You know what's really unethical? Relying whole cloth and basing your entire economy around getting every last little nicknack and infrastructure and system critical thing from a nation of "not technically" slaves employed by a myriad of unaccountable chinese con artist corporations and market fixers.
How though?
If others are making bad deals, without me coercing or encouraging them to make those bad deals, where exactly is the problem?
Or do you have some sort of savior complex?
That and it's just bad practice to regularly and freely hand foreign nationals who hate you the keys to your kingdom.
This part I don't understand.
A tariff applies to an area, like the USA. If a foreign national X no longer does business in industry A from a foreign country because it is no longer profitable to sell A to the USA with the tariffs, X has an incentive to locate to the USA and work in industry A there. Is that not basically "freely hand foreign nationals who hate you the keys to your freedom"? Like, wow, you got the foreign national here now.
The global free trade experiment
Which?
Free trade can be issued immediately and unilaterally with this set of rules:
I: Everybody who wants to import something can import it.
II: Everybody who wants to export something can export it.
Any and every "free trade agreement" is contradictory because free trade does not require any agreements. "Free trade agreements" are nothing but government thugs colluding and being corrupt gangsters. Where the fuck is there global free trade?
But the effects of that experiment have also destroyed whole swathes of manufacturing and hollowed out huge parts of our country, resulting in entire regions that are economically and literally depressed.
I'm convinced you're mistaking correlation and causation here.
Logically, if you are saying "a lack of tariffs put me into economic depression", it means "foreign competitors are able to produce more efficiently than domestic production, therefore domestic production is not happening". What is preventing domestic producers from being sufficiently efficient? Red tape? Zoning laws? Intellectual property laws? All sorts of environmental mandates? Central banking and banking regulation in general making it harder to obtain funds to start a business with? Why not tackle those things first? They will solve your alleged problem much more directly and effectively.
Other countries take advantage of these policies to screw over American families and youth, and I frankly don't care if that means some NPC can get slave-made Nikes from China for $20 less.
Now what I am about to write may come across as very bad, but please don't hold it against me and do try to see it logically.
If someone fails to adapt to a situation, why should other people who didn't fail to do so pay the price for that?
If you are in a shitty situation, then do something to get out of it. You can't just blame everything on outside forces screwing you over. Especially outside forces that have never met you, never spoken to you, don't even know that you exist.
Consumers go for cheaper items because most consumers are thoughtless or, giving them the benefit of the doubt, want to spend less.
If consumers go for cheaper items, pray tell, what do they do with the money they did not spend on more expensive items?
But most consumers also are purchasing items they don't actually need
Please don't use communist talking points like that. You can make solid arguments according to which you don't need to be alive right now.
Consumers purchase things (assuming they aren't being coerced) because they want to purchase them.
because the underlying driver of globalized free trade
What globalized free trade!? I'm not even aware of any localized free trade, unless it's within a few square feet.
But if tariffs force some soy-drinking NPC to put off purchasing their next funko pop because it costs twice as much, I don't care.
I'm against legislating morality even if it's morals I agree with. The logic behind "government intervention will make people buy fewer funko pops" is the exact same logic which will be used to justify things like "But if saving the climate of our planet forces some Trump-voting hillbilly to put off purchasing meat, gasoline, housing, and other important things because it costs twice as much, I don't care."
Nor do I think the nation's economy is actually better off
This is complete nonsense. Before the advent of statistics, there was no concept of "the economy" as some thing that can be measured or grown or shrunk.
Again, this wouldn't be as much of a problem if there was fair trade as equals.
This here I don't understand.
If two people are equals, they have almost no reason to do trade.
A trade is caused by inequality. If we agree so that you sell me a pair of shoes for $80 / I buy a pair of shoes from you for $80, we do that because we aren't equals. You - with your preferences, motivations, goals - prefer (value higher) ownership of $80 over ownership of a pair of shoes, and I - with my preferences, motivations, goals - prefer (value higher) ownership of a pair of shoes over ownership of $80.
In a sense, a voluntary trade is mutually beneficial because both parties are "exploiting each other". Yet both gain. Both are better off than before, or without, the trade.
But the countries that undersell and poach American industries
Underselling is an unsustainable practice. Relax, sit back, reap the benefits as long as foreign countries are willing to shoot themselves in the foot for your benefit. That's the American way, no? Stay out of situations and just capitalize on others' mistakes?
Tariffs can be done intelligently and they can be done brutishly.
Operating a concentration camp can be done intelligently or brutishly, it's the activity itself I take an issue with, regardless of how it's being done.
But that doesn't mean tariffs as a concept are stupid.
Except they logically are. Unless your only goal is to give a short-term benefit to a special interest group. Then tariffs are a good means to achieve that end. But I was thinking pro-Trumpers are against giving short-term benefits to special interest groups.
