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Comment by victorbjorklund | Hacker News Reader

Tariffs are not free market. A true free market would have zero tariffs.

Tariffs, as with taxes, may serve positive, market-favourable functions, particularly in addressing market failures, uneven regulation (e.g., higher pension, safety, environmental, and/or medical-care burdens in the importing country), as well as anti-dumping or anti-interference actions. British-Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang writes of this, particularly in Kicking Away the Ladder:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ha-Joon_Chang#Kicking_Away_the...>

Recent US tariffs fall rather short on most of these points, of course.

It is still not a free market thing.

And it would quickly be destroyed by competing governments that don’t believe in free markets and actively subsidize their industries to capture market share.

The US has been largely tariff free since the 1900s and it's the largest economy in the world.

Remind me where I can buy a Chinese EV?

And I assume there’s no government subsidies to allow US private sectors to compete globally because free market right?

Right?

I forgot to put in my comment "until recently". And the US auto industry does such so using that as your argument in favor of tariffs doesn't really work.

The 1960s+ chicken tax would like a word. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax

Yes, trucks are one of the few areas where there have been tariffs. And unsurprisingly American automakers are now completely uncompetitive.

You and your downvote brigade can continue to hit my posts but it won’t change the fact the US has been subsidizing our agriculture sectors and oil and gas to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars for a LONG time.

Anyone claiming the US is a completely free market is either uninformed or a delusional nationalist.

I didn't downvote you once, I don't do it to people I'm discussing things with out of principle.

Can you give an example of a zero tariff country being destroyed by a super high tariff country? I can give you examples of the opposite. For example Argentina tried to build up domestic industries with high tariffs.

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