Comment by kortex

> But we still import oil! Why? Because the oil we produce isn’t entirely the right kind for everything we do with it.

Just wanted to elaborate a bit on this. Oil is a fantastic example for "why international trade good?" Oil is weird in that it is a fungible commodity (one barrel here is the same as one barrel there), but at the same time, functionality it's not. Each oil formation has different geology and chemistry. There are light sweet crudes, sour crudes, heavy crudes, and so on [1], and refineries (which are massive capital investments with specialized work forces) are typically tooled out to only process one type or family of types of crude oil products.

One paradox of the USA crude industry is that nearly 70% of U.S. refining capacity runs most efficiently with heavier crude, but our shale crude is lighter. Thus, 90% of crude oil imports into the United States are heavier than U.S.-produced shale crude [2]. So even if we had perfect supply/demand of crude within the USA, we would not be able to run our refineries efficiently without a massive overhaul. They have been built under decades of the assumption of a high degree of free international trade.

And these companies will be loathe to invest in retooling if they believe that the tariffs will just be rolled back in four years.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_crude_oil_products

[2] https://www.afpm.org/newsroom/blog/whats-difference-between-...