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by _delirium
3624 days ago
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Trump sort of has a gesture towards an answer, which is more or less: trade protectionism. The broad sketch of his argument is that free trade, or perhaps more specifically "bad trade deals", moved good blue-collar jobs overseas, and either ripping up the trade deals or renegotiating them will move the jobs back. I personally am skeptical, but it's a pitch many people are open to. In my opinion protectionism isn't going to revive the American middle class and bring back millions of 1970s-type well-paying, unionized manufacturing jobs, because at this point it's difficult to create any kind of circumstances that will make that happen. Though I can believe a more historical version of the argument, that free-trade deals accelerated the decline of these jobs, which would've stuck around longer, rather than fleeing rapidly to Mexico and China, if we'd have had a more protectionist trade policy over the past few decades. I can completely understand why people are willing to buy the argument though, in part because they're not being offered a particularly compelling alternative. Telling someone who used to have a good factory job and is now poor something like: "sorry buddy, these jobs are gone and not coming back, maybe go to university or sign up for welfare", isn't a big winner. But, I doubt this is what interests Thiel. |
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Seems like that is the kind of thing that gets you into trade wars. Not to mention that people would be Really Really Unhappy if iPhones suddenly doubled in price because of tariffs designed to protect American manufacturing.
But...I'm not an expert, so I don't know with any degree of confidence what the consequences would be. Problem is Trump's fans are so far down in the "not an expert" direction that Dunning-Kruger probably makes them think it really IS that easy...sigh...