the "experts" are willing to blatantly lie in order to advance their ideological agenda.
We have been told repeatedly for years by the experts that making any sort of adjustment, pushing any buttons on the control panel at all, to the global trade system would lead to complete economic collapse, the rise of fascist dictators, the end of civilization, and in general all manner of untold horrors.
But why should we believe the experts? We know they're ideologically motivated liars. So, fuck it. Let's just start pushing buttons. Smash away and let's see what happens. If for no other reason to prove that you can do something different, alternatives are possible, even if you may indeed get burned.
Pouring gasoline all over my body and lighting a match because the experts told me not to (and how dare they tell me what to do?) is a completely different type of thing than nuanced risk taking and experimentation.
We can do things differently, improve on our flaws and take healthy risks. We can challenge the orthodox opinions of professionals. We don't need to light ourselves on fire to do this.
Alternate comparison! Nearly every country on the face of the earth has tariffs against US goods. It's working out fantastic for them. I regularly read articles about how protectionism is the secret sauce behind China's economy.
Maybe we were the ones pouring gasoline all over our body and lighting the match because the experts told us we have to.
That's both not true in a meaningful sense, most of our meaningful trade partners have only limited tariffs on a small number of industries or businesses which is not anywhere near equal to large tariffs on everything and not true because the US economy is substantially stronger and better than most other countries in the world.
Lots of countries have tried autarky before, somehow despite it being incredibly effective apparently, none of them ended up doing well. If we're pouring gas on ourselves, it's strange how rich and powerful America has become doing so.
Also important, free trade is historically the revolutionary idea. Free trade economists like Smith and Ricardo were the ones who pushed back on the mercentalist mindset that dominated the elite class of the time, and the countries that adopted trade grew up strong.
So howcome I have never seen a "made in USA" label, and why is the local agribusiness periodically shiitting bricks at the prospect of dropping tariffs on food?
American manufacturing is actually really strong https://www.cato.org/blog/united-states-remains-manufacturing-powerhouse
There's not as many jobs in manufacturing because automation. There's absolutely no reason to cuck ourselves employing people to do things that machines have been able to do for decades, and it's freed up labor into other goods and services. And again this has made the US into the economic marvel that it is too.
Free trade actually benefits a lot of agriculture too. Even the Trump admin knows this given they subsidized farmers during the first trade war and are planning more now https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/31/us/politics/farmers-bailouts-trump-tariffs.html
A relevant point to the "why do I never see 'made in USA' labels" is that US manufacturing strengths are not low-end consumer goods like textiles or plasticrap. The US does a lot of high-value manufacturing, but those products are often sold to other businesses.
Yeah exactly. The US economy by freeing our labor up from much of the basic work other countries can do cheaper has allowed for so much room into high value manufacturing and services.
I often see a complaint about "bullshit jobs" where people don't feel like they're productive, and there certainly is some that exist because of regulations that aren't necessary (like the people who need to make five hundred pages of environmental reviews instead of just a concise 2-5 page paper) or because their employers are not perfectly optimized machines who never make mistakes but in general American wages are so absurdly high on average because our jobs are actually doing a lot of productive work in ways we might not be able to directly appreciate.
The average American office worker gets paid a shit ton of money to file paperwork or do accounting or whatever because the company believes it is worth the expense whether that be direct gains like manufacturing or indirect like optimizations, PR relations, advertising, HR, lobbyists, R&D, IT, etc etc.
And the companies keep succeeding so clearly they must be somewhat right.
I'm about as pro-capitalist as it gets but imo this is the wrong model for zero-sum (for example advertising) and negative sum (for example compliance) industries. Especially large, already successful companies can secure their position by burdening everyone with enough extra costs that only they can shoulder well enough due to scale.
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