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.

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.

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

“both sides” but the two sides are “it was bad” and “it was disastrously bad”