Comments by "Jim Luebke" (@jimluebke3869) on "Wolfgang Münchau: Why Trump would win a tariff war" video.

  1. "Germany has played the game to run up persistent trade surpluses" Considering the state of Germany right now, what good has it done them exactly?
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  2. "In comparative advantage theory, you focus on what you are best at (perhaps finance), and leave the rest (perhaps farming or manufacturing) to others" This means that you will destroy the sectors of your economy that you are not "best at". This manifests both in the "resource curse" (if you are "best at" pumping oil for the world, this drives the price of your currency up until the rest of your economy is flooded by cheap imports), and in subtler ways -- like the de-industrialization of America and the resultant hollowing-out of the Middle Class. If your "curse" resource is oil, at least if things go wrong you have oil. If your "curse" resource is specialized knowledge of how to run a system, and people change that system so that it does not apply anymore, you are left with nothing. Comparative advantage is nice, but a properly diversified economy is better.
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  3. @ Didn't do Germany any good.
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  4. "If there is a tariff, that will decrease demand for trade" Except it won't, because every government will have an existential interest in increasing its revenues by increasing trade. It will even go to war to do so, as England did (pulling the rest of the world with it) against China in "The O**um Wars".
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  5. Er, if productivity skyrockets, the value of labor skyrockets. The interesting thing about AI, is it is extremely rewarding to anyone with the patience to puzzle out when it's telling the truth -- or when it has handed you a good quality software product. AI will tear down barriers to entry in a host of fields. Picture swordsmen who trained for a lifetime, getting displaced by musketeers who trained for a couple of months. What the world needs now, is to refocus on family. Normalize (valorize!) motherhood, and we'll solve labor problems, eating problems, mental health problems, and a lot of other problems that have mysteriously cropped up in the last generation o two. Motherhood is most likely to be supported if we get rid of the income tax, because that gets rid of the incentive for governments to push women into the workforce.
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