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Comment by LaurensBER | Hacker News Reader

> Unfortunately, Canada (where I live) will feel way more pain from this than the US. I am not sure Trump will have respect for this at all, but the alternative was to put in a permanent trade deal that significant disadvantaged Canada.

It's unfortunate and in some ways unfair. I hope the Canadian economy will move towards more open trade partners and will proposer.

The thing that I really struggle to understand is what the grand vision behind this is. A logical consequence of the tariffs is that Canada, Europe and other American allies focus more on those who are willing to trade with them, including China.

If I put a 2/3y contract in place with an American supplier, there's a fair chance that I might have to deal with 10-50% tariffs at some point during the contract. This does make (long)-term business deals with the US risky.

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There is no grand vision. Trump has an irrational love of tariffs. He just likes them, they feel right to him. It is entirely that we have a presidential system with an executive that is capable of too much unilateral action, and we elected someone to that office who is unfit for it.

Does the admin’s affinity for tariffs have anything to do with Lutnick? His “former” firm bought tariff credits from companies for pennies on the dollar - huge upside if you knew what was coming.

Trumps been talking about tariffs since the 80's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEDVdSclDqg

I'd say that's more effect than cause.

I do think that Trump is irrationally attached to protectionism, but I also think that tariffs have at least 2 concrete benefits for him: 1) as a tool of economic coercion to achieve geopolitical ends, and 2) as a form of corruption to solicit de facto bribes in exchange for exemptions.

2, yes. 1, maybe he thought that would work, but it hasn't.

When you are forbidden to expand taxation on the people with money, because "ideology" and your country is accruing debt at historic levels, tariffs are about the only revenue source that you have that won't make the oligarchs angry.

I don't think this has anything to do with revenue or the national debt. They don't seem to care about that at all.

Trump is one of oligarchs.

  > The thing that I really struggle to understand is what the grand vision behind this is.

Religious zealots and the new barons want to go back to the Gilded age. If that means the house needs to burn down first, the house will burn down first. In the mean time, there is lots to gain from crises.

This is something so far removed from the way normal, constructive way people (have to) think and behave with each other as a prereq to participate in society that they will inevitably fail to see this parasitical dynamic, because there is no way they can relate to that from their own frames. Even when we learn about this we will instinctively dismiss it. It doesn't fit our frame of reference, so we decide this can't be true.

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