Readit NewsIt doesn't have to be a high stakes situation, sometimes small annoyances can add up
I agree that he should have lost at the voting booth, but the law is pretty clear on this subject.
The reason this looks sketchy in the first place is that it happened after they saw the election results, and one gets the feeling that if another candidate won they would not have annulled it.
Losing your industrial base and giving it away to a geopolitical competitor is almost certainly an error in the long run.
Large industrial bases also are correlated with healthier middle class societies, according to Vaclav Smil, and in my experience, he’s exactly right.
So losing the industrial base is fine for you, a service sector worker, but it’s bad for the country and it’s bad for society, if you want it to have a healthy middle class.
The ones who are most hurt by tariffs, most affected by higher prices, are the working class. Sure, the workers of the specific industries that are lucky enough to be protected, the ones with the most persuasive lobbies, will certainly benefit. But every other worker will be a little worse off.
If you are concerned about the people who got hurt by globalization, maybe the government should collect money from people like us and spend it on people like them. They can set up the tax in such a way that rich people pay the most.
But if you use tariffs to help the people who got hurt by globalization, you cannot set it up in such a careful way. It's a blunt instrument that hurts productivity across the board and increases the prices to the end consumer. It becomes an implicit tax that poor people pay the most. An actual explicit tax would hurt much less.
Successful Asian powers studied history, not Milton Friedman. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_school_of_economics
I'm a consumerist at heart. As long as consumers get to consume, it does not matter to me whose industry is doing the producing.
I get that your foreign suppliers can turn on you and raise prices. I think the money you make during peacetime by not putting tariffs will let you buy more weapons and bribe more allies so that the foreign suppliers don't try anything too awful with the supply chains. Stockpiles can buy a lot of time to restart industry in an emergency or at least find a different foreign supplier.
Take a look at Russia, they are sanctioned by half the planet and they still keep going on a reduced industry because they had huge stockpiles of tanks, artillery and so on. Imagine something like that but with a military that doesn't suck. Nobody would even dare try a sanction.
From a national security standpoint this can be deadly in a hot conflict.
From an industrial strategy standpoint, it’s the same as any other monopolist practice - they will erode your base, take over your market, then raise prices to fleece your population’s wealth while increasing their own.
Industrial bases are economic strongholds that shouldn’t be lost, particularly not to great power competitors.
What about a cold conflict? How much do the tariffs and protectionist policies cost in the middle to long run?
For example, the Jones Act costs billions per year and has been going on for a lot of years. How many additional aircraft carriers and submarines and so on could the US have bought with that money?
They neutralize the subsidy's effect on pricing and prevent the subsidizer from taking over your market, at least.
> It has been my understanding that tariffs typically end up being tit-for-tat and relatively zero-sum.
The subsidy is already a tit, the tariff is tat. Zero-sum is at least better than just taking the blow and having a negative-sum outcome for yourself.
Why is someone else subsidizing the price of a thing you buy bad?
The subsidy is doing you a favor by reducing your input costs, or freeing up your work and capital to produce something else.
That would be amazing.
This sounds like I'm being pedantic because no one would never be in favor of suffering for no benefit, I'm arguing against a strawman.
But in the context of babies suffering, it might surprise you to learn that doctors used to give zero thought to their suffering at all, believing that they don't become conscious until they grow a little. Apparently when they screamed in pain it was like a mechanical autonomous response to a stimulus, not real human pain.
They weren't just being sadists. Applying anesthesia is always risky and if you can get away with not doing it then it's sometimes worth engaging in a bit of rationalization to ease the conscience.
Normally this honesty would cost them money because their competitors would have better (more persuasive) marketing, but a law could force every company to be honest at the same time so that the relative ranking of each company does not change.
>Original Text: Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city.
>Facilitator: >O.K.
>Subject: >There’s just fog everywhere.
What deep insight is there to say about this sentence and this sentence alone? Reading the paper it seems like they want you to comment on how the fog is not just literal fog but a metaphor for the dirt and confusion in the city, but reading it sentence to sentence like this, what much is there to say about it?
The speaker is probably standing near city limits. There is some sort of dock or shipyard down the river, there is some green nature stuff up the river. The river might come up later as a reference for other locations.