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Notes -
Trump tariffs McDonald's:
BBC article for a more detailed overview.
Highlights or lowlights include:
I'm not an economist, but I don't think it's a good idea to throw out tariffs with such clear absence of rigor. The only saving grace is that Trump is fickle, so if enough people yell at him from his in-group, he might pivot in a week. If not, bloody hell.
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.
China and the other successful Asian economics used protectionism to target specific industries for development (often picked through pure cronyism of course, see Japan and Korea.)
The two secret ingredients are a) going for stuff you can get cheap capital and inputs for, and b) imposing the costs on workers who are already poor and won't really notice how much the policy is hurting them.
China started by importing old labor-intensive machine tooling from Europe, and heavily subsidized their light manufacturing exports. The workers were coming straight off of disastrous collective farms and didn't notice or care that much of their output was going towards American consumer surplus and the dead weight loss of the subsidy. They kept this ball rolling one industry at a time all the way to where they are now, at the cost of still being heavily export-dependent with depressed domestic consumption.
(One reason tariffs against China are good policy rn imo: they have overinvested in a ton of export manufacturing, and have little choice but to eat most of the loss themselves or let too many well-connected investors and pension funds lose their shirts/heads. Their whole EV battery industry is hemorrhaging money and so desperate for overseas sales that battery prices kept dropping after the tariffs.)
That doesn't really work in the US when workers would face huge reductions to their current quality of life to make American manufacturing competitive.
Especially trying to do it for everything, all at once.
We could get rid of migrant farm labor by subsidizing/tariff-exempting cheap automated farming equipment from China. Or we could expand immigration to get cheap manufacturing labor, bringing all those Mexican border factories to the US side and taxing competing imports. But doing both at once is impossible.
Really? Aren't prices falling because of technological development, ruthless competition and economies of scale? They use subsidies to build up industries but Chinese industry is so big it can't possibly be reliant on subsidies in the medium or long-term. You can't just subsidise the whole economy and pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
https://x.com/alojoh/status/1778746545481126308
BYD seemingly got a mere 2.4 billion over 8 years, that's peanuts. It's profitable despite the subsidy.
https://www.scmp.com/business/china-business/article/3228224/overcapacity-chinas-ev-battery-industry-reach-four-times-demand-2025-putting-small-players-risk
This is why you can get lithium batteries on Amazon for half the price they were last year, even after biden's new tariffs. Especially now Tesla isn't buying Chinese LFPs any more. They're doing anything they can to sell cells.
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