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**DragonFury** · 01-26-2018, 08:14 PM

(01-25-2018, 11:18 PM)flsprtsgod Wrote:
(01-25-2018, 08:14 PM)EricC85 Wrote: By that logic we should impose Tarrifs on anything made outside of Canada or Europe.
Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, for instance, are just fine.

(01-25-2018, 10:55 AM)The Real Marty Wrote: Apparently this is more than a 2-sided question. I have a different point of view from both of you.

I don't think imported tires are of lower quality than American made tires. But that's beside the point.

Secondly, if a person wants to buy imported tires, they should have that right. And I don't think restricting imported tires would have any effect whatsoever on the human rights of the overseas countries where those imported tires were made.

But let's suppose that we did restrict cheaper imported tires. Now everyone who needs new tires has to buy more expensive American made tires. Because of this, people drive longer on old tires instead of getting new ones. Fewer tires get sold and installed. Raise the price, reduce the demand. So fewer tires sold, fewer jobs at tire stores and fewer jobs at tire installers.

The problem is, things that benefit society as a whole are much harder to see than things that benefit a particular special interest. People say, for example, we need to restrict the inflow of cheap steel from overseas to save American steel jobs. It's easier for people to see that we saved some jobs at a steel mill than it is for them to see that the price of everything that uses steel just went up and they're going to have to pay more for a whole lot of things.

People save a whole lot of money on cheap imported goods, and that money that they saved flows into other businesses here in the United States. Suppose a person who is living from paycheck to paycheck has to pay more for clothes, and shoes, and a TV set. And then they need to fix their roof. Do they postpone fixing their roof? And with the price of shoes going up, do they buy fewer shoes? And what effect does that have on jobs at shoe stores?

Bottom line: I don't think we can control the flow of cheaper goods, and I don't think we should try to. We need to either find a way to compete, or find some other business. I am for free markets and free trade.

And yet our primary economic adversary has neither free markets nor free trade, so why grant them free access to our market at the same time they undercut us with immoral busuness behaviors? Cheap stuff at the cost of our moral fabric.

Because economic dependence goes both ways and is the most powerful tool in preventing outright war between superpowers. China will never attack the West because doing so would fundamentally cripple their entire economy which for a massive part is built on exports to the West. For the same reason the West will never attack China because we are dependent on cheap goods made in China. The economic dependence each side has of the other makes war not only unthinkable but essentially impossible.