tariffs are taxes on imports, and distort the market incentives away from them. what trump did was flip the script on many trading partners who were taxing US exports heavily while US was not taxing them back.
the result has been that the viability of many one-sided relations between other countries and USA has changed, where it used to be profitable to only sell to americans, and not buy their stuff, it is now becoming more balanced.
taxation on commerce distorts the incentives and breaks the efficiencies created by supply and demand movements in different places. like, if crops failed in USA, then the price of other countries whose crops didn't fail should increase, but because of the tariffs, this equalization of supply that should reduce price fluctuations by a to-and-fro between places that have increased supply, where the other has decreased, doesn't happen.
the great majority of famines of most of recorded history were caused by this kind of interference in price discovery in the market. the oldest one is even in the book of Genesis, and Joseph was the instigator of this price manipulation and the result was very bad for egyptians. the reason why it happened was it made the pharoah even richer.
so long as people are not able to respond appropriately to changes in costs of production to find markets where their profit margin is highest there will always be problems, and i have small hopes that trump asserting a balance by countering the tariffs on US exports and the result, which will be many countries who were riding high on that (china is the worst offender) will be forced to stop doing this retarded shit.
but, hope springs eternal, and the reality is a desert of the real. so long as people are easily distracted into voting for these interventions on their own hobby horses and don't consider the second or third order effects of them, we are going to see a steady descent into madness. i was just reading today about this carbon trading bullshit in EU that will affect germany the worst. the effect of their green bullshit will be that people's transport costs will rise dramatically. all the NGOs and social support associations are crying for subsidies, which can't be funded without borrowing money, and the ongoing failure of the EU is pretty much sealed with this shit.
personally, i just want to get the fuck away from all of it and lower my dependence on external resources and control as much of my own costs by producing them myself and trading on the local grey market as possible.
the people aren't going to realise there is a problem until it's apocalyptic, because they are so short sighted, their minds have been warped by state education that teaches them to think the state is always right. it's never right. the market is always right, but the market can't act when the state is rugging everything.
