cross-posted from: https://lemmit.online/post/5566633
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The original was posted on /r/todayilearned by /u/MechCADdie on 2025-04-04 08:19:11+00:00.
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something something people who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it
Great depression, and 2/3rds drop in global trade resulted.
I present also 1828 dementia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariff_of_Abominations which started southern secessionist movements.
Unjustifiable trade attacks like all wars are bad for unity. If California or Texas has to pay $10k more per car so metal and auto workers elsewhere get high pay, national unity fractures. Everything being super expensive with no jobs because of global trade retaliations, means that Mexicans stop being a unifying problem, and those white Michigan and Pennsylvania blue collar workers cheering for Trump are the problem. Better cars elsewhere in the world become a bigger national unity factor the more protection $ is spent on inferior cars.
… Ford begins furiously colaborating with Lada.
Well they had elections afterwards. Trump’s nazis will just throw dissenters into KZs and invade their neighbours.
There will be no free elections anymore
Tarrifs are billionaire cash grabs, nothing more. Nobody likes those. Except billionaires of course.
Yeah, look past the self-righteous grandstanding to see it for the big wealth transfer that it is.
Even the billionaires are going to lose money. It’s just unjustifiably stupid.
They have enough money to coast along to buy and hoard failing companies and collect them for whenever the economy rebounds.
Billionaires have so much money, they could spend a few thousand a day and it wouldn’t hurt their bank account for decades.
They could spend $100,000 a day for 50 years an not have spent through 2 Billion. Elon and musk both command 200 Billion ish. the interest alone is worth that 8 billion a year if it was in treasuries.
Every year the interest on Musks fortune could generate enough money to spend $2,100,000 a day without even losing a dollar of principle. on the theoretical interest of his fortune.
I lost 10% of my retirement today. Thats not even a fraction of any of these numbers 😂😭
The old oil money declared war on the neuvo riche tech bros.
Its an attrition war.
The majority are peeons (sic) in this new feudal trickle down economic game.
Let them lose enough to put them on the street with the rest of us. Hopefully it can humble them enough to understand that wealth should not be hoarded but shared for the greater good of society
Every once-in-a-lifetime economic disaster I’ve personally witnessed has taught me that any economic loss for billionaires is only temporary.
Some, but it does work nicely as a regressive tax to offset their tax cuts. It’s really hard to see who’s winning in the race to destroy the global economy, someone has to right?
We got a Progressive Era out of it, maybe we’ll get another one?
Edit: To clarify, I’m talking about the New Deal and New Deal v2 Progressive Eras (and the era of Progressive Democratic supermajorities that dominated congress)
We got a Progressive Era out of it
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Jim Crow
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Japanese Internment
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Religious revivalism
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The Wars on Crime / Drugs / Terror / Immigration, leading to the highest incarceration rate in the world
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Two major Red Scares and a collapse in union membership
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Intercontinent Ballistic Missiles with nuclear warheads
Some progress.
You really picked random negatives from a bunch of different decades?
Jim Crow
Already existed before that era and ended during it. Military was desegregated under Truman and the Civil Rights Act was passed under Johnson.
Religious revivalism
The Wars on Crime / Drugs / Terror / Immigration, leading to the highest incarceration rate in the world
These things only really happened in the 80’s, marking the end of the New Deal/Keynesian era.
Japanese Internment
Two major Red Scares and a collapse in union membership
Legitimate criticisms.
Japanese Internment Two major Red Scares and a collapse in union membershipLegitimate criticisms
No they’re not. Those two things were caused by far greater international factors. Like, you know, the 2nd World War.
In the 1970s, under mounting pressure from the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) and redress organizations, President Jimmy Carter appointed the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) to investigate whether the internment had been justified. In 1983, the commission’s report, Personal Justice Denied, found little evidence of Japanese disloyalty and concluded that internment had been the product of racism. It recommended that the government pay reparations to the detainees. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which officially apologized and authorized a payment of $20,000 (equivalent to $53,000 in 2024) to each former detainee who was still alive when the act was passed. The legislation admitted that the government’s actions were based on “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”
You’re literally to the right of Ronald Reagan on this.
As for the Red Scare, I appreciate the honesty of a .world mod siding with Joseph McCarthy explicitly instead of just following his example in practice while pretending to be leftist.
My apologies, I guess I wasn’t clear enough. My point was that it’s unfair to blame those things as results of progressive policies.
But hey, thanks for the gross mischaracterization of my perspective.
The comment you’re responding to really doesn’t seem to be condoning those things; the thing being argued here is whether there was a push in a progressive direction, you said these events are evidence against that, which they countered with the idea that war has a regressive influence, something your quote is supporting.
really doesn’t seem to be condoning those things
Exactly: total failure of reading comprehension. Acts like bro saying that bad thing doesn’t support a conclusion means bro now endorses bad thing. Wut?
The comment you’re responding to really doesn’t seem to be condoning those things
Then criticizing those things would be legitimate. To disagree that there’s legitimate criticism regarding those issues is to condone them.
the thing being argued here is whether there was a push in a progressive direction, you said these events are evidence against that, which they countered with the idea that war has a regressive influence, something your quote is supporting.
The fact that there were other factors pushing relatively progressive figures to do fucked up stuff doesn’t mean that the stuff they did wasn’t fucked up or that they shouldn’t be criticized for it. The New Deal/Great Society era was a progressive era but it was also very imperfect and it’s valid to critique the ways in which it failed certain groups of people.
I’d also point out that it cuts both ways, in addition to the factors pushing them towards regressive policies, their progressivism was also somewhat attributable to external factors. Even FDR wasn’t really so much of a believer in “big government,” in fact there were times when he tried to roll back aspects of the New Deal during the Depression. He was just someone who was responsive to the conditions of the time and willing to deviate from economic orthodoxy in order to respond to crises. Had FDR been president during different conditions, he might have been an unremarkable president, or perhaps he might have pushed for progressive policies but been stopped by institutional forces. The threat posed by communism may have also contributed to such reforms being implemented and permitted, out of a sense of self preservation.
I’m down to look at history through that lens, but if we’re gonna do that we have to do it consistently, not just with regards to people we like doing bad things.
Then criticizing those things would be legitimate. To disagree that there’s legitimate criticism regarding those issues is to condone them.
If what you meant by “legitimate criticisms” was to say that criticism of these policies themselves is legitimate, that’s an extremely confusing way to say it given the context (both previous comments and the first part of your own comment), it very much sounds like you were saying something entirely different. I don’t think it’s fair to assume that someone objecting to your statement is objecting to that meaning of it.
I mean yeah. That’s the cyclic nature of politics, we learn a lesson and get a bit better, forget that lesson, get away worse, only to overcorrect and end up better than the first. We move pretty consistently leftward politically globally but only as a reaction to incredible periodic swings to the right.
We move pretty consistently leftward politically globally but only as a reaction to incredible periodic swings to the right.
This is simply not true. We advance technologically and we often mistake the mass media that comes out of these advances as social progress. But what we have historically endured over the last two centuries has been liberal rhetoric whitewashing much more reactionary and authoritarian policy than what our ancestors endured.
The long march has not been towards progress, but towards progressive pastiche.
There is no legitimate argument that we haven’t moved leftward over the last thousand or so years.
So progress that only seems like progress but progress is progress boss. I’m not sure what exactly you’re arguing but so far it seems… Outlandish and removed from reality.
There is no legitimate argument that we haven’t moved leftward over the last thousand or so years.
The colonial era of the 1400s to 1900s resulted in an industrial scale enclosing, enslaving, and extermination of entire ethnic cohorts. This was not a leftist move by any definition. It was 500 years of settler colonialism which resulted in some of the most abysmal living conditions in recorded history.
We have not yet recovered from this massive global reconfiguration of human society. While we enjoy more advanced tools and industrial scale infrastructure, we remain both socially and physically less independent of our authoritarian oligarchs than we were prior to the European Imperialist Era.
So progress that only seems like progress but progress is progress boss.
We have a modern economic system that produces more homes than people, while guaranteeing a certain population will remain homeless their entire lives. We have a system that produces enormous surpluses of food, but guarantees a segment of the population will remain malnurished. We have a system that produces vast excesses of professional expertise, but guarantees only a fraction of the population can access professional services.
All of our shortages are manufactured. Trump’s latest tariff wave is the most blindingly obvious example of how these shortages are imposed - not even via some convoluted market mechanism, but through the whims of an authoritarian madman.
This is not progress in a social sense. It is a huge regression from our historical roots. We are prisoners of the state and of the economy, subject to arrest, torture, and execution at the whim of the local leadership. And the only reason you and I are not personally under a boot right now is because we haven’t been targeted yet.
we remain both socially and physically less independent of our authoritarian oligarchs than we were prior to the European Imperialist Era.
Horseshit opinion.
You described literal progress only to say it’s the illusion of progress. You aren’t even making logical sense.
You described literal progress only to say it’s the illusion of progress.
I’m describing the systematic roll-back of free travel, free trade, and freedom of individuals to co-mingle absent legal barriers.
We need paperwork to cross borders. We need documentation to legally accept offers for work. We need licenses from the state to formalize marriage. We can be arrested, detained indefinitely, and subject to physical and psychological abuse without so much as an official reason by state officials. We can be conscripted into war, extorted for our wages, and deprived of our homes and personal effects at the whims of state officials.
And to top it all off, we have an entire industrial education establishment that compels us to repeated the dogged lies that this is progress. We have state-sponsored celebrations intended to lionize our enslavers. We have parades of security service workers through the center of our townships, paid for with wealth looted from our own pockets, to drive home how occupied we all are.
How the fuck is that progress?
Tell me, do you think a Black person is safer living 100 years ago in the USA, than today’s USA?
Don’t get me wrong, innocent black people are still being murdered, but it’s nowhere as common as before. It was at least 100x worse 100 years ago.
Tell me, do you think a Black person is safer living 100 years ago in the USA, than today’s USA?
Thanks to modern technological innovations, sure. Clean air/water, safer public transit, vaccines, etc go a long way towards improving quality of life for everyone, including the bottom of the social hierarchy. But has a black person in 2025 enjoyed the same degree of prosperity as a white peer over the intervening years? Absolutely not, and for the same reasons. They’re more predisposed to experience tainted air/water, they are comparatively less safe traveling, they have diminished access to modern medicine like vaccines and prenatal care, etc, etc.
And this is a deliberate function of public policy. The sky-high arrest rate of African Americans (particularly while traveling) is the result of a Nixon Era campaign to over-police black and brown neighborhoods that every subsequent executive and governor seems to have endorsed. The higher rates of cancer, the higher rates of obesity and malnutrition, the higher rates of disease transmission and mortality from preventable illness or injury all stem from eugenics policies pioneered in the OG Progressive Era. Even some of the pseudoscientific theories around mental, physical, and social aptitudes have endured.
it’s no where was common as before
The arrest rates of black men peaked in the 90s, during the height of the Reagan War on Crime. They’ve fallen off somewhat in comparison to arrests and harassment of hispanics and east asians, but are nowhere close to comparable to white peers. This is downwind of the reactionary media hijacking progressive language and ideology and weaponizing it against a population that its leadership believes is subhuman.
What we have in the modern era is rationalization of reactionary policy in progressive terms. The propaganda we experience is caped in progressive language. But the goals are the exact opposite.
For what it is worth, Jim Crow predated and outlasted the Progressive Era in the US. I wouldn’t so much apply causation there.
But it also ended in the 20s. It mainly achieved Women’s suffrage in the US.
But it also ended in the 20s.
Okay, so you’re talking about the 1890s-1920s “Progressive” Era of Prohibition and Sufferage.
Not the 1930s-70s New Deal / Great Society period of progressivism that was great for middle class white people and maybe a little less great for African Americans, East Asians, and American Natives who had to claw their way into a post-industrial standard of living against all the best efforts of the settlers.
Again, I might suggest you look back at the history of the T.Roosevelt to Wilson administration and reconsider whether this is the benchmark for progress you’ve been sold on.
Okay, so you’re talking about the 1890s-1920s “Progressive” Era of Prohibition and Sufferage.
Yeah, as that’s what that time period is called: “Progressive Era”.
Not the 1930s-70s New Deal / Great Society period of progressivism
No, I am not referring to the period following Prohibition Era and the Great Depression which was an intermediate (1920s-1930s) before New Deal.
If you’re taking issue with the ‘Progressive Era’ being called ‘Progressive’ then sure. I get you then. It mostly just achived women’s suffrage as a meaningful milestone, as I said.
Yeah, as that’s what that time period is called: “Progressive Era”.
The top level comment is referring to the New Deal/Great Society period, which followed the depression and the tariffs that the post itself is referencing. There’s some confusion because “Progressive Era” was capitalized in that top level comment, but that’s not what they were actually referencing.
Jim Crow
Before that was slavery. The Civil Rights act was the result of the Progressive Era.
The Wars on Crime / Drugs / Terror
War on Drug and War on Terror happened at the-end-of/after the New Deal Progressive Era
Two major Red Scares and a collapse in union membership
Xenophobia is nothing new. Again, the Red Scares were the backlash of Progressive policies, and marked the end of the Progressive Eras.
The oligarchs in power want to make you feel powerless, they want to make you accept defeat, but don’t surrender, you have more power than you think.
Progressiveism and Regressiveism is always in a tug-of-war, there will be constant progress and constant reactionary policies, but the general trend (across the world) is towards progress. Monarchies have fallen, eventually Oligarchies will fall. (Hopefully towards a stateless egalitarian future)
Before that was slavery.
Before Jim Crow was Reconstruction, which was the real Progressive Era for African Americans. The Freedman’s Bureau, elections overseen by the Union Army where black citizens were guaranteed a vote, mass migration out of southern plantations and into the industrialized north, and real (abet fleeting) economic progress for the millions of newly liberated peoples.
War on Drug and War on Terror happened at the-end-of/after the New Deal Progressive Era
The Federal War on Drugs began with the Smoking Opium Exclusion Act of 1909, squarely in the thick of the Roosevelt/Wilsonian Prohibitionist period. You could argue that prohibition wars were going on decades earlier, at the state level. Similarly, the War on Terror was an outgrowth of the War on Crime, which has its roots back to the post-Reconstruction South and the prison exclusion of the 13th Amendment.
Progressiveism and Regressiveism is always in a tug-of-war
The liberal/conservative tug-of-war over popular support for government is a tug-of-war. But the underlying policies have a strong through-line going back over a century. Policing, surveillance, and the administrative state bloat with each new administration, following different rhetorical lines but always moving towards the same effective end.
Monarchies have fallen, eventually Oligarchies will fall.
Monarchies rose and fell for thousands of years prior. They did not end, they only changed their form. Regional and sectoral dictatorships are alive and well in the modern era, from explicit Kingdoms in the Middle East to vertically integrated monopolies governed by tyrannical CEOs in the West.
The only exceptions are where popular movements have successfully revolutionized the government, democratized capital, and hedged out foreign financial parasites.
The United States is not one such place.
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Just throwing this out there.
If you expect conservatives to learn anything from this experience, I can promise you on my life that they won’t. They will not deviate from voting R under any circumstance in existence.
Best we can hope for is independents getting a clue and helping swing the next election, if there is one, back to the grownup party.
Not holding my breath though. This is a very, very stupid generation of Americans.
Conservatives hate learning, especially from mistakes. Learning makes you go “Why do we do this tradition? This is stupid.”
If a conservative learns something, its a failure of the conservative ideology. Keeping them dumb makes them unquestioning obedient workers and soldiers. You don’t have a soldier disobey commands to harm someone, you don’t have a worker disobey their boss.
Conservatism is explicitly against learning.
The thing about Smoot-Hawley is that when it happened everyone else also put up equal tariffs among one another.
this time the EU, Japan, South Korea, Canada are only putting tariffs on the US. Not amongst themselves.
Every day of my life is an economic crisis.
Right now we’re struggling to be able to pay for groceries tomorrow, after paying rent to a place that hates my family.
If the stock market crashes, what’s the real difference between my shit life with my family, and the shit life with my family if the stock market goes down? I’ll have 0.0001% less chance to become a billionaire?
Is this implying if you with paycheck to paycheck it doesn’t affect you? People playing with the stock market can afford to lose. This isn’t going to hurt them nearly as much as those who can’t afford to lose
No, it’s not saying people living paycheck-to-paycheck won’t be affected. I think the point is - scary threat isn’t scary, because such people already feel the constant threat of poverty every day. Being regularly pumped full of cortisol over worries of simply surviving, there are no fucks left to give when additional threats are piled on.
To me it looks like it sides with the paycheck-to-paycheck people. But you’re getting a lot of upvotes so either I’m looking at it wrong or a lot of people are wearing the same anger glasses as you.
The reason that the stock market cratered in response to this was that regular consumers are about to get hit with a 25%+ price increase on literally everything they buy. If you don’t make 25% more paycheck, you’re going to be cutting your lifestyle by the difference. Companies know this and are anticipating major lost revenue because people won’t have money to spend on their products. The price increases are probably going to be in full swing in 2-3 months, but that’s an educated guess, only.
An even bigger factor to the stock market is that the largest companies get 50%-60% of their revenue from other countries. They are about to get shit kicked.
thanks, I know all that. Back to the cartoon, it looks to me like it’s acknowledging the situation of Everyman in the persona of SpongeBob. So the answer to, “Is this implying if you with paycheck to paycheck it doesn’t affect you?” would be no, it does not imply that. It’s saying people are already up to their necks in shit and oh well, this’ll make things worse but it’s just another log on the fire.
Second largest senate seat loss, I say hopefully.
Proof yet again that “business leaders” typically don’t know shit about shit.
They LOVE massive depressions. They buy up real estate and failing companies cheap with their massive cash reserves.
It is all 1000% on purpose.
They intend to ride it out and profit from all of this, and we’ll let them due to cowardice and division.
This guy is no business leader- he bankrupt his own casinos multiple times and just stiffs people on payment. He’s a grifter who happened to be born into money
The so called geniuses of business have a better batting average than the average person but they are still prone to the same fuck ups and emotionally driven foolishness as anyone else. I was reading about the Theranos scam and how many supposed brilliant corporate leaders all threw big money at it without taking the time to investigate it first.
If you have Hulu or sail the seven seas, check out “The Dropout” which is a mini-series about Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes.
A hero of the right, Ronald Reagan, actually gave a speech condemning tariffs. Yup, I’m actually on Reagan’s side here.
Reagan was a neoconservative, heavily invested in deindustrializing the Midwest to break the domestic labor movement and capturing labor overseas for the benefit of investment capital. He succeeded too well, as his NAFTA and global trade policies birth to large foreign industrial powers that could meet the US as peers instead of supplicants.
Forty years later, Trump looked at the economic landscape and concluded he could undo the Reagan Era by throwing up high trade barriers, because he believed the finance capitalism at home (combined with our large international military) commanded leverage over physical capital abroad. Now we’re gambling on a war over Greenland and a promise that Europe needs Wall Street more than it needs Chinese manufacturing capacity.
But both Reagan and Trump were fixated on global US hegemony. They just went about it wrong, because they were dumb-dumbs surrounded by people more greedy than they were strategic. It’s a double-own goal, from opposite ends of the net.
I think there’s room for reasonable tariff policy, but unfortunately the US is a nuance-free land full of extremists so Trump’s terrible implementation will make tariffs radioactive for another generation if there’s a large public backlash.
It doesn’t need to be absolutely free trade with slavers or tariff man hell. We could raise the standard of living by allowing free trade but imposing tariffs – or even outright bans on imports – from places legalizing slave labor and other close to slave labor conditions. But obviously none of that fits into Trump’s dumbass worldview.
Tariffs in my opinion can be a way to protect a given national industry against price dumping, especially when subsidies are involved, or if you have a specific capability in mind that you want to build nationally, but then I think subsidies are a better way, maybe in combination. But putting blanket tariffs against countries is in most cases not the best idea
Yep 100% agree.
Both “free trade” and big stupid blanket tariffs are extremist positions and it’s America so they’re the only positions discussed.
People came for the Smoot but they stayed for the Hawley.
The largest Senate loss in history yet
Those that don’t know history are destined to have a nice day.
If we don’t get these paid actors out of Congress we’re going to lose in ways most people really don’t want to believe
There is some nuance here. Smoot-Hawley didn’t cause the great depression, and there a lot of economists who say it didn’t have that much of an effect at all.
Tarriffs can have some useful effects when used for protectionism, diplomatic coercion, or trade barrier reduction coercion. However, Trump’s tariffs are way dumber than anything that came before, because he’s trying to do all three of these at once. All of these have conflicting effects on each other, and it is literally impossible to design a tariff strategy that can accomplish all three, since raising a tariff for one purpose means that you need to lower tariffs for other purposes. All he’s doing by raising across the board is causing instability in the economy and convincing all partners to ditch the US.
Tarriffs can have some useful effects
Europe has a some tariffs on Chinese EV brands. The reason is that they get subsidized by their government and can easily dump them on our markets, ruining our own industries. The tariff calculation is based on what we think those subsidies are and how to make it fair compared to our prices.
There is good economic theory that Smoot Hawley actually was responsible for the initial bank failures that led to the Great Depression.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOvWS_xzRbc
Can skip to about 15 minutes into if ya want.
All he’s doing is exactly what Putin wants. Systematically isolating and weakening America while weakening the West at large and any other competing countries to his power and new accumulation of wealth.
and there a lot of economists who say it didn’t have that much of an effect at all.
Source? To my knowledge Smoot-Hawley is pretty widely regarded as the worst possible move at the worst possible time. Protectionism doesn’t work when domestic purchasing power is already collapsing. Agreed on the rest though.
There is some contention about whether this can necessarily be attributed to the tariff. The Great Depression was already in motion before Smoot-Hawley, mainly due to financial instability, falling demand, and poor banking practices. However, the tariff worsened the crisis by shrinking global trade, hurting farmers, and reducing employment in export-dependent industries. Had it not passed, the Depression still would have occurred, but perhaps with less severity.
Monetarists, such as Milton Friedman, who emphasized the central role of the money supply in causing the depression, considered the Smoot–Hawley Act to be only a minor cause of the Great Depression in the United States.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot–Hawley_Tariff_Act
yeah maybe my nuance leaned too much to the no side, but I wanted to explain tariffs a bit. Trump tariffs are not protectionism or coercion, they’re just stupid.
Most people here love blaming Stalin for more than he is responsible for. The Soviet famine, was a global famine, and its roots are in this Smoot Hawley tariff act. Stalin gets blamed for upholding communist principles instead of submitting to Kulak farmer extortionist pricing. But he was also saddled with US pressure to repay debts with food. The tariff origins are that throughout the world, reciprocal tariffs meant not growing any surplus food, because you couldn’t sell it abroad, and then making too much food just made prices lower. A bit of a drought somewhere, and FUBAR.
“both sides” but the two sides are “it was bad” and “it was disastrously bad”
I was thinking about the protectionism though… like in order for the tariff to work, the us would have to also manufacture the good that is being tariffed. But we don’t produce a lot here…and also even if we did… i guarantee the us business would jack up the prices to be competitive with the foreign price After tariffs and pocket the money. Making the whole thing moot.
The “protectionism” falls flat the moment you consider that the tariffs blanket all goods. If you want to dramatically expand American industry, you don’t start by raising the price of steel and raw materials.
Yea no matter how you slice it, there are no good use of tariffs, and if one were to insist, then it would only be like just barley enough to push up the price above parity, and only on very select items. But then if the other country does it back it goes in favor to the nation that is more industrial.
But then if the other country does it back it goes in favor to the nation that is more industrial.
Correct! That’s what Cavallo et al found when the Trump administration tariffed China in 2018. US profit margins decreased on both imports AND exports, while China’s remained largely unchanged.
According to their analysis, American tariffs hurt Americans more than literally anyone else.
Fun fact, the Trump Administration cited Cavallo et al as supporting evidence for their tariff calculations.
Yeah, sorry to say you were pretty off base friend. Smoot-Hawley didn’t start the fire, but it poured fuel all over the flames and locked the firemen out of the building.
Friedman was an advisor to Reagan and Thatcher. He was a libertarian who genuinely believed that economic prosperity hinged almost entirely on just printing more money. His economic theories are all over the place, but even he acknowledges that tariffs generally don’t work:
… [Friedman] uses tariffs as an example of a policy that brings noticeable financial benefits to a visible group, but causes worse harms to a diffuse group of workers and consumers
I think you can make a very good argument that the Smoot Hawley tarrifs were the main cause of Great Depression
This is what is funny for me. I would like tariffs to discourage trade with countries that have less democracy, rights for its citizens, and high income disparity (which unfortunately we are not a paragon of currently) and encourage trade with countries that are the reverse of that.
No one thing triggered it but the tarifs contributed almost as much as the out of control stock market. All the controls put in place to prevent this have been changed. So stupid tarifs(Are there any other kind) and a unregulated market system has us primed for some serious times.
So stupid tarifs(Are there any other kind)
There are some that work in order to protect national interests, mainly local producers and services. Whether they are stupid or not depends on implementation and end results
But these local companies just jack up their price to be competitive to the new tariffed foreign price and pocket the money.
Dunno, what usually happens without tariffs is that the bigger multinational companies drive the prices so low as to destroy local competition, after that they jack up the prices
