Featured Trump tariffs put the US auto industry in disarray

I'm trying to figure out what your post has to do with the one you quoted of me.

At any rate, I try to stay out of politics, and used cars are more expensive than they used to be.

I'm still kicking myself in the rear end for getting rid of my $250 1993 Mazda 323 and $600 1985 VW Golf, my $1,500 1972 VW Super Beetle and my $1,000 2001 Chevy Astro. Now I'm afraid what will happen when my current car bites the dust and I'm looking at the same cars for about 10 times the price, along with all the other economic problems that have hit us.

 

Read the title.

 

Maybe you should have quoted the title instead then?

 

It was intended to be directly pertinent to your post as well. You may choose to be obtuse to it all you wish.

 

In other countries used cars are much more expensive, so that somehow caused Trump to be convicted of felonies and then caused people to claim those convictions were fraudulent. Ah! Now I get...

No, I'm still lost in the relation between the two concepts, regardless if both are right, wrong, or one is right and the other wrong.

 

It not really so complicated. The man responsible for the disarray is not only a convicted felon, but a lifelong con man and a man of very low character.

 

Yes - as is continually critiquing & questioning it. Then, honing it.

 

Nope...orange man bad will suffice.

 

China unleashes ‘dumping’ epidemic across Europe
Beijing is dumping a fresh wave of cheap goods in Europe, including air conditioners, motorbikes and swimsuits after Donald Trump stepped up his trade war, new data shows.
Data published by Brussels suggests Beijing is flooding the trading bloc with goods ranging from leather to car engines amid increasing evidence that the world’s second biggest economy is trying to divert shipments to other countries because of Mr Trump’s tariffs.

Last month, officials warned that the EU will not tolerate “dumping” of Chinese electric vehicles.

 

The term "dumping" is often misapplied. Selling a product at competitive pricing is not dumping.
Dumping is intentionally selling at a loss to drive competitors out of business.

 

Nothing has polarized the world like this in recent memory. Relations between the US and Canada are the worst since the War of 1812. I haven't met anyone who isn't resolutely against Trump. From what I gather, the sentiment is shared worldwide. It seems to have been very much in Canada's favor so far.

 

Dumping or not, increasing prices through tariffs decreases the demand in the USA. So that means more supply for elsewhere. It makes sense.

What I don't get is why this is so much of a war between governments when it's the individual who decides if he wants to buy something or not. Shame on people who would like to buy a cheap car or air-condition?

 

I work with a lot of Trump supporters who believe he's a genius with this tariff war.

Personally I don't agree with them. But to each his own.

 

They are nincompoops.

 

It's like the lessons of socialism that never get learned, after total failure for centuries.
Isolationism leads to poverty, wars and strife. Always has and always will.

 

A nation-state has objectives of its own, which can be based (in the better ones) on some rational idea of what will put its citizens generally in some advantageous position, or (in the worse ones) on scheming to advantage some narrow group. Either way, nation-states have objectives, and pursue them.

A lot of the levers they can pull to pursue objectives will involve forms of tax or incentive to bring the power of many citizens' individual decisions to bear in a concerted way. Both the better and the worse governments do that. If a head of state says something like "this short-term pain will lead to some long-term advantage", that isn't necessarily a nutty thing to say.

On the other hand, if a head of state says "our tariffs are paid by the exporting countries", that inspires nostalgia for having the people pulling the levers at least be people who know what the levers do.

 

Not for me to declare anyone as stupid; just that some notions are. Tariffs are stupid, and have always been destructive. Free trade leads to prosperity, and it always has.

Go back a few hundred years, when you had to make everything yourself. You want a chair, there were no stores to buy one. You had to cut down a tree and make the chair with tools you made yourself. Everyone was desperately poor, and families had dozens of children because most of them died. That's an example of a world without free trade.

 

It seems to me when there are trade war tarrifs it is very unlikely the nation has the objectives. In some cases like argentina in 2011, russia for as long as I can remember, the heads of state do this to gain more power and produce a crony capitalist state. Looking at the polls the people in america are not for these tarrifs, but congress has ignorned its responsability and now a single man is playing with the world economy.

Well yes some people like socialism and tarrifs are one way to rig the system for a crony capitalist society. I don't understand who gets the long term advantage other than the head of state and the industry leaders he chooses as winners. Consumers and small businesses are always the lousers. If the objective is higher manufacturing employment like it was in good ol days (not really good) we can rig it so productivity falls and wages are lowered, but I doubt many want that.

Either that or it is an outright lie. Consumers and busineeses in the countries creating the tarrifs always pay. They can be used in a focused way but in a complex web no country has had the exporters pay.

 

We probably have numerous points of agreement in the above, though not everywhere.

It just seems to me that the idea of any nation-state without state-level objectives it pursues would be a fantasy. It's certainly preferable to have the state-level objectives be somehow related to improved well-being of the citizens overall. No regime is perfect at that and some are beyond even credibly pretending, but it's not an incoherent idea.

I think there are some nation-states in this century facing a state-level objective of keeping as many as possible of their citizens unsubmerged. Which might not be something the citizens can effectively pursue through uncoordinated individual action.

 

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