> There are no out of work olive farmers in the US.
Is that because we can't grow olives here, or because we don't have federal subsidies propping up a domestic olive industry that can compete with corn and soy?
I ready don't know the details well enough there, but it feels like this could just be selection bias at play.
You can grow olives in the US and there are some farms in CA. The quantities produced are orders of magnitude off though and given the time it takes to grow olive orchards we cannot replace our imports of olives in a reasonable time period.
There's a lot of examples like this. Coffee, and bananas come to mind. You can only grow those in Hawaii, or maybe Flordia, and there's absolutely not enough land to sate our imports. The whole theory behind international trade is that some countries do things well and others don't. In the case of food the reality is more that others can't.
Hawaii is the only U.S. state where you can grow coffee and their coffee costs a fortune. You need tropical weather and high altitude. Florida won't cut it. Besides, we already have fruit rotting in the fields in Florida because there's no one to pick it.
Want to put tariffs on Chinese electric cars or batteries? Ok, fine. But tariffs on all imports? It's the most brain dead policy in my lifetime. I can't think of any products that are produced 100% domestically without any foreign inputs. These tariffs will drive up the price of just about everything.
Leverage over importers, i.e. all of industry. If you're a captain of industry and want an exemption or a lowered rate, they you approach the deal table, cap in hand, with tears in your eyes and beg like a dog. "Please, sir..."
In return for a minor reprieve, you ensure your factory bathrooms and hiring policies are aligned with the president's agenda, among many other things. This can be a cudgel over the heads of the Apples and Costcos of this country who dare to defy the edicts of POTUS on social policy.
Other popular options are very publicly taking your card of the Party, writing odes and poems to the Great Leader, and give your firstborn daughter's virginity as a token of vassality.
The problem is not so much that people don't like doing such things - they get by - it's that, at some point, enough people will start getting more favours than you do, and you'll start feeling the need to stage a coup, which is a lot of work.
I wonder how it will work out in a world where tiktok is always there as a much less exhausting form of entertainment than revolutions.
Sure, but that's the rationalizing of someone who can't get strawberries in winter. Getting food that's not grown locally much less in the current local season is one of the most QoL-improving parts of the modern world.
Kinda sad to go from that back to "well I guess I don't really need these nice things we took for granted. I suppose I can live off jellied eels again."
> If we could snap our fingers and domestically produce most or all of our own products, would you not prefer that?
That's like saying "If we could snap our fingers and every state would have mild weather, abundant capital, and a highly talented workforce, would you not prefer that?"
Yeah, then every city could be like SF or LA or NYC.
But it's not even worth it as a thought exercise because it completely ignores reality. The reason I live in NJ and pay high taxes is because this is where the high paying jobs and good schools are. Cottontown, Alabama theoretically could be a financial capitol of the world and if you want to base your position on that, then you should probably re-examine your position.
This is called rejecting the hypothetical. Just because it's not worth it for the arguments you care about doesn't mean it doesn't have value as a thought experiment to explore the consequences.
That potential end state isn’t possible is the point of my initial comment. It is as infeasible as the weather to control where natural resources are located.
Lets talk plastics. Plastic needs oil. We’re the largest oil producer in the world now. But we still import oil! Why? Because the oil we produce isn’t entirely the right kind for everything we do with it.
An end state where the US is an island cannot exist without massive shifts in production and consumption habits.
Maybe you’re saying though that shift should happen and that end state is good?
> But we still import oil! Why? Because the oil we produce isn’t entirely the right kind for everything we do with it.
Just wanted to elaborate a bit on this. Oil is a fantastic example for "why international trade good?" Oil is weird in that it is a fungible commodity (one barrel here is the same as one barrel there), but at the same time, functionality it's not. Each oil formation has different geology and chemistry. There are light sweet crudes, sour crudes, heavy crudes, and so on [1], and refineries (which are massive capital investments with specialized work forces) are typically tooled out to only process one type or family of types of crude oil products.
One paradox of the USA crude industry is that nearly 70% of U.S. refining capacity runs most efficiently with heavier crude, but our shale crude is lighter. Thus, 90% of crude oil imports into the United States are heavier than U.S.-produced shale crude [2]. So even if we had perfect supply/demand of crude within the USA, we would not be able to run our refineries efficiently without a massive overhaul. They have been built under decades of the assumption of a high degree of free international trade.
And these companies will be loathe to invest in retooling if they believe that the tariffs will just be rolled back in four years.
> That potential end state isn’t possible is the point of my initial comment. It is as infeasible as the weather to control where natural resources are located
You might as well not have commented in the first place if you wanted to throw out my entire premise.
Your premise is the goal of globalism though. You just draw larger lines. If your premise is the lines _must_ contain only the US as it is today then it’s impossible to have enough coffee for the entire country among other thing.
But what are you even asking? Would it be good for Americans if the US could produce every single thing conceivable to fully meet demand domestically? Yes, it would be. But it will not and cannot happen, so it’s not a useful thought exercise.
Would it be amazing if I was 6’7”, super athletic, played in the NBA, and I was also super smart and everyone loved me, especially the ladies? Sure. But I’ve gotta play the cards I’ve been dealt (I think there are some people who love me, at least).
No, it's not a desirable end state. If we produced everything in the US — just assuming we had magic tech to make it possible - we'd have less and be poorer. Americans today live like kings from 200 years ago, in large part due to global trade.
I had said this somewhere else in the thread as well, but domestic production is a pretty bad idea if success metrics revolve around prices, quantity, or some specific quality metrics.
Where it would potentially be a good approach is if the primary goals are relates to self reliance, sustainability, resilience, etc. I don't think many people actually care about that at the national level though, and our economy as-is almost certainly couldn't allow it.
No, I would not prefer that. A robust distributed system is less likely to crumble under local pressures. A blight could more easily sweep through a single nation and take out a staple crop or two, where it'd be impossible for that to happen globally. You can't spin up additional global trade quickly after you've shut it down, which could lead to people starving in America. I like systems that can't fail. That's especially true when that system is how I'm able to eat food.
Global trade isn't a security issue, national or otherwise. We don't increase safety or stability by reducing sources of consumables.
Edit; super timely example because this isn't an unlikely hypothetical: egg availability due to bird flu.
We've had plenty of wars since globalization came in post-WWII though. Its impossible to know what wars would have happened without it, and how much war may have been prevented due to trade rather than the threat of nuclear war, for example.
Those were good wars, though, apparently, since they bolstered US dominance and the spread of a certain flavor of "liberal democracy" based on progressive politics and consumerism.
I could have sworn they were bad wars when they were happening ("No blood for oil"?), but opinions on that seem to have shifted all of a sudden for some reason.
I think my answer to this question would be no? The food example is specific, all food can't be grown here, but for other products that aren't commodities, I want different cultures competing to build the best products i.e. cars, and I want other cultures innovating things that maybe their culture is optimized for (video games, electronics in Japan, in the 1980's?). There are some interesting questions recently about how maybe globalization have turned luxuries into commodities (i.e. all cars look the same) but I think my point still stands.
No, I wouldn't; Ricardian comparative advantage is a thing, and the kind of extreme autarky you suggest means sacrificing domestic prosperity available from maximizing the benefits of trade for the aole purpose of also harming prosperity in foreign countries (but usually less sonthan you are denying yourself, because they have other potential trading partners) by denying them the benefits of trade.
I have, and that depends on whether you are concerned at all with where we externalize our costs to. We had it good while messing up a lot of other places.
Maybe that's fine, maybe its not, but its not as simple as trade makes everyone better off.
Then regulate those negative externalities. Huge progress has been made on that front over the years. This tariff approach is demolishing the whole bathroom full of people to get rid of the bathwater.
I don't want a cost of living increase either. However, this raise the question of what the real cost is. The prices might be cheaper, but is that only because we're exploiting poorer people in markets with fewer worker protections and fewer environmental protections? Is it just because I'm greedy and I'm not willing to pay someone a liveable wage here or go without whatever it is? I'm not sure, but it makes for an interesting thought experiment.
Right, and there's a good case to be made for tariffs that are explicitly tied to another country's worker and environmental protections, where the country has actionable steps to improve their worker/environmental protections in order to avoid the tariff.
But the current administration is itself actively opposed to worker or environmental protections, and the result of the current tariffs will just be that the poor people overseas end up even more impoverished and still lacking in protections.
For some things that's true. For others it is not, or at least not enough to make up for the difference. For example, "housing" might cost less, but the definition of housing might be different. Even if we adjust the standards and built the exact same thing, it would be cheaper, but likely still out of reach for the average person in the poorer market.
> but is that only because we're exploiting poorer people in markets with fewer worker protections and fewer environmental protections
That's definitely happening, but there are other possible reasons. For example a good could be more efficiently grown or produced in a country because of geographical reasons.
Also, from a pragmatic standpoint, it is simply not the case that all wages and wealth across the countries of the world are equal. Maybe that could be a goal but is anyone talking about that? Either way, it does not follow that the workers in that country are necessarily exploited when paid lower wages compared to the importing country, unless we are using different definitions.
This is not to mention that untargeted tariffs can increase the cost of living _for no gain at all_. If Germany manufacturers some specialty tool (not with slave labor, I would hope!), and no US manufacturer wants to make it, then I suddenly have to pay X% more for no reason at all.
Sure, not every country needs the same pay. Things like cost of living can vary. It seems hypocritical to say that people in one country deserve better protections than in another though. If we aren't creating the same protections as the workers here, it would seem that we are exploiting the less protected group. Workers here deserve real unions, but not in China. Workers here deserve OSHA, but not in China. We've decided as a society that people deserve certain protections, benefits, and even environmental protections. These costs factor into the cost of the goods. To not extend these protections (or the remuneration to pay for them) to the poorer group is exploitation by definition.
If tariffs were being added as a response to poor working conditions, and a requirement of lifting the tariffs was to improve working conditions, that could potentially be seen as a generally positive outcome for the world.
Producing the same good in the US, at anywhere near the same price, requires automation or prison labor (legal slavery in the US) and likely won't result in more manufacturing jobs and likely won't result in higher wages for workers. Florida's approach here is child labor, which is both exploitative and cheap.
If the good is so cheap that we can't get close to it here, that might actually be a good case for a targeted tariff depending on the circumstances. It's essentially similar to anti-dumping depending on the specifics even if it isn't tied to overseas conditions.
"because we're exploiting poorer people in markets with fewer worker protections and fewer environmental protections"
This can easily be overdone. If you stop doing business with poorer people, you all but guarantee that they stay poor. Counter-productive to say the least.
In my lifetime, I saw a lot of countries grow at least somewhat wealthy from extensive commercial contact with the West, including mine (Czechia).
Yeah, you don't want to stop business, but if the price gap is massive, it might be good to ask why. Sometimes it's because something is more efficient in that country. Others it's just people getting taken advantage of.
I’m not familiar with any arguments that would lead somebody to prefer that. Maybe to avoid giving adversaries leverage over you, but isn’t that better solved by diversifying your supply chain? Maybe to salve the domestic effects of the trade adjustment, but isn’t that better solved by reallocating the surplus wealth rather than eliminating it?
Self reliance and resilience, at least to certain pressures, would fit. I don't think many people would be willing to give up cheap electronics and only buy stuff we produce here, but those are reasonable goals even if uncommon.
Environmental concerns would actually fit the bill too, if one is willing to consider externalized costs. Its easy to ignore mining damage in other countries and all the oil burned shipping over the oceans. When that all happens at home people would more acutely feel the costs and may be more likely to fix it.
describe how a entirely domestic food chain would be more resilient than one that is global?
Self reliance is a defective meme that breaks down once you want anything other than individual survival. Dependence on a community allows humans to specialize. Humans being able to specialize is the only reason this comment, or this thread exists. More simply, not just the Internet, but modern life couldn't exist without it.
Once you acknowledge that interdependency is a reasonable trade-off for the other nice things about life. A simple infection no longer being a death sentence is a nice thing we've commoditized reasonably well. The only question is, how do you build a robust and resilient system?
EU depends on the US for many things. That was clearly a mistake, and it's now working to work out backup solutions.
Having your government depend on foreign cloud and software was always a bad idea in my opinion, but IT security is not high on the list of the people that make decisions.
Russia depended on Europe, but got wiser after 2014 and certainly after 2022. To the point of having it's own Linux distribution (which I ridiculed along with everyone, and now it turns out they were right). Geopolitics change, friends become enemies and enemies become friends. Barring a civil war, a country will never refuse to work with itself, so it's the most reliable partner possible.
You're describing problems, in fact the exact same problems that you'd have with an entirely domestic source as well. I'm asking about how it would be stronger, or better than a purely domestic source. The EU absolutely should have it's own cloud infra. Couldn't agree more. How does an exclusively domestic IT infra benefit the EU, is the question. If they had their own, and were also able to source from the US, from Japan, Korea, Taiwan, [insert other allies] they'd be faster at adapting to a change in supply.
Russia is a bad example, they're doing stupid shit, the same as the US. Hurting itself in it's confusion. But I guess it's a fair point, if you're willing to cut off your own feet, you don't need to depend on importing shoes. And it might make sense to build exclusively domestic leg stub sock factories, given the rest of the globe doesn't want to cut off it's own feet.
I wouldn't actually suggest that as something the us should strive to emulate.
Are relations and allies impossible to have with trade tariffs? Historically we have had both, I'm not sure why they would be considered mutually exclusive.
No, for the same reason I don't try to manufacture my own car in my backyard or build my own house, or grow all of my own food, or ...
This is basic fucking common sense: I'm good at some things and other people are good at other things. We each specialize in the things we're best at, and everyone ends up better off.
You went to the extreme though. I didn't ask if one wants to do everything themselves. In the US, for example, there are still hundreds of millions of people to specialize in various roles.
The exact growing conditions for olive production aren’t common in the US, so most of the production comes from California - west of Sacramento and south along the San Joaquin river. There are a lot of barriers in bringing specialty crops to market related to know-how and contracting sale of product, so even in other areas where growth may be possible it may be infeasible.
Most likely the answer in many such examples is it needs cheap human labor. US seldom lacks anything in terms of natural resources and always comes down to this.
Is that because we can't grow olives here, or because we don't have federal subsidies propping up a domestic olive industry that can compete with corn and soy?
I ready don't know the details well enough there, but it feels like this could just be selection bias at play.