Since energy is undercosted and climate externalities unregulated, we transport way too much stuff way too cheaply across the globe. Tariffs unintentionally help mitigate that a little. Even the emperor of free market fantasies, Friedrich von Hayek, wanted to regulate environmental externalies, advice that his acolytes immediately discarded. And tariffs are an unintentional, partial fee on the transport-related externalities.
I’d be kinda glad if international trade slowed down a bit if it meant fewer things being bought and more fossil fuels being left in the ground. If it instead means “let’s drill drill drill and industrialize like crazy so we can hawk junk goods to the world”, then not so much.
So tariffs are started for bad reasons. Nationalism, jingoism, “our-country-first”–ism, all bad things. Not good. And from a monetary theory standpoint they’re an inflation disaster waiting to happen. And it’s the type of saber-rattling and border-drawing that makes all of us who dream of a peaceful united world have nightmares.
The “retaliatory” tariffs aren’t retaliating tariffs or anything we could change, they’re retaliating a trade deficit. (And they’ve excluded services when calculating that “deficit”, they only looked at physical things and products.) There’s nothing we can do to “stop” a trade deficit short of start buying as much stuff as Americans do. Legally mandated consumption. Maybe not the best idea in the climate change era.
America started importing stuff from other countries and then got mad that other countries weren’t buying as much back. I can’t help but look at this in terms of copyright colonialism: “Hey, you guys can look at Mickey and Donald and Facebook and YouTube for a few hours. Only look, not own! And you send us back diamonds and cars and computers and clothes. That’s fair, right? Your ideas and culture, we’ll just take them, our ideas and culture, we’ll rent them out.” And then later “Hey, people aren’t buying any cars and computers from us! Let’s raise tariffs.” There’s no bluff we can either call or give into, we can’t do anything. Our governments raised tariffs back in some sorta tit-for-tat trade war. Not sure that was good or bad.
Tariffs also tax the poor; they don’t follow the principle of progressive taxation.
And tariffs are not the climate solution we want, which is comprehensive regulation and energy rationing alongside greener energy and materials.
So this is not a defense of tariffs. It’s just a li’l hopeful silver lining. The neo-liberal market capitalist free trade fanatics are having a cow and it’s fun to see that the fascist they propped up are biting their hands off for once. That does not make him overall good or even okay or even this particular policy proposal good. He can bite all the merchant hands he wants, that does not excuse what he’s done (and is doing) to the poor and to workers and to vulnerable minorites.