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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

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Tariffs are fairly standard policy when it comes to import-substitution industrial development. If they're so bad, then why does the rest of the world have them? Are they stupid?

Because the rest of the world has a different context than America does, and tariffs in those contexts can work much more effectively. In the US, your manufacturing industrial base was shipped to China several decades ago - and that process took decades. In the meantime, all of the industries required to support that manufacturing base have also moved to China because that's where the manufacturing work is. As a result, even American manufacturing is getting hit by the tariffs because raw material costs are skyrocketing as a result and making American manufacturing LESS competitive. The US is so helplessly dependent upon Chinese manufacturing that the tariffs aren't even being applied to them - Trump has to extend the tariff pause over and over again because if it was seriously implemented the US economy would collapse overnight.

You can't reverse all of that overnight. You can't reverse all of that in the space of a single year. You can't even reverse that over a decade when the same forces and people responsible for profiting from the outsourcing of that industry are still in place... and they are. Outsourcing, offshoring - all of these things happened for a variety of reasons that are still here, and until you actually rework the economy to remove those incentives the tariffs will never work. Even then, could tariffs work to resolve the US' manufacturing issues? Yes, they could - but only as part of a larger plan to revitalise American manufacturing. You'd need lots of investment and government support in order to bring all these industries back, as well as large investments in training to build up the skilled workforce required... and that skilled workforce is also going to have to be compensated with the kind of good wages that will drive up the price of their output and make the made-in-China competitors even more attractive.

None of this has been done. Not only has none of this been done, the same corrupt politicians who were responsible for the problems which drove out manufacturing in the first place are still there (literally the same people in some cases) and actively working to make sure that this manufacturing resurgence does not take place because it would be bad for the interest groups and donors that keep them living the good life.