Re: Nice
Consider what would happen in a world without any trade barriers.
People would buy what was cheapest (for given specification and quality) regardless of source. China combines a very low cost base with some very good infrastructure, and skills in toolmaking and production engineering that the west long since waved goodbye to. The only things that people would buy from Western economies would be heavily differentiated goods, or things where there's skills that the lower cost economies don't (yet) have. So French wines have a future export market, the top end of European luxury/heritage/brand goods, certain advanced tech (big aero engines, wide body jets) although other countries continue to pursue their development. Are there any US made cars that the rest of the world would buy, given that US build quality is mediocre, and the labour costs high? Low and mid-range European and Japanese car makers would be trounced by Chinese marques, simply because all of their costs are higher - labour, employment taxes, land, capital, energy, transport etc. It's interesting how US software businesses have progressively become US-listed Indian software businesses. That buys them a bit of time, but that's all. Wall Street is still too greedy, pricing models are increasingly exploitative, data sovereignty an increasing concern so sooner or later the US hegemony in software will fall in the same way that US industrial hegemony failed.
Tariffs are a very good way of protecting your domestic economy if you're prepared to accept that they are still a cost a country imposes on itself. But to work as intended they need to be low, subtly implemented for specific trades, with a clear understanding of what impact they will have; and usually carefully negotiated so that there's some things a country concedes with its trading partners. Tariffs are not a weapon, despite the cretinous beliefs of Trump that they are.
