Oddbean new post about login | logout I have heard many people repeating the line "government had more money than it knew what to do with" as if that is a great thing. It isn't. Government should have just enough money given voluntarily by the governed. You won't remain free for very long if your government has the right to take or make money. That especially includes tariffs, as it essentially dictates what Americans can/can't buy from outside of their borders. It's a blank check for central planners to pick and choose economic winners. All government funding should be voluntarily without use of force. Tariffs are force.
Tariffs are a short term lever for rebalancing the ability of your nation’s manufacturing sectors and skilled labor to produce both peacetime and wartime goods. We shortsightedly exported the jobs that kept our population’s skills polished. We need to rebalance that or we will eventually have to face that we exported our nations ability to defend itself against foreign forces, both physical and financial through monetary trade and mass production of supplies. It’s not a tax on its own citizens. It is meant to relocalize long term sources of prosperity, like localized mass production, community and regional self reliance, diverse skill set development across our population, etc.
You say 'we' and 'our' like individual property rights don't exist. That isn't consistent with American ideals. Companies should be free to come and go without government using any 'lever' to try and control economics. All they really need to do is fuck off and companies probably wouldn't want to leave. Using force always breaks something in an economy, even if you have the perception of fixing something else. Laissez-faire is the only rational policy and it's also the only policy consistent with freedom. Americans and companies can fix everything on their own by having government just fuck off entirely. Do nothing except remove all the somethings that broke everything.
Makes sense. I’m over here munching popcorn while watching the political happenings right now as I’m reading about how civilizations have tried throughout the ages to offer both freedom and longevity. I don’t have an answer for us, obviously. Stepping way back is what affords the perspective I put forward. I prefer a free market. I’m guessing that if something good comes from what’s happening, I think it falls in line with what I laid out. The cost of someone grabbing the steering wheel at the top of a nation of free people, is that it sucks when it messes with their individual freedoms and goals.
If the government had more money than it knew what to do with, we wouldn't be running Trillion dollar deficits. Our current monetary foundation is based on debt, because we can always go more into debt tomorrow to pay the debts of today. Until we can't. Bitcoin changes that entire foundation and flips it over. The more debt you have, the weaker you are. Thomas Paine didn't have as good of an understanding of economics as Alexander Hamilton did, but he did understand politics. The people institute governments in order to manage infrastructure that is beyond the ability of individuals or companies. Governments may have been corrupted over the last 250 years, but that doesn't negate the need for governance systems that function well. Tariffs don't dictate whether a good or service is available, the intention is to increase the costs of imported goods and services to give domestic labor a chance to compete fairly. They've always been part of a healthy multi-national economic landscape, they've just dropped off the radar of policy makers for so long thanks to the insanity of the WTO that nobody knows how to even talk about them with intelligence, let alone implement something that would actually accomplish what needs to be done. Tariffs are so far away from the ideals of central planning it's almost funny to see them used in the same paragraph. If we have concerns about a New World Order at the level of the WTO and UN, IMF, and ABC XYZ, then tariffs are the way out of that pit of vipers, not a reason to jump into one. And this is from someone who considers himself to be a hard left progressive. Take it with a grain of salt.
Maybe not, but we would still have all the problems with government that we have. Funding is the only way government can grow and intrude more in our lives. Whether that take it or make it doesn't matter in the grand scheme. The fundamental issues remain the same. We should neither spend on debt nor spend on money obtained through force. They're both the same thing: theft.