Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Wed Mar 12, 2025 1:09 pm
Alexiev wrote: ↑Wed Mar 12, 2025 2:41 am
Trump may or may not bring peace to the Ukraine. But it does seem he'll drive us into recession with his idiotic tariffs. I though the Republicans supported free trade.
Here, dear Alexiev, I think you reveal some misunderstanding and misperception. Like it or not Donald Trump, if understood through the Steve Bannon lens, is not a Republican but a populist. Trump “did a number” on the Republican Party and — insofar as they are “establishment” — they loath and resent him.
The concept behind Trump’s tariffs is (according to the argument which I am personally not qualified to assess) to bring businesses and industry back to the United States. It stands to reason and to intuition that this would necessitate the implementation of a radical policy that could not be else but painful (?) at the start.
I have watched some “experts” who have made the case that a policy of tariffs could, perhaps ultimately, create larger benefits in the long run than the short-term pain which will (?) certainly manifest.
The Republicans, if my researches into Reaganomics are correct (reduced taxes, and a free-market policy championed, for example, by the Wall Street Journal during that decade) is precisely what dismantled America’s industrial base and “shipped it to China”. The damage this class of “globalists” did was enormous.
From this perspective Reagan, though popular, and presented as a “gold standard” of the American presidency, did a great deal of harm to the American social body.
I have no way (that I can trust) to assess Trump’s radically bold policy moves in these
specific areas. Will his policies, and this supposed populism be coopted by extraordinarily powerful interests? That seems
likely given the history.
You have made a very large number of errors there, far too many to cover here, but we should make a start. Frist the good bit: I agree that Trump is not a conservative, and neither are any of his prominent advisers this go round, they comprise a collective of neo-trads and other radicals who just use old school conservatism as an occasional source of inspiration. There don't seem to be any actual conservatives left though and that trend started long before Trump and was previously embodied by Sarah Palin and the Tea Party.
The concept behind Trump's tariffs is clearly protectionist, but it goes further than that, his explanation of the reasoning constantly refers back to the notion that other nations who have a positive trade balance with the USA are ripping America off. This is an aggravating factor, it marks Trump out as a 21st Century Mercantilist.
Mercantilism is one of those common sense sort of views that only the totally uneducated can possibly believe. Pursuing it in this day and age can only bring great harm.
Reagan did not create the decline in dirty manufacturing in America. To stay in the game in any area of economic activity requires investment, and to have investment requires returns on investment. America stopped investing in a lot of industrial activity in the years following the post war boom. The
Stagflation years. You should learn to love that word btw, it's on a comeback tour thanks to Trump.
During the Stagflation period, and the decade prior, manufacturing growth in two the most bombed out economies of the second world war had completely overtaken that of the USA, France and Britain leading to underperformance on the British and American car and steel industries among others. Both countries attempted to protect their incumbent manufacturers with tariffs and non-tariff barriers such as quota systems, bailouts and so on. This response simply caused new problems, it did not bring about a situation where investment in a new car factory would boost productivity, gain market share and generate profits. Instead they maintained a shaky status-quo until it became unsustainable. Similar investments did generate such returns for German and Japanese (and Italian and South Korean) manufacturers.
That is why the USA ended up with Reagan and the UK with Thatcher. Nobody wanted Thatcher, her own party least of all, they just ran out of other ideas. It is worth noting however that other European nations in the 80s had the same underlying issues as their own manufacturing industries slowed down with lack of investment. They didn't go for Reaganite/Thatcherite low taxes zero social investment route, but they did all fix the main problem by ending the excessive subsidy and trade restrictions of the 60s/70s (they had to, they were in the EEC).
The subsequent move of manufacturing industry to China began much later when China joined the WTO. But the China stuff is just jingoism so we don't need to bother with that.
If you want to know how protectionism works out in the longer term, you can look into the
Jones Act. Promulgated over a century ago, it enforces the protectionist rule that only American ships can carry cargoes between one American port and another. This means that American seaborn logistics companies do not need to invest rapidly in fleet that carries cargo to such places as Hawaii and Puerto Rico, making all sorts of every products ruinously expensive outside the contiguous states.
