Capitalism is great as long as it works just for you. When others learn to play the game and even outrun you, it’s time to put the finger on the scales. Essence of the free market.
If you want to protect your whole "manufacturing", you also need to make peace with the idea that consumer and industrial prices will balloon.
You can only compete, choose your battles, but you can't live in a world that does not exist.
Before tariffs, unemployments was ~3.5% and real wages were rising, and part of why wages have been rising is because the cost of goods like TVs have been falling.
Manufacturing is facing the same fate of agriculture: machines and robots will keep displacing people. Nothing is going to stop it.
2. There is no such world where we'll choose to do things less efficiently to artificially save few jobs. And it's not about your TV being 100$ more expensive, it is about everything you touch and see being considerably more expensive, with a cascade effect on the businesses that need the equipment.
3. Average Joe in US is as much a shareholder as some imaginary person you have in mind. And a company's duty is towards shareholders first, workers second.
> a company's duty is towards shareholders first, workers second.
This is just like, an opinion, man. There's no reason a company has to be like that.
It just benefits company management to act like it's an objective truth because their pay is stock-based.
Law. Board and CEO have fiduciary duty towards shareholders.
Management has to act in shareholders' best interests especially when those conflict with their own.
That's not the same thing as shareholders above workers (or anyone else for that matter).