Comments by "Nattygsbord" (@nattygsbord) on "What everyone is getting wrong about Trump’s trade war" video.

  1. Tariffs do work and history shows so. Which was the fastest growing economy in the world 1780-1820 and had the highest tariffs in Europe? It was Britain. Which country had the worlds highest tariffs 1820-1890 and was the fastest growing economy of the world at that time? It was USA. Which country had the worlds highest tariffs on manufacturing goods and the fastest growing economy measured in GDP per workhour 1890-1914? It was Sweden. And later on have you seen the worlds fastest growing economies like Japan, South Korea and China repeating all these economic wonders. So the free trade dogma is based on stupidity and ignorance. And not all jobs are worth saving because not all jobs are equally valuable. If you wanna make a poor 3rd world country rich, then you need to replace all low paid jobs with higher paid jobs. And when different parts of the economy inside a country is competing for workers there will be winners and losers. South Korea used to be the largest shoe manufacturer in the world during the 1990s. However later on would South Korea see a strong rise in its high technology sector, and Samsung was performing strongly and needed more workers and was prepared to pay high wages to get more workers to help it make smartphones. However this pushed up wages not just in industry but in all parts of the South Korean society, and that was good for South Koreans that now would get better paid and get a higher standard of living than before now when their high tech industry was rising. But the shoe industry was the loser as it could not compete with Samsungs higher wages. And higher wages harmed the profits of the shoe industry, so the shoe factories moved to other countries instead. And this is the typical development of things when a country is transitioning away from jobs with lower wages to jobs with higher wages. There will always be losers. And we should not try to prevent every job from being lost. We should do the opposite and try to destroy as many low paying jobs as possible and replace them with high paying jobs, and we should try to speed up technological development as fast as possible. If you do want every job from being lost, then you should make the tax payers save every old outdated industry that could not handle competition... save the horse and buggy industry jobs that cannot handle competition from cars, save the Kodak analog cameras that cannot handle competition from digital photography, support ice harvesters that are getting outcompeted by refridgerators, and help the typewriter industry that have a hard time since the innovation of modern computers. Personally I think that we should help some jobs and destroy other jobs. We should support high tech jobs by all means... including tariffs and government support, and regulations favoring them. While we should try to despose of old dying industries. If some poor country in the 3rd world wanna make money from taking over our low paying jobs and then ship those products back to us for a low cost - then fine, let them do that. We get cheap products and they get a steady income. Maybe they don't earn that much from their primitive industries making beer, milk, toys and such. But it is at least better paid than non-manufacturing jobs. And yes manufacturing jobs are more valubale than other jobs. Because they got higher productivity than jobs in say farming, raw material extraction and service sector jobs. You can invent more effiecent production methods in industry and use robots and machines that can upscale production to become 400 times more effiecent. But you cannot do that in farming, because it takes time for chickens and potatoes to grow. And trees need say 30 years to grow. And service sector jobs like chefs and hairdressers cannot do 400 times more job in a workhour... because that level of productivity is simply not possible in the service sector. A roman barber can probably make roughly as many haircuts in an hour as a modern barber can. And a chef cannot increase his output 400 fold without the meals he serves gets lower in quality. And producitivity matters if you want your country to go from poor to rich. No medium sized country have managed to become rich without increased productivity. So the talk that manufacturing doesnt matter is just ignorant nonsense. Tourism does earn a country foreign cash that allow it to import foreign goods, unlike manufacturing does. And neither can a country like USA with 300 million people just live off tourism. And selling raw materials is not making countries rich, since the global competition is strong as many countries in the world got coal, wood, copper, cotton and sugar. And new materials are constantly invented that can replace those materials - like for example artificial sweaterners instead of sugar, synthethic vanilla, and optic cables are invented to replace old copper cables which makes the global price of copper to fall like a rock and hurt copper exporting countries in africa. But knowledge based products in manufacturing does not have does products. If your country is one of the extremely few countries that knows how to make high tech products, then the competition is low and you can charge high prices for your exports and make big profits that allows for high wages and large tax income for the government. And when your country is making the newest most hot thing, then of course is global demand for that product enormous - which allows you to sell massive quantities at a high price which means enormous profits. And by being a world leader in aircraft manufacturing, creator of jet engines, and stealth aircrafts do USA gain massive amounts of wealth. And by the US government with state support (and not the free market) helped to create the internet, GPS, semi-conductors, and so on did USA manage to create some of the largest companies in the world like Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook and so on. Europe does not have anything similiar. So it makes sense for USA to just to temporarily curve the free market, even if it means short term costs for society. Sure did it cost money for Japans consumers to have tariffs that forced them to buy inferior japanese cars at an overprice instead of buying European and American cars back in the 1950s. But today have Toyota managed to grow into one of the most succesful car manufacturers in history thanks to that, instead of getting crushed by foreign competition. Had you been an economic advisor of Japan in the 1950s you would have told them to not do any protectionism. You would have said it would be insane to think that a poor 3rd world country just destroyed by a big war should try to compete with the worlds largest economic super power in car manufacturing. You would have told japan to save its money by not helping Toyota, and instead should Japan have followed the free market and continued to do things it was good at. And continue to sell silk, fish, porcelain, soy and textiles. And with your advice had Japan continued to remain a poor agrarian society instead of an industrial powerhouse. And we consumers in the western world would never have enjoyed playing any Nintendo, driving any Toyota, or any electronics from Sony.
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