Comment by myrmidon

If you onshore production via tariffs while having low unemployment, you are basically forcing your population to build basic stuff despite them having better things to do.

This is somewhat justifiable with vital sectors like agriculture, but if you do this in an arbitrary way just for the sake of it you just make stuff more expensive and your workforce less productive for no gain.

Those dollars are not just vanishing abroad, you are getting actual stuff for them, and your citizens then don't have to spend their own time building it and can do something more productive instead.