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Comment by apawloski | Hacker News Reader

Frame this on the wall as the most succinct way to sum up the utter capitulation people face in supporting these tariffs.

Yes they are raising taxes and making everything more expensive for Americans.

Yes they are disrupting the raw materials needed for domestic manufacturing supply chains.

Yes their policies change so frequently and capriciously that it's impossible for American businesses to make medium-to-long term plans.

Yes the president and his family are personally and directly benefiting from these policy decisions. Yes they are directly accepting gifts and payments, including jets, TikTok board seats, and brazenly corrupt contributions to their personal cryptocurrency.

All of that is acceptable, and technically food doesn't need to taste good anyway.

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> All of that is acceptable, and technically food doesn't need to taste good anyway.

Food doesn’t need to taste good. This is America, not some mediterranean country: https://www.nytimes.com/1975/08/31/archives/food-on-enjoying... (“This American attitude toward food has been formed by two important elements in our national thinking, both functions of our national history. One is the he‐man ideology developed during our pioneering past which holds that it is effete to demand finesse in cookery (or in any other cultural activity, for that matter). The other is our Puritanism. The Puritan nourishes himself (grudgingly), for God has so organized the universe that he must. Possibly he suspects that the chore of eating was imposed on him as a penance for his disgraceful gourmandise in connection with an apple.”).

Of all the things in my post to address, the fact that you are pulling some random NYT opinion piece from 1975 to say “actually it’s more American to NOT enjoy food” only reiterates my point.

I the article discusses a salutary american cultural norm that has since been diluted but is still worth emulating. The America that sent a man to the moon thought garlic was spicy. You don’t need “the best pasta.” Adequate pasta, produced in America by Americans, is good enough.

This is becoming a Tim Robinson gag. I wish you would dedicate as much time supporting American consumers and American manufacturers as you did trying to argue whatever it is you’re digging in about food spiciness or whatever. Your points were not about pasta but truly that it’s more American to not enjoy food lol.

If you must respond, please address my initial points about all the concessions you’re making about these policies. Also, how do you end up finding these random op eds? Like what do you search to find them?

> Your points were not about pasta but truly that it’s more American to not enjoy food lol.

The point to which I was replying asked: "Why not just buy the cheapest highest quality pasta, where ever it happens to be made?" My response was that developing American capacity to produce is more valuable than satiating the American appetite for consumption.

America's lost Puritan spirit is directly relevant to the demand side of that equation. It suppressed Americans' appetite for cheap Chinese goods, foreign luxuries, etc. It was a great virtue of the Republic. Among other things, it enabled America to develop its domestic industries and reinvest the profits in the country, because Americans were readily willing to forgo cheaper prices and higher quality of foreign-made goods for the benefit of developing domestic industrial capacity. (Note that Chinese industrial policy also is focused on suppressing domestic demand for imports.)

Contemporary trade policy is based on facilitating the cheap procurement of foreign products at the expense of domestic industries. That's a bad thing, and one of the forces enabling that bad thing is the loss of the Puritan spirit in America. We've become a country focused on hedonic satisfaction, and that makes us weak.

This is amazing, thanks for sharing

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