Technology

Blind, overall tariffs can’t work anywhere.

Pretty much every country, including US, has successfully applied targeted tariffs to specific things for specific reasons. Usually you’re protecting an existing industry, but you could even build a supply chain by balancing it with targeted incentives, and bringing them together with a long term strategy to grow that specific segment.

For example, we used to have a complex strategy for helping legacy car manufacturers transition to new technology. We had incentives to build a market, manufacturing incentives and other assistance, we had targeted loans and guided research to build the technology, obtain the resources, build the infrastructure, we had well targeted tariffs protecting them from specific “predatory” countries, and much more. In a decade or so, our legacy automakers would have transitioned to new technology, with at least similar manufacturing presence in the us and a strong global presence. It was slow, bumbling and inconsistent but it would have worked. Now we’re likely to end up with failing manufacturers unable to compete on the global market, and with their us market shrinking to nothing as they continue to focus on large, inefficient, outdated, polluting technology that can only be sold locally.

Tariffs can also be an effective way of balancing buisness advantages. An example: Germany has quite high standards in its farming sector. This applys to what pesticides you are allowed to use, how much fertiliser you can use, what conditions animals have to live in and so on. Everything that you have to do to comply with these rules costs money, so in order to still make a profit you need to charge quite high prices. If you then compare these with the almost non existent standards of, as example Brazil, you quickly realise, that they are capable of producing goods much cheaper (who could have guessed, that its cheaper if you can just imassively increase your land by land grabbing, giving a shit on everything and using the most efficient, but very cruel, ways to feed and hold your livestock). Due to this, beef that gets imported into Germany from Brazil, thanks to Mercosur without any tariffs, will be magnitudes cheaper than locally made. This kills your local farming sector and also does massive damage to Brazil's citizen and enviroment (its a massive brainfuck how farming works there). If you want to counteract this you could charge tariffs, so that the consumer starts preferring locally made products, because they are cheaper. This also is an incentive for Brazil to better regulate its farming industry.