Today I Learned

They are already trying to setup Kamala for 2028. I have zero faith that the Democrats are going to learn anything from their failure

In 1930, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, in an effort to alleviate the effects of the... Anyone? Anyone?... the Great Depression, passed the... Anyone? Anyone? The tariff bill? The Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act? Which, anyone? Raised or lowered?... raised tariffs, in an effort to collect more revenue for the federal government. Did it work? Anyone? Anyone know the effects? It did not work, and the United States sank deeper into the Great Depression. Today we have a similar debate over this. Anyone know what this is? Class? Anyone? Anyone? Anyone seen this before? The Laffer Curve. Anyone know what this says? It says that at this point on the revenue curve, you will get exactly the same amount of revenue as at this point. This is very controversial. Does anyone know what Vice President Bush called this in 1980? Anyone? Something-d-o-o economics. Voodoo economics.

Conservatives hate learning, especially from mistakes. Learning makes you go "Why do we do this tradition? This is stupid."

If a conservative learns something, its a failure of the conservative ideology. Keeping them dumb makes them unquestioning obedient workers and soldiers. You don't have a soldier disobey commands to harm someone, you don't have a worker disobey their boss.

Conservatism is explicitly against learning.

All he's doing is exactly what Putin wants. Systematically isolating and weakening America while weakening the West at large and any other competing countries to his power and new accumulation of wealth.

and there a lot of economists who say it didn’t have that much of an effect at all.

Source? To my knowledge Smoot-Hawley is pretty widely regarded as the worst possible move at the worst possible time. Protectionism doesn't work when domestic purchasing power is already collapsing. Agreed on the rest though.

Reagan was a neoconservative, heavily invested in deindustrializing the Midwest to break the domestic labor movement and capturing labor overseas for the benefit of investment capital. He succeeded too well, as his NAFTA and global trade policies birth to large foreign industrial powers that could meet the US as peers instead of supplicants.

Forty years later, Trump looked at the economic landscape and concluded he could undo the Reagan Era by throwing up high trade barriers, because he believed the finance capitalism at home (combined with our large international military) commanded leverage over physical capital abroad. Now we're gambling on a war over Greenland and a promise that Europe needs Wall Street more than it needs Chinese manufacturing capacity.

But both Reagan and Trump were fixated on global US hegemony. They just went about it wrong, because they were dumb-dumbs surrounded by people more greedy than they were strategic. It's a double-own goal, from opposite ends of the net.

I think there's room for reasonable tariff policy, but unfortunately the US is a nuance-free land full of extremists so Trump's terrible implementation will make tariffs radioactive for another generation if there's a large public backlash.

It doesn't need to be absolutely free trade with slavers or tariff man hell. We could raise the standard of living by allowing free trade but imposing tariffs -- or even outright bans on imports -- from places legalizing slave labor and other close to slave labor conditions. But obviously none of that fits into Trump's dumbass worldview.

I have a feeling they learned, and then said “what a great idea to crash the economy. It’s so easy, let’s do it.”

They had newspapers owned by William Randolph Hearst, who pretty much invented the "yellow press". And whose story is eerily similar to Musk's, including a sudden swing from progressivism to far right nationalism.