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Comment by throwawaykeno | Hacker News Reader

And then I'll introduce tariffs on goods produced using your robots.

These are, fundamentally, political-economic questions. Not merely one or the other.

That's how you start a trade war and kill trade aka the Trump solution.

To be fair Thomas Jefferson raised tariffs significantly. Most manufactured products simply stopped existing for consumers. All of that demand and no supply spurred the creation of a domestic manufacturing industry in a country that had previously only been useful for agriculture and raw materials.

Thomas Jefferson lived in a very different time. This is a hyper-connected world with a very complex web of trade and inter-dependencies. Simply putting up trade barriers is a sureshot way of isolating yourself from global trade, when has that ever worked out for anyone?

The choice between NK/Iranian levels of isolation and complete free trade is a false choice. Plenty of countries have high tariffs for certain types of goods and do just fine. Even today.

More-over, I hardly think a tariff on the output of robotic labor applied only to expats who left the country for tax reasons is going to cause a trade war...

Yes, but the US basically had an entire continent that was almost free for the taking, given the relatively light resistance that Native Americans were able to put up. Of course this land had to be farmed/mined/etc. to be productive, but it's far far easier to take economic risks when you have effectively unlimited quantities of a popular asset (land) at your disposal. I'd be very wary of generalizing from that situation to economic planning in general.

All I'm saying is that tariffs are not universally good or bad. Japan has ridiculous duties on rice because the farm lobby is super strong and the inevitable result of lowering those tariffs is a loss of livelihood for many people as well as the loss of traditionally grown and sourced rice. Is that bad for the economy and for consumers? Duh. But if the rest of the economy can support the inflated price of rice and the Japanese people prefer staying true to their roots, then that's their business.

A collapse of consumer demand will also kill trade.

That's a much better point. Consumer demand is paramount.

> I'll introduce tariffs on goods produced using your robots.

My robot submarines will run your coast guard surveillance and deliver goods tariff free.

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