Comments by "Jim Luebke" (@jimluebke3869) on "The Economic Truth About Tariffs \u0026 Trade Deficits" video.

  1. One serious problem with relative economic advantage is that it pushes overspecialization. When this hits resource-rich countries, this is called "the resource curse" or "Dutch disease", and is recognized as a problem that squeezes other (desirable) productive industries out, as the foreign exchange it brings in puts other forms of local export out of business. When this hits countries who specialize in something like Finance, you get Britain: "A very rich city [London] attached to a rapidly declining country." The fortunes of the city -- which are not enough to support the country's massive welfare state, by the way -- suppress the fortunes of the hinterlands. America is seeing the same thing, with financial services in New York and information technology in Silicon Valley (and increasingly, government contracts in Washington) overshadowing other ways of making money.
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  2. "Work brings human dignity" If we gave as much human dignity credit to mothers as they deserved (and if we didn't have the government incentivized to monetize every human interaction and every moment of every human life), we'd solve the inter-generational labor imbalances that threaten our civilization's survival. We'd probably also solve the mental illness epidemic, the autism epidemic, the problem with anti-social uses of social media....
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  3. "Your $80k costs the rest us $100k" No, it's more like "We could either keep $100k local by paying you, or ship $80k overseas." Keep shipping enough of those $80ks, and you just keep getting poorer, and poorer, and poorer.
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  4. "The reason we have so many different car models is because we have so many overseas trading partners" What? No. Overseas, our car companies have totally different product lines.
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