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Strategies & Market Trends : CFZ E-Wiggle Workspace -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Qone0 who wrote (40973)	4/24/2025 4:04:28 PM
From: skinowski	2 Recommendations Recommended By Clam digger kckip Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 41420

I’m a free market person - and always thought that tariffs and various border duties are merely robbery on the part of the politicians / government. Always thought that the less they interfere, the better off everyone would be. But, the reality is that all - or at least, most countries - do it. And, if other countries collect tariffs and we do not - that puts us at a competitive disadvantage. If a trading partner uses dumping practices - that adds to the problem. I think that the so called sanctions serve a related purpose - when Biden issued an order to stop sales of US manufactured chips (or chips made elsewhere using US technology) to China - that was a way of putting China at a disadvantage, of slowing them down. Doing this (while cutting off the domestic chip industry from its greatest customer) could have made some sense - had we used the time to accomplish technological and manufacturing breakouts of our own. But we haven’t. I think there may be something analogous between the British empire exporting to the US massive amounts of goods (which they could manufacture cheaper, having more advanced skills and technology) — and China’s imports to the US. The danger of excessive protectionist policies is - stagnation. The protected industries may chose not to invest into better technologies - but to cash in on the opportunity to charge higher prices. The protected economy stagnates - and population gets stuck with a limited choice and poor availability of outrageously expensive, poor quality goods. The former USSR was a good - albeit, an extreme - example. How this current situation with the tariffs will play out — I don’t know. Of course, it’s wrong to count trade imbalance as a tariff. But - counting it this way was a political decision, not related to the precision of economic definitions. The previous way of doing business with the world led to us losing skills and industries - and accumulating close to $40 Trillion in debt. I don’t know if what’s happening right now is the best of possible paths - but the old path was nothing to brag about. Sorry for a long rant.