@neptuneblue,
neptuneblue wrote:
livinglava wrote:It's almost as if Lincoln had somehow created trade barriers with the southern states and, as a response, the southern plantations started making more cotton and northern factories buying more of it. Really that's a bad comparison, though, because it's not like they could have grown their own cotton in the north.
Ok, I don't understand your point.
At all.
The idea of trade barriers is that they are supposed to stimulate greater investment in local productivity by increasing costs for foreign producers.
For that to work, though, local producers have to invest in increasing productivity, creating more jobs, etc.
Mostly, businesses don't want to do this, however, because it costs them a lot more to hire people and produce things in the US than to import them from China, so they just keep importing and paying the tariffs presumably.
So it would be similar to if Lincoln had tried to put tariffs on southern cotton and other products in order to stimulate more local productivity in the north. The problem would have been that northerners couldn't grow cotton in the colder climate, though they could have maybe figured out alternatives, or found ways importing less cotton and using it more efficiently.
Anyway, the point is that people have to decide whether to support greater US independence or whether they want to give into international pressures to keep markets open to global economic exploitation.
I am not entirely averse to global economic cooperation, but I found it very offensive when Trump started talking about pursuing greater independence and the global response was to threaten retaliation. After all, if they were our allies and respected our democracy and independence, wouldn't they respect and support us wanting to become more economically independent?
What I think this whole trade war has really shown is that the world sees the US purely as a lucrative consumer market to sell expensive items like cars/car-parts/oil/etc. and pharmaceuticals; and if we interfere with them having their way with us and milking us for money, we better watch out.
It's sad, but the world is more like a global economic empire than a global democracy. People need to be less economically (inter)dependent so that they can respect others' efforts to increase independence, but they can't because of their dependency. It would be like telling slavery-dependent people in 1850 that they needed to do their own farming, pick their own cotton, etc. and have them just freak out and start working harder to preserve slavery and increase economic growth with it, which is pretty much what was happening at that time anyway, I think.
