EPTUS Politics Mega-thread - Page 4627
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Now that we have a new thread, in order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a complete and thorough read before posting! NOTE: When providing a source, please provide a very brief summary on what it's about and what purpose it adds to the discussion. The supporting statement should clearly explain why the subject is relevant and needs to be discussed. Please follow this rule especially for tweets. Your supporting statement should always come BEFORE you provide the source. If you have any questions, comments, concern, or feedback regarding the USPMT, then please use this thread: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/website-feedback/510156-us-politics-thread | ||
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maybenexttime
Poland5348 Posts
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BlackJack
United States10013 Posts
On November 27 2024 06:22 KwarK wrote: But the solution is worse than the problem. The out of work food guys are bad at food, that’s why they lost their jobs. If you slap tariffs on to make them competitive you’re still creating a scenario in which the efficient oil workers are overpaying for food to subsidize the worthless labour of the food guys. You still have a productive sector and a parasitic sector of your economy, but now with more bullshit jobs. Forcing the oil guys to pay high wages to people who aren’t good at their food job is not a better solution than taxing them, buying the food from better workers, and letting the shitty workers do nothing. You'd actually be better off just keeping the free trade going and paying the out of work people to dig and fill holes than creating a tariff scheme. Instead of paying the out of work people to dig and fill holes, why not pay them to make food? | ||
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Byo
Canada184 Posts
In addition it makes no sense that it would end up as a blanket tariff without any exemption based on the type of goods. It's not a secret or unfathomable that us companies would just import raw materials from Canada and tariffing that at 25% seems like a bad idea to me. So in conclusion I wouldn't worry too much about what Trump literally says. | ||
Liquid`Drone
Norway28500 Posts
On November 27 2024 07:22 maybenexttime wrote: Food was just an example. Trump's been talking about all sorts of tariffs. E.g. on cars or anything imported from Mexico, etc. Yeah and I'm basically in agreement with Sadist, in that some targeted tariffs can make sense for a country while a general slap 10-20% on everything or 60-100% on everything from China is nonsense. | ||
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Uldridge
Belgium4433 Posts
On November 27 2024 07:38 BlackJack wrote: Instead of paying the out of work people to dig and fill holes, why not pay them to make food? I'm on the verge of calling your reading comprehension beyond subpar, because it's literally explained in the entire post you quoted, but here goes: Because food is already available and of better quality and cheaper. What is there not to get? Why replace a sector with less skilled people and worse infrastructure and resources that needs to be invested when there's a supply chain that's more optimized? In the free market scenario, the food guys got outcompeted because reasons that don't really matter. Maybe I can try an analogy.. There's already a river you can get water at, there's no reason to dig a hole at an arbitrary distance from the river to find water. Unless the water is full of Chinese and Jews of course (sorry couldn't resist). You would be better off to try and reinvest what is left in your original system to find them something better to do than to dig holes for these people, but because digging holes is all that's on the table right now, that's what they'll have to do...for now. Maybe they'll find water, who knows. | ||
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Acrofales
Spain17712 Posts
On November 27 2024 06:54 Liquid`Drone wrote: Eh I think food is different from other goods and that there are various reasons why it might make sense for a country to subsizide local food production (or slap tariffs on foreign food, or both). For one there's the security aspect - if there's some sort of global crisis that makes food a global scarcity it's good to have maintained some ability to produce food even if you're not entirely self-sustainable. Moving from 50% to 80% which would be enough to avoid a famine is gonna be much easier than moving from 0% to 80%. Secondly one might think that local communities have some intrinsic value not necessarily quantifiable in economic terms or what have you and these communities might be built around food production and there's a school and kindergarten and nursing homes and if you take away the farms then there's no real creation of anything anymore and it'll become desolated. Like, people aren't just cogs in a machinery that can or should be shuffled around for maximum efficiency. There can also be ethical concerns, or environmental ones, that make you favor local production over importing something from a different continent - even if that other country produces stuff at 20% the cost you do. Norway does have some tariffs in place on various foods. Certain types of cheese actually comes with a 277% tariff. When that was implemented there were lots of warnings that now the consumer would suffer greatly because they'd lose out on lots of variety. What actually happened was that producing local cheese became way more viable because even if it's more expensive in Norway, they'd no longer be demolished on price by cheese from abroad, and in the past 10 years, Norway has actually become a cheese powerhouse. I thought it sounded excessive when it was added like 12 years ago but honestly in retrospect I consider it a success. Question is really whether you should want Norway to be a cheese powerhouse. I know nothing about Norwegian agriculture and it may be a really good terrain for cows (or sheep), and super efficient, they were just struggling against subsidized Dutch milk, in which case this is the exact right kind of use that tariffs are good at (alternatively just directly subsidize local cheese production for a similar effect). But as a counterexample I offer Brazil's wine industry. Brazil has some wine producers in the south of the country. They grow wine in soil and a climate that is rather unsuitable for grapes and basically produce overly sweet, undrinkable plonk. But the wine lobby is apparently quite powerful, and there are severe tariffs on foreign wine, which mainly impact Argentinean and Chilean wines, as the tariffs basically make it so barely drinkable Brazilian plonk is a lot cheaper than a cheap Argentinean wine, which is about the same price as a top-of-the-line Brazilian wine (which is probably about on par in quality as a cheap Argentinean bottle). When you buy "expensive" Argentinean or Chilean wines, there's no more local competition, because the local wines just can't compete in quality. This has nothing to do with Brazilian enologists, and everything to do with the fact that Brazil is a tropical country with a climate that is either too humid or too hot or both for grapes to best grow. So all the tariffs do is create wine production jobs on land that should probably be used for bananas or sugar cane, at the cost of a "tax" on the consumer.* *This was the case until 2016 when I moved away from Brazil. It's possible the tariff on wine has changed since. | ||
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Acrofales
Spain17712 Posts
On November 27 2024 08:22 Uldridge wrote: I'm on the verge of calling your reading comprehension beyond subpar, because it's literally explained in the entire post you quoted, but here goes: Because food is already available and of better quality and cheaper. What is there not to get? Why replace a sector with less skilled people and worse infrastructure and resources that needs to be invested when there's a supply chain that's more optimized? In the free market scenario, the food guys got outcompeted because reasons that don't really matter. Maybe I can try an analogy.. There's already a river you can get water at, there's no reason to dig a hole at an arbitrary distance from the river to find water. Unless the water is full of Chinese and Jews of course (sorry couldn't resist). You would be better off to try and reinvest what is left in your original system to find them something better to do than to dig holes for these people, but because digging holes is all that's on the table right now, that's what they'll have to do...for now. Maybe they'll find water, who knows. The real answer to blackjack is of course: why should these people who are crappy oil producers and inefficient farmers work at all? Ensure a UBI that everyone can live on comfortably. And if you want luxuries there are jobs available (in the example, in the oil industry, feel free to reeducate yourself if you don't know shit about oil). | ||
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BlackJack
United States10013 Posts
On November 27 2024 08:22 Uldridge wrote: I'm on the verge of calling your reading comprehension beyond subpar, because it's literally explained in the entire post you quoted, but here goes: Because food is already available and of better quality and cheaper. What is there not to get? Why replace a sector with less skilled people and worse infrastructure and resources that needs to be invested when there's a supply chain that's more optimized? In the free market scenario, the food guys got outcompeted because reasons that don't really matter. Maybe I can try an analogy.. There's already a river you can get water at, there's no reason to dig a hole at an arbitrary distance from the river to find water. Unless the water is full of Chinese and Jews of course (sorry couldn't resist). You would be better off to try and reinvest what is left in your original system to find them something better to do than to dig holes for these people, but because digging holes is all that's on the table right now, that's what they'll have to do...for now. Maybe they'll find water, who knows. Your analogy only makes sense if you assign zero value to building up and protecting the industry and infrastructure in your own country. A better analogy would be why employ people to dig a well in your own community when daddy Nestle can sell you bottled water for cheaper. Biden put in a 100% tariff on EVs from China. The argument that's offered is that we would be stronger as a country if GM/Ford and other US manufacturers were priced out of the EV market, we put those workers on the government dole, had them dig holes for no reason, and then bought all our EVs from China. Your mistake is thinking I can't comprehend this argument when really I'm asking why you think this is self-evidently true. The argument that it's better to pay people to do something absolutely useless than paying them to do something "less optimal" is not convincing me. | ||
KwarK
United States41601 Posts
On November 27 2024 06:54 Liquid`Drone wrote: Eh I think food is different from other goods and that there are various reasons why it might make sense for a country to subsizide local food production (or slap tariffs on foreign food, or both). For one there's the security aspect - if there's some sort of global crisis that makes food a global scarcity it's good to have maintained some ability to produce food even if you're not entirely self-sustainable. Moving from 50% to 80% which would be enough to avoid a famine is gonna be much easier than moving from 0% to 80%. Secondly one might think that local communities have some intrinsic value not necessarily quantifiable in economic terms or what have you and these communities might be built around food production and there's a school and kindergarten and nursing homes and if you take away the farms then there's no real creation of anything anymore and it'll become desolated. Like, people aren't just cogs in a machinery that can or should be shuffled around for maximum efficiency. There can also be ethical concerns, or environmental ones, that make you favor local production over importing something from a different continent - even if that other country produces stuff at 20% the cost you do. Norway does have some tariffs in place on various foods. Certain types of cheese actually comes with a 277% tariff. When that was implemented there were lots of warnings that now the consumer would suffer greatly because they'd lose out on lots of variety. What actually happened was that producing local cheese became way more viable because even if it's more expensive in Norway, they'd no longer be demolished on price by cheese from abroad, and in the past 10 years, Norway has actually become a cheese powerhouse. I thought it sounded excessive when it was added like 12 years ago but honestly in retrospect I consider it a success. Firstly, the food and oil examples were a very simplified example to explain the theory in which there are only 2 goods in the world that people need. Poking holes in the strategic need for food independence isn't really the point of the simplified example. Secondly, no. Just no. Producing local cheese didn't become any more viable, it was still not viable for all the same reasons that it wasn't viable before the tariffs. What happened was importing foreign cheese became less viable. That's not the same thing at all. Before the tariff making cheese in Norway was economically a bad use of everyone's time. Norwegian consumers preferred imported cheese to Norwegian cheese. After the tariff making cheese in Norway was still a bad use of everyone's time and Norwegian consumers still preferred imported cheese but they couldn't afford imported cheese and so they settled for Norwegian. That is very much not the same thing. Norway may have subsequently developed its own industry of inferior products that exist due to Norwegians not being offered the superior products but I can't understand why you would consider that a success. If the cheese is good then take away the tariffs and it'll continue to flourish. If the only thing keeping it around is the tariffs then the project has been objectively a failure, it proves only that Norwegian consumers will settle for Norwegian cheese if you don't let them have superior imported cheese. We could generate all sorts of successes by that standard. Take away medicine and people might start settling for the successful new healing crystals industry. | ||
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Magic Powers
Austria3398 Posts
"The argument that's offered is that we would be stronger as a country if GM/Ford and other US manufacturers were priced out of the EV market, we put those workers on the government dole, had them dig holes for no reason, and then bought all our EVs from China" Who exactly made this argument if I may ask? | ||
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Fleetfeet
Canada2447 Posts
On November 27 2024 09:53 BlackJack wrote: Your analogy only makes sense if you assign zero value to building up and protecting the industry and infrastructure in your own country. A better analogy would be why employ people to dig a well in your own community when daddy Nestle can sell you bottled water for cheaper. Biden put in a 100% tariff on EVs from China. The argument that's offered is that we would be stronger as a country if GM/Ford and other US manufacturers were priced out of the EV market, we put those workers on the government dole, had them dig holes for no reason, and then bought all our EVs from China. Your mistake is thinking I can't comprehend this argument when really I'm asking why you think this is self-evidently true. The argument that it's better to pay people to do something absolutely useless than paying them to do something "less optimal" is not convincing me. Where I lose you in the analogy is that you seem to fail to consider the possibility of someone producing negative value. If you have a truck driver so unskilled at their job that they get in an accident so often they lose one third of their shipments, you'd be better to pay them to dig and fill holes. "Less optimal" has negative value. The company is better off having them doing nothing than driving trucks. I don't grasp the entirety of the argument, but it seems obvious to me how an industry or subset could actually be counterproductive, and it doesn't seem like you acknowledge that. | ||
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KwarK
United States41601 Posts
On November 27 2024 07:38 BlackJack wrote: Instead of paying the out of work people to dig and fill holes, why not pay them to make food? You don't need to pay them to do anything. In the example the efficient producers of country A and the efficient producers of country B can meet everyone's needs in 2 days of work per week. That's a pretty great scenario, everyone is doing the job they do best. The tariff proposal is to ensure everyone has five days of work per week by reducing the efficiency of the labour. The order of preference here is: 1. Everyone works efficiently and the needs are met optimally with lots of free time. 2. Everyone works efficiently and the needs are met optimally but people have to spend their free time digging and filling holes. 3. Everyone works inefficiently and the needs are met suboptimally by fully engaging the workforce with no free time. I made the case for 1 because 1 is objectively and obviously superior which is why human civilization is literally based upon that premise. Then I made the case that 3 is so bad that you'd be better off pursuing 2. That wasn't an argument for 2, it was an argument against 3 and making the point that if full employment is really your justification for pursuing 3 then it can be obtained a lot more simply. | ||
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Turbovolver
Australia2344 Posts
Not going to pretend I know if Norwegian cheeses are an example or not, but Kwark's logic here feels like the arguments people make that no price is wrong or unfair, because if it was, nobody would pay it. | ||
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KwarK
United States41601 Posts
On November 27 2024 10:30 Turbovolver wrote: I dunno, people talk about the free market like it's water, naturally finding the path of least resistance and concentrating all the flow that way. It seems to me much more like a viscous sludge, slowly slopping its way around a very bumpy landscape. Sometimes you really do need an external push to find that true optimum. Not going to pretend I know if Norwegian cheeses are an example or not, but Kwark's logic here feels like the arguments people make that no price is wrong or unfair, because if it was, nobody would pay it. My argument is that you should do what you're good at and not what you're not good at. That human civilization is fundamentally built on this basic concept of cooperation and that tariffs run contrary to it. It's obvious and self evident to the point of absurdity. | ||
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Turbovolver
Australia2344 Posts
Once all those pesky Norwegian producers are out of the way, though... And to be clear, I'm not here to argue pro-Tariffs. I'm not going to pretend to be an economist, or informed about best practise for international trade. I just think things also very quickly get absurd when free market theory is pushed too far. | ||
Razyda
500 Posts
On November 27 2024 10:43 KwarK wrote: My argument is that you should do what you're good at and not what you're not good at. That human civilization is fundamentally built on this basic concept of cooperation and that tariffs run contrary to it. It's obvious and self evident to the point of absurdity. For bolded I agree, rest however not so much. Your arguments in previous posts are based on some GH-ish scenario except you apply his solutions to nations rather than people. You would be correct if countries were all equal, good willing, unicorns and rainbows and so on, but then why even trade? They all can just share their surplus with others. I think this is were you erred: "That human civilization is fundamentally built on this basic concept of cooperation" - It is not build on cooperation, it is build on conflict. Cooperation is not natural, it is more often than not, forced by some external threat forcing coalition. As for your example what if nation A and B are exactly the same except nation B is making way more food than A? trading will then effectively erase food production in nation A. What's then to stop nation B from saying: "sorry you cant have our food anymore, unless..." Edit: typo | ||
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Turbovolver
Australia2344 Posts
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KwarK
United States41601 Posts
On November 27 2024 11:40 Razyda wrote: For bolded I agree, rest however not so much. Your arguments in previous posts are based on some GH-ish scenario except you apply his solutions to nations rather than people. You would be correct if countries were all equal, good willing, unicorns and rainbows and so on, but then why even trade? They all can just share their surplus with others. I think this is were you erred: "That human civilization is fundamentally built on this basic concept of cooperation" - It is not build on cooperation, it is build on conflict. Cooperation is not natural, it is more often than not, forced by some external threat forcing coalition. As for your example what if nation A and B are exactly the same except nation B is making way more food than A? trading will then effectively erase food production in nation A. What's then to stop nation B from saying: "sorry you cant have our food anymore, unless..." Edit: typo You're thinking too large scale here, rival empires etc. Someone in your tribe is old and doesn't see so well anymore. Another person in your tribe is young, fit, and sees well. Who goes hunting rabbits and who keeps the fire burning? So no, all human civilization really is built on the basic concept of cooperation, that not everyone does everything all the time. Anyone who insisted on doing every part of every activity themselves would never get anywhere. The upsides and downsides of cooperation at an individual level are self evident. The case against cooperating at a national level have the same downsides. The argument against forcing the guy with good vision to tend the fire is the exact same argument against tariffs. | ||
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Razyda
500 Posts
On November 27 2024 12:14 KwarK wrote: You're thinking too large scale here, rival empires etc. Someone in your tribe is old and doesn't see so well anymore. Another person in your tribe is young, fit, and sees well. Who goes hunting rabbits and who keeps the fire burning? So no, all human civilization really is built on the basic concept of cooperation, that not everyone does everything all the time. Anyone who insisted on doing every part of every activity themselves would never get anywhere. The upsides and downsides of cooperation at an individual level are self evident. The case against cooperating at a national level have the same downsides. The argument against forcing the guy with good vision to tend the fire is the exact same argument against tariffs. You see, this is exactly what I was trying to point out, regarding tariffs "rival empires" is exactly what we talking about. Your misconception is based on this: " in your tribe" and I cant specify this enough. This presume some sort of ideological alignment. In simplest terms: someone in your tribe is baby Hitler and you know what his survival will result in (or at least you are hell of convicted of it), are you still willing to share your rabbits with him, in exchange for keeping fire burning, even though you know you are able to keep it as such yourself, at the cost of extra half an hour work? | ||
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JimmyJRaynor
Canada16189 Posts
On November 27 2024 03:26 KwarK wrote: What Trump says is that he's an amazing deal maker. What Trump does is fuck with trade and then bail the victims out with taxpayer money. I think he is an adequate deal maker ... perhaps above average. Amazing is a stretch. Biden is incapable of being any kind of deal maker due to his failing health. Thus, Trump will be an upgrade. Trump has already leveraged his table image... He has the full attention of Canada's leadership. I wonder how Mexico is reacting... | ||
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