I try not to post about the Current Thing unless there is a good reason to do so. In this case, that reason is that this ties back into the broader theme underlying most of my posting (and much of the political discourse in general) since January 20 of this year: Is Blumpft #winning or not?
I started out cautiously optimistic, then quickly abandoned that optimism when I got a proper glimpse of the stupidity called DOGE. But DOGE, for all that I might say bad about it, is a blunder that is relatively contained in scope—if you aren’t in the federal bureaucracy or adjacent to it, it probably doesn’t affect you that much, and you can just shrug it off and/or make up copium about it. This blunder threatens to be different. There are a lot of things the average voter doesn’t care about, but if there’s one thing that he does care about, it’s a bad economy.
The tariff insanity is also on a different level from DOGE because there is at least a very twisted sort of logic by which you can try to defend DOGE, namely the logic of “hurt the bad people”—sure, the stuff that DOGE is doing might qualify for the trifecta of Stupid, Illegal, and Evil, but this is war, man. None of that shit matters so long as Libs Are Being Owned. Obviously I disagree with that for reasons that I’ve already written about at length, but it is some grasping attempt at a coherent narrative that people can try and cling onto. Once again, with the “Liberation Day” nonsense that we just witnessed, this is not the case.
What exactly is “Liberation Day” and why are so many people up in arms about it? I could go on here to describe the entire mess to you, because it does take a bit of doing to paint the full picture of its absurdity, but that would be redundant given how readily available the information already is. I’ll just link to this post which does a solid job of laying it out in case you don’t already know this story. The short version is that Trump has now thrown out tariffs on essentially the entire world in proportion to America’s trade deficit with each country, or if there isn’t a deficit, just slapped a 10% tariff on them for fun.
The idea here appears to be that any imports of any kind are de facto bad, and thus the tariffs will continue until morale improves, or rather, until the United States no longer has a trade deficit with that nation. The degree of stupidity on display here is staggering. First off, up until now, the idea has been “reciprocal tariffs,” and indeed even on “Liberation Day” Trump continued to brand this lunacy as “reciprocal tariffs.” Now when you hear “reciprocal tariff,” what do you think that means? If you are not Donald Trump but are instead a rational human being, you probably assume that means that whatever tariff rate another country is charging on our exports to them, we will impose on their imports to us.
Going by that very sensible and logical definition, these tariffs are NOT reciprocal. They are not imposed in proportion to the tariffs that each foreign nation imposes on US goods, but rather, imposed in proportion to how much each foreign nation exports to the US, period. It is in effect a punishment to the other nation for having the gall to sell us things. For example, Vietnam charges tariffs of 15% or less on most US imports, but Trump’s announced “reciprocal tariff” on Vietnam is 46%. And a lot of them are like that, Vietnam’s isn’t the worst by far. Again, what Trump is “reciprocating” here isn’t Vietnam’s actual tariff rate, it’s the rate at which they export more stuff to us than we do to them.
This is economic ignorance on the same level as leftoids who think price controls are ackchyually a good idea. I shouldn’t have to explain this to anyone, but if we’re going to start ignoring reality on the right as well, perhaps I have to—in Economics 101 you will learn about a little thing called comparative advantage. It is so simple that a five year old could understand it. All it means is that if one party can produce something more easily than the other, that party should produce that thing and trade it for other things that it can’t produce as easily. That’s literally all it is, and it is the main reason why trade deficits between countries exist. Because, y’know, some of them are better at producing certain things than others.
You have a trade deficit with all kinds of other actors all around you for this reason. You have a trade deficit with your local grocery store, your local hairdresser, your family doctor, the list goes on—anyone and anything that you pay more to than they pay you. The only entity that the average person has a trade surplus with is their employer, and then you trade that surplus to everything else around you that you need or want in life. This allows an extreme, inconceivable degree of specialization and ends up making us all unimaginably wealthy by comparison to where we were just 100 years ago, never mind going back farther than that.
As best as I can tell, the narrative behind this debacle is the idea that we are going to re-shore manufacturing and make everything in America again, and this is going to be great because I guess comparative advantage is bad for reasons no one has yet specified. People will have “good jobs” in factories again, like they did back in the 50s! This is like declaring that you are going to become completely self-sufficient—you will produce and provide all goods and services that you require completely on your own—and then declaring that you are now wealthier because you will be “self-employed” and will have no shortage of “work” tending to your subsistence farm so that you don’t starve instead of just going to the grocery store like everyone else.
It's all true in a certain sense, but… yeah.
This is a really dumb and roundabout way of arriving at welfare. If this is actually what you believe, what you are advocating for is to make everyone else poorer and worse off so that some people will have “good jobs” in factories. Even if we assume that all your premises are correct and that there will actually be some people who benefit from this arrangement, at the end of the day you’re just asking for a handout. You’re asking us to shrink the pie so that you can have more of it. If you’ve been paying attention, you will immediately recognize that this makes you an economic leftist. This is exactly the same way that socialists think, they’re just way more honest about their motivations and methods.
So if this is you, then yeah, become a Bernie Bro. Stop pretending this is about tariffs or trade or anything in that ballpark—let’s leave the trade alone and just have an honest conversation about whether or not you deserve gibs, and why. Seriously, I think you’d get farther that way, if we could just negotiate and arrive at a set amount of gibs to pay people off and then let markets do their thing, the markets could price that in pretty quickly. This is the basic “mixed economy” model that essentially all developed nations follow and it doesn’t make any sense what so ever to abandon it in favor of some delusional quest to defeat the concept of comparative advantage.
The other angle that people are likely to take here is the “4D chess” angle, which is beyond played out at this point. These people will point out that nations are immediately trying to negotiate these tariffs with Trump and act like that means Trump is “winning,” because he will presumably pry some sort of concessions out of some of them. This would be like declaring war on Vietnam and then framing it as “4D chess” when Vietnam immediately wants to negotiate a ceasefire. Yeah, no shit they want to negotiate! If you go up to someone and start hitting them for no reason, they’re gonna want to find some way to make you stop. That doesn’t make it a smart thing to do!
One way that you know this isn’t 4D chess is that the messaging around it is self-contradictory. One minute the narrative is that we’re going to use these “reciprocal” tariffs to negotiate tariffs down to zero—so we’re doing this to actually increase free trade in that case—the next, we’re hearing about how other countries have taken advantage of us by selling us so much cheap stuff and we have to bring all our factories back to the US. These are mutually exclusive goals. The result is confusion and mass uncertainty, which is why the stock market dumped. If people actually thought this was a big-brain play to reduce trade barriers to zero, that wouldn’t have happened. Instead, there’s a selloff because no one can tell what the hell is actually going on.
This can’t be fully solved even if Trump were to come out and admit tomorrow that it was all a big boo-boo and he’s gonna undo the whole thing. That would probably be the best thing for him to do, but at this point the signal has already been sent that he is willing to do crazy retarded shit and then pull it all back on a dime. It also gives people cause to question not only his competence but his connection to basic reality. I do think that this will be mostly clawed back because to actually stick to it as the policy going forward would just be too insane and suicidal.
I don’t think that makes it 8D underwater backgammon though. No, it’ll be Trump doing something retarded, realizing it’s retarded due to the reaction, and then doing the whole “ha, got you, I was only pretending to be retarded!” schtick after the fact. Not good! Not for Trump, not for the US, not for anyone else. The only people that it’s good for are the Democrats and maybe China (because the US committing suicide would drive the rest of the world into their arms). Anyone that carries water for this is making the same mistake as Democrats who spent the last four years pretending that Joe Biden wasn’t senile. I can’t think of a clearer sanity test to determine who is an actual blind Trump cultist or not.
At some point, people need to decide whether they are loyal to right-wing political goals or loyal to Donald Trump personally. The more that stuff like this happens, the more that those things will be in tension, and at this rate we will quickly arrive at the point where they’re incompatible.
“One minute the narrative is that we’re going to use these “reciprocal” tariffs to negotiate tariffs down to zero—so we’re doing this to actually increase free trade in that case—the next, we’re hearing about how other countries have taken advantage of us by selling us so much cheap stuff and we have to bring all our factories back to the US. These are mutually exclusive goals.”
If you listen to how the admin defends this (from the treasury and commerce secretaries), this isn’t entirely contradictory. They believe that the persistent trade imbalance has less to do with U.S. over-reliance on imports and more to do with foreign export barriers that are levied on U.S. goods (though they cite both obviously). Lutnick spent by far the most of his TV time on Thursday complaining that foreign nations don’t buy enough of our beef, rice, and automobiles because of tariff and non-tariff barriers they erect on trade. So there is a world where this holds together - lower tariffs overall, trade imbalances that are closer to neutral, overall a more vibrant U.S. export economy and manufacturing base, but continued gains from specialization and worldwide trade.
The question of their execution and competence is a whole other matter. It looks grim.
It feels like he is trying to enrich his social circle. At this point, I’m not even sure he has the Republican Party in mind. He will pull this tariff back and act like it never happened.