They aren’t mean to be. They’re meant to protect domestic business and jobs and, more importantly, compel reshoring of industry and services and bringing jobs back home to America.
If products from China and elsewhere are made more expensive, then domestic production of those products becomes incentivized, which in turn creates jobs here at home. The more jobs that are created here—coupled with mass deportation—empowers labor and, making domestic workers worth more to employers, which in turn puts upward pressure on wages and demand for labor increases. All things equal, rising wages raises the standard of living produces superior life-chances. It creates the potential for fewer people dependent on government. All this raises quality of life well beyond wages. We may actually begin to repair the broken American family.
Remember why the neoliberals pushed “free trade” to begin with. By off-shoring of productive and importing cheap foreign labor, corporations push down wages for native workers. Globalization is literally class warfare, with transnational and even nationally-based corporations waging economic war on American citizens. In order to keep a semblance of the same standard of living, workers incur debt, which enriches the banks—and when they can’t pay their mortgages, the banks take their houses. All of this—along with rent-seeking, etc.—is an attempt to destroy organized labor and restore the falling rate of profit in the West. It certainly has worked to destroy organized labor (except public service unions, of course, which are part of the extended administrative state), but it couldn’t stem the fall in the rate of profit. This is because the “solution” to the problem is the cause of the problem.
Globalization and neoliberalism are what Democrats and establishment Republicans have been pushing for decades. It’s a failed policy for the working man and woman. We have to get back to a national economic strategy that puts American first. Tariffs are a logical step in that process. I look forward to seeing the free-traders eat crow.
freedom and reason 