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Comment by AlexB138 | Hacker News Reader

There is also the fact that tariffs are protectionist and reduce competition in the market. It allows lesser products to succeed due to where they're made, rather than on the merit of the product. This inherently makes companies less competitive and less required to respond to consumer demand. That means long-term weakness and even less ability to compete.

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Agreed, and tariffs are an impediment to specialization, which is the basis for innovation that drives long-term economic growth.

Surgeons can push the limits of better and better surgery if they can spend their entire career focused on just that. If they’re required to farm or sew clothes half of every day, they will not be able to advance surgery as far.

The same specialization-driven innovation happens between companies who can trade freely, and between countries who can trade freely. Paul Krugman won a Nobel prize for exploring this idea.

You should probably tell the Soviet Union that who used to give graduate students at Tashkent State University a cotton picking quota albeit one much more lenient than the undergraduates

It's important to be careful with value judgements like this.

Tariffs allow otherwise more expensive domestic products to compete against cheaper products from abroad.

In and of itself, that says nothing about quality one way or another. In practice, it often means the opposite of what you suggest: domestic goods are often of higher quality, and/or are made by workers in better conditions, because of stricter laws here than in the places manufacturing has moved to. (And not by coincidence—the cheaper labor and looser laws are exactly why manufacturing moved to those places.)

Of course, all of this only applies when tariffs are carefully considered, strategically applied, and left in place for a long and predictable length of time.

This is the theory behind tariffs when applied to specific industries or products because the tariff amount can be adjusted to suit the dynamics of that market. When applied broadly I can't see how it won't just increase costs and create incentives to not compete on quality when you now are "the cheap option".

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