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Comment by saint_fiasco | Hacker News Reader

I don't disagree, you can definitely build more industries with tariffs and protectionism. I just don't see the point.

I'm a consumerist at heart. As long as consumers get to consume, it does not matter to me whose industry is doing the producing.

I get that your foreign suppliers can turn on you and raise prices. I think the money you make during peacetime by not putting tariffs will let you buy more weapons and bribe more allies so that the foreign suppliers don't try anything too awful with the supply chains. Stockpiles can buy a lot of time to restart industry in an emergency or at least find a different foreign supplier.

Take a look at Russia, they are sanctioned by half the planet and they still keep going on a reduced industry because they had huge stockpiles of tanks, artillery and so on. Imagine something like that but with a military that doesn't suck. Nobody would even dare try a sanction.

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The point is that unfortunately geopolitics ends up in an eternal competitive state.

Losing your industrial base and giving it away to a geopolitical competitor is almost certainly an error in the long run.

Large industrial bases also are correlated with healthier middle class societies, according to Vaclav Smil, and in my experience, he’s exactly right.

So losing the industrial base is fine for you, a service sector worker, but it’s bad for the country and it’s bad for society, if you want it to have a healthy middle class.

Most of the country works in the service sector. It's not like I'm some kind of out of touch elite.

The ones who are most hurt by tariffs, most affected by higher prices, are the working class. Sure, the workers of the specific industries that are lucky enough to be protected, the ones with the most persuasive lobbies, will certainly benefit. But every other worker will be a little worse off.

If you are concerned about the people who got hurt by globalization, maybe the government should collect money from people like us and spend it on people like them. They can set up the tax in such a way that rich people pay the most.

But if you use tariffs to help the people who got hurt by globalization, you cannot set it up in such a careful way. It's a blunt instrument that hurts productivity across the board and increases the prices to the end consumer. It becomes an implicit tax that poor people pay the most. An actual explicit tax would hurt much less.

If the consumer becomes richer by brining industry back to your country you might actually end up a victor in that transaction.

> The ones who are most hurt by tariffs, most affected by higher prices, are the working class.

Perhaps in the short to medium term, the people who had their livelihoods decimated and partially compensated for the decline in their standard of living by buying cheap imported products, will be most affected.

But tariffs should be a component of a longer term plan of tradeoffs to revitalize the protected industries.

> If you are concerned about the people who got hurt by globalization, maybe the government should collect money from people like us and spend it on people like them.

That idea is past its sell-by date. It's the neoliberal Democrat's response to the economic damage done by globalization: put the losers on welfare indefinitely. IMHO, that money should be

>IMHO, that money should be

Should be...?

>> IMHO, that money should be

> Should be...?

Sorry. Should be used to offset any short-term difficulties caused by tariffs, that occur as part of a longer term plan.

>I don't disagree, you can definitely build more industries with tariffs and protectionism. I just don't see the point.

You don't see the point of building up, say, your domestic chip building capacity? Really?

>Take a look at Russia, they are sanctioned by half the planet and they still keep going on a reduced industry because they had huge stockpiles of tanks

Russia can "keep going" because they have vast reserves of fossil fuels that Europe, currently, can't live without.

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