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xkcd #3290: Trade
(lemmy.nz)
Title text:
"You legs may have a comparative advantage at running, but we arms have a competitive advantage at swinging hammers, so unless you accept that we're the dominant limbs and stop hogging the oxygen, that running advantage won't be around for long."
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3290/
And I don't think it works at all for manufactured goods.
For example, in the 70's or 80's Yamaha came out with their Virago line of motorcycles. They were American style teardrop tank cruisers set to compete directly with Harley-Davidson, except with objectively better engines and lower prices. The only thing Harley had going for it was their trademark engineering mistake. of a single pin crankshaft.
Harley asked the government to step in, the government applied a tariff to motorcycles over...some engine displacement, I think it was 1200ccs or so. Yamaha responded by slightly reducing the cylinder bore to bring it down to 1150cc and made a range of lower end models all the way down to 250cc, none of which qualified for the tariff, and Yamaha is still selling cruisers in the US to this day, meanwhile Harley-Davidson is a popular designer clothing label with a small vestigial powersports division.
That's sort of different. In that case, the tariffs were being used to protect a specific company's product, so it had to be narrowly worded, and that's just not going to work. If they had applied it to, say, all two-wheeled motorized vehicles, Yamaha wouldn't have had a way around it. Of course, in that case it wasn't that Japan had lower prices because of poor wages, it's that they had a better product.
It was both better AND cheaper.
I've seen similar tariffs circumnavigated by putting cheap crappy seats in the bed of the Subaru BRAT or selling a Japanese truck as a "Ford Ranger." Or importing parts and assembling them in America rather than just importing the whole truck.
Tariffs are politics, politics is bullshit, therefore tariffs are bullshit.
Eh, I still say there are cases to be made for times when another country puts their thumb on the scale. It's not a perfect solution, but it has it's place. Still, what's happening now is complete bullshit.
The United States was at one point a manufacturing powerhouse. We built the materiel to fight our own two front war and a lot of the kit used by our allies. Our solution to any other nation on Earth trying to put the thumb on the scale should be to shrug our shoulders and just fucking win. We've got manpower, energy and resources falling out of our ears.