Wednesday, May 15, 2019

VIDEO The Ugly Truth About Tariffs

What really occurs to the US economy when tariffs are placed on products entering a country?

Do foreign manufacturers pay the tariffs as President Trump claims or do US consumers?

It's complicated and I discuss below.



-RW

2 comments:

  1. The orange Kool-aid drinking Trump-supporters are indefatigable in their cult-like support of Trump tariffs. I get in arguments and debates just about every day, and there is no budging them. I post and share every day---articles, quotes, graphs, charts, my own explanations---and am met with the same, vapid rejoinders: "This time it's different! Trump has a 'Master Plan'---he's aiming for a world totally free of all tariffs---and so if he has to get tough now and induce a little pain on Americans temporarily, so that China and other cheaters feel much more pain and ultimately drop their tariffs...well, it's worth it!"
    I feel like they all received the same talking-points script. Nothing I throw at them works---not Rothbard, Chodorov, Hazlitt, Bastiat, Nock, Sowell, Walter Williams, Friedman, Henry George, etc. They don't CARE to consider the American farmers and businesses harmed, the tens of billions in dollars lost, the Americans out of work---they don't consider those things, because as Hazlitt and Bastiat observed, people don't consider "that which is unseen," and don't consider the long-term effects, nor those not directly involved with government policies. They simply DO NOT CARE that America, and Americans, are being hurt, because somehow, the end justifies the means, no matter how immoral.

    I tell them "I'm going to start beating my wife, in an effort to end all wife-beating everywhere; That'll teach all those brutes out there to treat their wives with dignity!

    Seriously, I give-up. Smoot-Hawley redux is here, and history will repeat itself.

    Thanks for allowing me to rant.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I like Henry George's characterization:

    "Protective tariffs are as much applications of force as are blockading squadrons, and their object is the same—to prevent trade. The difference between the two is that blockading squadrons are a means whereby nations seek to prevent their enemies from trading; protective tariffs are a means whereby nations attempt to prevent their own people from trading. What protection teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war."

    ReplyDelete