Comment by bsder

> The only way to get that is to give some protection to the little guys while they grow.

Industrial Policy

It has a very bad reputation in the West but in built Japan and Taiwan

In the West it meant "protect old industries" rather than grow new ones (e.g. British steel)

I agree that we do need robustness in our production and economies, and a lot of it. But I don't really believe that most tariffs, especially current ones, will ensure that in any way.

Generally if you want stable and reliable local production of something, you subsidize that production or industry. You guarantee a certain amount of product will be bought/paid for even if a foreign supplier can or is willing to undercut that cost. That is why we have a large agricultural surplus in basically every western country, subsidized crops means there is money on the table for somebody to be in that industry which ensures surplus production even when other places are offering cheap food to trade.

Those can also be misapplied and corrupted, but it is still better than nothing at all or not extremely well planned and implemented tariffs which can sometimes hurt local production of other things still.

> We need robustness in the global economy more than some megajillionaire needs another half cent per customer in profit.

Exactly this.

Economies follow the same general principles of our distributed products. There’s good reasons you pay extra and lower efficiency (a bit) to have redundancy and resilience. We saw that we need more of it during COVID lockdown chaos.

Generally lowering tariffs has been a good thing overall, but there’s a point where it stops being beneficial.