Comment by mapt

It's hard to imagine that there's a way they thought this through in several redundant dimensions.

I understand rationally that there was an economy before the US plunged the world into neoliberalist global free trade in order to build its trade empire, and there will probably be an economy after... but likely not a US trade empire.

But another thing is investment uncertainty. The mechanism by which protectionist tariffs are supposed to work functions over a timespan of a decade or two - foreign imported goods are made more expensive, and so when investors believe they're confident in future tariff conditions, they spend money on domestic factories to produce goods, which have a large setup cost and gradually pay back the difference relative to their good-importer competitors that are paying high tariffs.

If investors can't form a confident prediction on future tariff conditions, investors can't invest; The sheer uncertainty of having a lunatic making up random numbers for every country over lunch and then rolling them out at close of market is instead going to scare them off. Trump has gone back and forth over tariffs with Canada and Mexico over the past couple months, and this doesn't just demonstrate that tariffs can be set extraordinarily high for arbitrary reasons, but that they can be set back to zero for arbitrary reasons. Both of these transitions cause economic ruin for one investor or other; If it's going to happen every few months then nobody is going to build factories or launch import supplychains, at least not for competitive prices. The risk of going bankrupt tomorrow (or in four years when the next administration takes over and abruptly cancels every tariff) on what is basically a coinflip then gets priced into consumer goods for both producers and importers.

The most frustrating of Trump's projects are not just when he shreds your rights or shreds precedent or tries to topple the government, but when he looks favorably at a policy you think is a good idea (like having a manufacturing sector) and chooses to pursue it by running around with a flamethrower setting everything ablaze because on some lever somebody's taught him about the Broken Windows Fallacy wrong, as a joke, and he's upgraded it. During his administration, we circle the wagons and declare that the policy is a terrible idea. Post-Trump, the absolute ruin that the execution of that policy predictably brought will discredit it for the rest of your adult life.