There is no "level playing field" when you are competing with literal sweatshops though.

Frankly tariffs get a bad rep because of from who and how they are implemented but can absolutely serve a purpose.

The shops you're thinking of are less of a sweat shop than, say, Amazon in the US. Theres no good wages, but factory jobs don't really pay well anywhere.

They're mostly just a lot more efficient at scale, with a few plants managing close to the whole worlds supply of random shit. Almost all microwaves by all international brands are made by the same Chinese company, all prismatic LiFePo battery cells come out of one of two factories in China, and so forth. Economy of scale on turbo steroids.

Imagine having to compete with Ford by making cars in a garage. Now imagine Ford as the garage shop vs. these factories.

The sweat shops you're thinking of is stuff like clothes manufacturing in other third world countries than the usual suspect. That shit is nasty - breathing and handling acid with naked skin nasty.

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Retric 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Automation consistently outcompetes sweatshops.

What’s missing from these discussions is the idea of competitive advantage. It is inherently more efficient to grow crops in climates where they thrive, tacking a tariff to protect domestic production means intentionally lowering the standard of living of everyone both domestically and abroad to favor some tiny group doing something wasteful.

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ethbr1 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

There are a few situations where tariffs are beneficial:

1. To preserve strategically important domestic industries (historically: food production and mechanization industry)

2. To shield domestic industries while they're growing to take on already efficient and scaled global competitors

Benefiting labor or saving jobs is probably the stupidest use of tariffs, if one of the above isn't also in play, because it'd be more efficient just to offshore it to low COL countries and instead refocus internal labor.

The slippery slope, of course, is that industries will claim to be included in one of the above, but instead sink their tariff-protected excess profitability into shareholder/self-enrichment instead of business investment.

It'd make more sense to require domestic industries in tariff-protected sectors to invest {near tariff} percentages of their revenue in R&D and/or capital expenses (or be heavily taxed).

Otherwise the government is simply artificially inflating their profitability, at the cost of any consumers of the product.

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Retric 2 days ago | parent [-]

Food production isn’t some homogeneous entity, it might make sense to subsidize some level of staples but direct subsidies are more transparent and can be more easily limited. But, obviously industry doesn’t want the government feeding through to stop simply because the’ve scaled vastly past domestic consumption.

Similarly, military procurement can subsidize relevant industries without impacting the wider economy. In other words you can maintain some domestic steel production etc without impacting the cost of goods.

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ethbr1 2 days ago | parent [-]

I think that under-appreciates the slippery slope of political leverage. There's a reason Iowa is so hell-bent on keeping their primaries first.

Without explicitly and financially tying subsidy-fueled gains to modernization efforts, market participants begin to consider the subsidies as business as usual, plan around them, and get lazy.*

It removes a primary incentive to maintain pace with global technology improvements. Domestic industry whispers in politicians' ears that their global competitors are unfair for reasons X, Y, and Z, and they really need more subsidies to protect them.

{Benefit from politically driving new tariffs / subsidies} must never be higher than {benefit from investing in efficiency increases}.

* Lazy as measured by peak international efficiency, not work. E.g. a farmer who works their ass off manually farming is economically inefficient compared to one who mechanizes most of their work

	▲	Retric 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		That’s a big part of why it happens, but every industry wants subsidies the idealized place of “farming” in the American public’s perception make this significantly easier. That helps explain why chips, cars, airlines, banking etc get subsidized but PVC pipes don’t.

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cuuupid 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Automation is not replacing sweatshops, they've just made the sweatshop workers more productive (economically) while requiring them to be less productive (in activity).

So all that's happened is an exponential increase in the output volume of sweatshops :/

	▲	Retric 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		There’s many industries that have moved beyond sweatshops due to automation. Pepsi can’t get glass bottles from 3rd world sweatshops at anything competitive with a highly automated factory. In the vast majority of industries it’s just a question of levels of automation and climate control inherently makes automation easier by reducing variability in temperature and humidity. Of course the original distinction around climate control that created the term sweatshops is dying as such operations are largely dying out, but that only reinforces the notion of automation killing off the inherent advantages of unskilled cheap labor.

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19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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bendbro 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't want to compete with pollution, child labor, slaves, extreme hours, and poverty-tier living conditions

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Workaccount2 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Bernie removed the section on his website about tariffs being necessary for a healthy economy...

Tariffs are a populist thing, and people seem to think it's just a Trump thing.