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@RandomRanger
Re: Schizo tariff policy
You argue that schizo tariff policies are not worse than controlled or orderly economic wrecking. What you complete fail to mention is why people would prefer orderly wrecking over schizo policy.
In short, making decisions at the levels Trump and many others do involves massive investment of time and resources. We're not talking about needing a day to make a decision, companies need notable warning so they can do analyses, inform relevant parties of upcoming changes, etc. One of the benefits of rule of glacial change to the legal system, for example, is that if you know the law once, you don't need to constantly keep a watch on it.
For example, consider a rational Trump supporter who agrees with the stated rhetoric that the tariffs will curb income taxes. Which world would they prefer? The one in which tariffs go on and off based on Trump's whims, or one where Trump gets Congress to put tariffs into place that reduces taxes for a set period of time going forward? I argue they would overwhelmingly support the latter, not the former.
Or consider the company that might support re-shoring factories based on tariffs. They can't build factories in days or weeks, it takes time to plan, acquire raw materials, and get the building(s) constructed. This is a process that needs multi-year guarantees, not the president's favor until his attention drifts to the next Owning The Libs moment.
And then there's the political ramifications. If Trump's policies flip on a dime, then there's a clear avenue for corruption - just say the right things and you get an exemption for your company. Most of us do not want policy done based on the president choosing winners or losers, and I suspect you don't either. And if you are going to cite some Democrats being corrupt, I will pre-empt you by saying that I will likely agree and say it shouldn't be done.
You look at the effects of various policies like DEI, mass migration, etc. and you conclude that since they caused more problems than Trump's current tariff flip-flopping, obviously the latter is not as harmful. But intent matters. Side-effects and second-order effects matter. You can appeal against DEI and immigration in formal ways, even if you lose that debate. The US carves out numerous formal ways to lodge your complaints. You can even convince enough people to support your views and get hand the winning side of a debate a legal loss by legislating their policy out of existence. You can't, however, appeal schizo policy in as remotely effective or fair a way.
Oh, and then there's the fact that this is just months into Trump II. We're still not fully seeing the impact these tariffs are going to have. Despite recent proclamations of those tariffs being dropped, they're still higher than they were before Trump took office. People are going to suffer under that policy when it was never necessary. And who knows what else Trump will come up with going forward?
Then there's the impact on politics as as a whole. An expression I hear from people on the right is that there's currently a stupid (Republican) party and evil (Democrat) party in the US. If there was any hope of doing better, then it lay in convincing the stupid party to do better so the evil one can be defeated. Trump was that chance, and he just turned the party stupider and squandered a great deal of political capital in the process. It's not impossible to come back from this, but I presume you'd rather be in the Nazi Germany strategic situation after D-Day then you would the strategic situation as the Soviets are encircling Berlin.
I think that American complaints over Trump are warranted but disproportionate, that's why I spent so much of that post comparing to foreign countries.
The Australian government works in a totally responsible, law-abiding, careful and considered way like you're calling for. But the results are a complete disaster and there's no obvious way to fix it. This is paywalled but it tells you the story in the http address.
https://www.afr.com/policy/economy/australia-s-fall-in-disposable-income-is-the-worst-in-the-world-20240822-p5k4ji
Productivity is in the doldrums. Energy prices are rising despite the government's promises, the only thing they successfully did is provide subsidies for power to make the price seem lower. All major cities are ludicrously unaffordable and more people are constantly imported to make it even more unaffordable. Industry is a shambles, we're constantly bailing out what little remains due to the terrible energy policy. To top it all off they've proposed unrealized capital gains tax on superannuation, there's nothing they won't stoop to.
And the Labour government that oversaw all of this just got their biggest majority ever for seeming to be less like Trump than Peter Dutton's Liberals... who weren't really like Trump in any significant sense and basically offer the same thing as Labour albeit slightly moderated. There's no way out of this mess.
There are way worse things that could happen to the US than tariffs or Trump, you could have a deepseated economic crisis at a structural level, not a mild stock market shock that's easily undone at the executive level.
The EU loves stable, boring governance. But just being stable and predictable doesn't work very well if you're stably and predictably doing the wrong thing all the time, that's why the US is rich and relevant while the EU is not.
Stability and effectiveness is of course good. Australia did a good job of blocking illegal immigration. Violent crime is still fairly low despite the best efforts of the drug legalizers and policing reformers. But the hierarchy should be:
Without Trump, there's a decent chance that the net closes and it becomes effectively impossible to contest the deep-seated institutions and lobbies that want to wreck the economy so they can maximize their control and security, turn the US into the EU, shut off any dissent as hate-speech... Before Trump, what legal victories were there where people convinced others to moderate the madness? Were there many such victories? Were they permanent wins or temporary compromises? The net is closing in the EU, they're moving slowly to ban the AFD and any alternative to managed democracy and permanent decline/replacement. Vote poorly in Romania and your election will simply be undone.
I dispute Trump being 2, I think he's more of a 4, and that does impact your argument. Trump is constrained by the rules around him, but he's actively trying to break them and test the limits of the law. Not to mention that even if you agree with his goals with DOGE, cutting down on wokeness, etc., he's squandering the political capital he was loaned for doing those by going about it in the way he does. Wanting less government waste isn't the same thing as having no government capacity. In fact, there's a good case to be made that the issue with the government is that it doesn't build capacity to do things more effectively on its own. Jennifer Palkha goes over examples of this in her book, Recoding America. I described one example here. Nor does it make sense to try and limit money spent on science, the NIH, etc. Or appointing RFK to the cabinet. Moreover, uncertainty has big impacts on the modern economy. We're not playing a 4x game where you just turn trade routes on or off. The US, for instance, spent years getting companies to move manufacturing to Vietnam, and now there's a tariff on...Vietnam. It's years of diplomatic and government effort being wasted.
It's true that outcomes matter. I certainly wouldn't want to live in a US where a hypothetical socialist president, with great stability and order, transitions us into degrowth socialism. But it's certainly not obvious to me where the line is to say that the outcome is more pressing than the process of obtaining it, and so I can't wholly accept the ordering of 2 vs. 3.
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