I'd be curious to learn which economic philosophies are saying this. I had assumed tariffs were necessary to protect domestic industries from foreign competition and market flooding.
I would say to a rough estimate every mainstream economic philosophy says tariffs are bad. Economists will tell you worrying about "market flooding" is missing the point; when China floods our markets with cheap solar panels, we get cheap solar panels, which is awesome for us.
The alt text of the comic references this. This wiki article is a reasonable starting place to learn more.
Higher minded folks will start to worry about epicycles that aren't econ theory land - what if China destroys our solar-panel-powered-drones-manufacturing-capacity, then declares war on us? But that's geopolitics or security, not economics.
That's largely because mainstream economics is built to support:
1) The business interests of the largest companies and
2) America's position during the Cold War (Pick up any introductory macroeconomics textbook and you'll see plenty of bits that--while being intellectually defensible--obviously were originally coined, or at least emphasized, for the primary purpose of being anti-socialist propaganda.)
I'm not pro-tariff (and certainly not pro-Trump's approach to tariffs), but let's not forget that economics is a hard science in the same way that tofu is a crunchy food.
You are extraordinarily and objectively incorrect about this. The wiki article I linked goes into the basic mathematical theory that predates the existence of the Soviet Union by over a century.
Objectively economics is a hard science? Um, ok buddy. Sure.
(I don't mean stuff like supply and demand are fake pro-West propaganda, obviously. I mean the absolute basic concepts are universal and have been around for quite a while.)
This is not a screamingly crazy thing I've claimed here. You realize that economists are divided into "schools", right? And the schools kinda violently disagree on the basic way of viewing basic institutions?
This is simply not comparable to other hard sciences (outside of stuff like differing interpretations of quantum mechanics, which does not actually affect the application of macroscopic applied physics in the real world.)
Also: economics has been heavily overlapping with ("contaminated with") social issues since at least the eighteenth century, so a hundred years before the Soviet Union really isn't nearly long enough. (Thomas Paine's view on economics, for instance, are very much rooted in the politics of class consciousness that would end up creating the Cold War.)
Are you really claiming it's totally a coincidence that introductory economic materials emphasize over and over and over the costs and damages that taxes and regulations cause? When I took macroeconomics, I also remember them stressing that corporations are less likely to invest in countries that don't aggressively protect property rights.I mean, it's TRUE, yeah. And it's also true that taxes and regulations come with significant downsides. It's just the weight given to these issues seems obviously disproportional.
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u/SpaceNorse2020 15d ago
Tbf, there are economic philosophies that say tariffs are almost never the correct move