Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Here's an NYT article on the IEEPA[1], which was passed in the 1970s and allows the president to declare an emergency and then take actions based on that without Congressional action. I think that tariffs under the IEEPA have never been done before, but sanctions have.
0: https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/02/fact-sheet-pr...
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/02/us/politics/trump-tariffs...
the main issue I see is that these-days-right-leaning-people do not like flagging, aka community-policing of content… same thing they don’t like on reddit or anywhere else :)
Will the old or the young have to pay the price to re-learn them? Did some countries, demographics, and ethnicities, have to pay higher prices? What are we leaving to our children?
How to industrialize killing on a grand scale.
We will all reap what a few sowed through their own obstinate choice, and it goes beyond a one off issue with understanding tariffs.
Is this just some ignorance we have to relearn as a group?
No, plenty of smart people, right here, right now, talked themselves into it, and from here, they'll never, ever, admit they were wrong on it. Even though they, daily, reap the benefits of free markets and extol the benefits of them. We'll just always have insufficiently tried relying on ourselves.
The site we're commenting on, the CEO retweeted some long fact-free nonsense on the subject, that when you're done reading it 10 minutes later, amounts to "juche will make us more powerful than ever before, and btw, the elites will be owned in this existential battle. dig in for war!!!" Sickening lack of self-awareness.
The elites who bray about "elites" are nihilist and a destructive force, necessarily, and always have been.
The Fourth Turning is a well-known book that discussed this idea exactly, that one generation learns lessons that the next generation forgets. There's a little more to it, but that's the simple idea.
We're ruled by oligarchs that are, effectively, a doomsday cult of personality [1]. They've realized that neither money nor fame can buy happiness, so they've gone all in on both pseudoscience and burning down the world for excitement. That's why Elon Musk and his cronies are tearing down the government and gaining access to sensitive systems under the hood [2] and why he bought Twitter. It's all a deranged game by people far wealthier than they should be, and far stupider than people think they are. But money is power and money buys propaganda.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/25/tech-righ....
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/02/01/elon-musk...
I think the problem is that they're genuinely stupid. Like far too stupid to actually execute a plan of this scale without either crashing the economy, causing a default, causing the military to overthrow the executive or an outright revolution against them.
They don't have a smart plan to descale and break apart the government, so they're just raiding offices and taking a hammer to everything. They're going to hit a load-bearing pillar with themselves still inside the building. And doing this sort of flash-speed deconstruction means the pain is immediate, obvious and devastating.
The Romans solved this because they understood you had to placate the population with bread and circuses. The current would-be fascists can do neither.
The flailing during the depression itself was also not clever, but the best approach to economic crisises is to keep the focus on not enabling capital destructive people in the first place. Smoot-Hawley didn't help. No taxes help, all taxes make the economy worse off. We still have taxes though.