I'm an engineer and mathematician. I also view economics from the Hayek/Mises schools, and even then, economics appears to be weirder that quantum mechanics to me (and I grok quantum, probably the meds help with that).
I just don't understand why tit for tat tariffs are bad. OK, Ossetia caviar is more expensive imported, so I buy American. Easy. If country A has tariffs on our products, mirror them.
Yes, free trade would be wonderful, we'd all sing kumbaya and have lots of business. I don't see that happening, as every country tries to protect some products where they're not competitive. Besides tariffs, they use excuses like GMO, antibiotics, steroids, whatever they can find to stifle competition. Please note, almost all corn in the US is GMO. So we're already at a disadvantage. We use a lot of GMO products; people don't realize how much. We get farmed fish, shrimp, and oysters from China, Vietnam, Thailand, as well as America. And they use who knows what - but we don't shut them out like the EU does to us.
The short answer is that your fundamental argument and that of all protectionists neglect that the primary victim of tariffs is the consumer in the country that imposes them. We spend way too much time thinking about the narrow benefits to a small number of American produce producers and we forget the harm to millions of American consumers.
As someone once put it, just because our trading partner has a rocky shoreline doesn't mean we need to throw boulders in our harbor
The other way to think about it is this: I put a lot more value on benefiting the American consumer than on benefiting the American producer, although I would like to help both. I am not willing to sacrifice the former for the latter but most politicians are because the political visibility of a small number of steelworkers is much higher than the political visibility of a very large but widely dispersed group of steel users.
Ross,
I'm an engineer and mathematician. I also view economics from the Hayek/Mises schools, and even then, economics appears to be weirder that quantum mechanics to me (and I grok quantum, probably the meds help with that).
I just don't understand why tit for tat tariffs are bad. OK, Ossetia caviar is more expensive imported, so I buy American. Easy. If country A has tariffs on our products, mirror them.
Yes, free trade would be wonderful, we'd all sing kumbaya and have lots of business. I don't see that happening, as every country tries to protect some products where they're not competitive. Besides tariffs, they use excuses like GMO, antibiotics, steroids, whatever they can find to stifle competition. Please note, almost all corn in the US is GMO. So we're already at a disadvantage. We use a lot of GMO products; people don't realize how much. We get farmed fish, shrimp, and oysters from China, Vietnam, Thailand, as well as America. And they use who knows what - but we don't shut them out like the EU does to us.
The short answer is that your fundamental argument and that of all protectionists neglect that the primary victim of tariffs is the consumer in the country that imposes them. We spend way too much time thinking about the narrow benefits to a small number of American produce producers and we forget the harm to millions of American consumers.
As someone once put it, just because our trading partner has a rocky shoreline doesn't mean we need to throw boulders in our harbor
The other way to think about it is this: I put a lot more value on benefiting the American consumer than on benefiting the American producer, although I would like to help both. I am not willing to sacrifice the former for the latter but most politicians are because the political visibility of a small number of steelworkers is much higher than the political visibility of a very large but widely dispersed group of steel users.