Tuesday, 4 February 2025

"Economic wars often turn into military wars."



"President Trump made it clear during his presidential campaign that tariffs will be a part of his policy-making. He has followed through on that. But tariffs are very risky business. Yes, you can get lucky with them being a political tool at times. 
    "But tariffs can also turn very bad, especially when egos get revved up. American history is littered with the use of tariffs going very badly. 
    "President Trump, and the American people, should always keep that in mind. 
    "Economic wars often turn into military wars. 
    "Given the bankrupt state of our nation, any type of war should be the furthest thing from our minds. It could end up being the last nail in the coffin. 
    "Best to focus intensely on cleaning our own house."
~ Ron Paul

 

1 comment:

Mark Hubbard said...

Trump is not using tariffs as an economic war, Mexico and Canada make that case: he's addressing USA's drug war with them (peacefully) particularly as a weapon against the cartels that make their money from violence and human misery. Both those nations have simply not policed their borders: surely the USA is allowed to remind them of their responsibilities. He's used tariffs to successfully get US hostages back from Venezuela, not a person wounded or killed. I think in his short tenure Trump has already fixed an awful lot wrong not only with US, but the West. Net zero is gone. Energy abundance is coming (partly via weaponising tariffs). DEI is history meritocracy is back (just in time as it was literally killing people in US aviation, who knows how many other fields; New Zealand is at least a survey ship down on the back of it). His first EO's were to reinstate reality: there are only two sexes. Then to reinstate free speech and to cancel cancel culture (for those asserting he's a dictator, that's obviously not the case). The size of the US state is being slashed via DOGE.

If Trump can sort out USA's problems, economic and otherwise, with a tariff war without firing a shot, compared to Putin who decided to murder hundreds of thousands of people to make Russia great again, I'll take the short lived peaceful tariff war. There is no evidence tariffs end in physical war (it's looking like the opposite, perhaps it will even fend off a physical war with China in which we all win.

Studying history, the tariff was a primary weapon used by all the early US presidents that freedom lovers venerate.

From https://pomp.substack.com/p/welcome-to-the-tariff-era-the-truth

'“Tariffs have historically served a key role in the trade policy of the United States. Their purpose was to generate revenue for the federal government and to allow for import substitution industrialization (industrialization of a nation by replacing imports with domestic production) by acting as a protective barrier around infant industries. They also aimed to reduce the trade deficit and the pressure of foreign competition. Tariffs were one of the pillars of the American System that allowed the rapid development and industrialization of the United States.

The United States pursued a protectionist policy from the beginning of the 19th century until the middle of the 20th century. Between 1861 and 1933, they had one of the highest average tariff rates on manufactured imports in the world. After 1942, the U.S. began to promote worldwide free trade.”

Historical figures like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Henry Clay, James Monroe, Abraham Lincoln, William McKinley, and Theodore Roosevelt were all outspoken supporters of tariffs as a necessary tool for America to thrive. The famous Lincoln quote on tariffs is “Give us a protective tariff, and we shall have the greatest nation on earth.”'

This is a very different presidency to Trump's first. He's learned. This is going to be, I think, one of the best presidencies in my lifetime.