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I don't think we disagree, necessarily.

I don't have strong opinions about trade barriers, but I generally fall on the "no barriers" side.

That said, implementation matters. Badly implemented barrier reduction policies will be worse than well implemented barrier raising policies. Policies are like everything else, in this respect. We just get more list in the high falutin debate more often, when it comes to politics.

I'm arguing that if trade barriers are going up, tariffs are the better implementation.

> this tariff thing is only costing the consumer. The consumers are the losers

yes. the consumers are the losers.

OTOH, the US is now in a position to question and modify the consumer-centric policies the US has embraced for decades.

the US is beginning a real-life experimental modification of the policy of prioritizing low consumer prices over other things.

this will have upsides and downsides.

Steel is like $500 per ton. I would like to see a source for the $100 extra claim.

This is completely off topic, but I will never buy another Samsung appliance or anything anymore. Great hardware but shit software...my refrigerator should not need to reboot.

I actually just replaced a 3 year old Samsung Electric Dryer. The heat was no longer working, and I suspect it was the heating element. To access the heating element required me to: - Take off the control board - Take off the entire top of the dryer - Take out the door - Take out the Front panel - Take out the drum

I only figured this out after finding a service manual, as I did not want to risk destroying a dryer to figure out how to fix it. A new heating element was $80 off the grey market. I wanted to see how much it would be to get it fixed by a service place, and any service place I went to wanted to charge $100 just to look at it!

When I saw a new dryer was $400, I just decided I did not want to deal with it anymore and bought a new dryer.

I will not be buying Samsung products again.

That the way all new washer / dryers are now. It's cheaper to replace than to fix them... the cost/benefit of having someone come out to see what the problem is just isn't worth it anymore. This isn't a Samsung thing... I had the same thing happen with a Whirlpool washing machine just a few years ago.

And I did take the thing apart to see what needed fixing -- it would have been much more expensive to fix it rather than replace it.

I agree, at $100 to bring someone out just to look at it (and not even fix!)...it really isn't worth it. Some dryers seemed to be a bit more friendly, I ended up getting a dryer that you could remove the back panel. I would assume (more hope) this makes it easier to replace parts.

Continuing in to off-topic-ness, I had to replace the heater element on our Samsung dryer at about 6 years of age or so. It wasn't hard, but I have really good mechanical aptitude (for lack of a better way to put it). I think you should have attempted disassembly yourself (without buying the heater element first), just to see if it was actually hard to do. You might have surprised yourself.

I halfway disassembled it, and I knew I could do it, I just value my free time more than that (I'd rather spend the $400 to have my weekend). The other concern is a heating element is a relatively simple thing, so for that to go out after 3 years, I was concerned other things would go out too, making me have to fix it again.

the situation reminds me of 1950's American cars in Cuba, or the situation with MacBooks and other Macs. replacement is so expensive, some people just repair the product themselves.

is it necessarily a bad thing that, for some products in some times/places, people find repairing their own products the best option?

It is not, if the part was easier to replace I probably would have done that. However I was concerned other things would go out if the heating element died (it's not a complicated part, so I question the workmanship on it). I really wish I did not have to go to grey sources to get a spare part and the service manual, and that they would be designed with repairability in mind, I would pay extra for that.

My Samsung TV will start showing bad artifacts like there are compression dropouts on the HDMI. The first time it happened I tried swapping cables and Blu-ray players but it didn't work. Finally I unplugged the TV and plugged it back in, and it's all good. I've had to do it twice more since then.

Shit hardware too as you find out when they need repair. Components are combined for cheaper manufacture, so don't expect to easily replace a defrost heater element without a whole bunch of other components in the block and a regas at the same time.

Unfortunately most makers are at this game now. No surprise that it promotes a lot more replacements when you can't change the £20 broken part but have to get some £250 thing that includes lots else.

"I'm not a libertarian but The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith states that all country will have certain expertise they are just good at. Whether it is because the geography that enable them to be better than other or other things, because they're good at certain thing, countries should play to their strength and trade for what they need."

And I am not against free trade (well, with reservations), but I think this idea has been proven wrong historically. I think countries that try to do a bit of everything, be self-sufficient, and perhaps specialize only in some very specific areas are generally more successful.

Just look at the U.S. as an example - if they followed Smith's advice, they would still continue to trade cotton. This advice will never let countries to build up an industrial base. (Or funny you mentioned LG - they were originally a textile corporation but the government forced them into electric industry.)

In my view, a country should have as many diverse industries as much it can keep all the specialists busy (the same is true for companies, by the way). That means to try to produce locally everything that is sufficiently consumed locally.

The reason why is that there are strong network effects in diversification. It's great if you e.g. produce agricultural machinery and you can talk directly to the farmer, who is going to use it. If you sell this machinery to people on the other side of the planet, with a cultural barrier, this gets much trickier.

Absolutely, you can see the problem with relying on one source of income in the oil dependent countries. Towns and Cities with a dominant employer have similar problems.

On the other hand having a closed border and expecting to do everything yourself leaves you exposed to potential famines and in a general state of poverty, see North Korea for an example.

That is a matter of scale more than anything else in my opinion. Countries natrually diversify when there are resources to exploit/nurture and even on a small scale they are decidedly not homogeneous. Even when restricted to 13 colonies scale the US would never remain agrarian. The north lacks cash crops and had too much in other resources natrual, labor, and educational to make industrialization nearly inevitable. Even if a fanatical regieme took extreme measures against it they would wind up knocked over by a world that passed them by and wants what they are sitting on.

Not to mention the chicken and egg problems - are they dysfunctional because of monoindustry or monoindustry because they are dysfunctional? Dysfunction leads to monoindustry since the base cannot be lost to war - see conflict minerals. Everyone wisely stays away and refuses to trade with smash and grab warlords and despots out of self preservation alone - owners wisely do not want to legitimise that sort of capital seizing for the same reason one doesn't try to work for a non survival desperation cannibal. They did it before and will probably do it again to you when convenient.

Causation and correlation with such messy subjects that I can see your point even if I disagree with the cause.

>And I am not against free trade (well, with reservations), but I think this idea has been proven wrong historically. I think countries that try to do a bit of everything, be self-sufficient, and perhaps specialize only in some very specific areas are generally more successful.

Oh? Which countries have been successful as you describe?

>Just look at the U.S. as an example - if they followed Smith's advice, they would still continue to trade cotton. This advice will never let countries to build up an industrial base. (Or funny you mentioned LG - they were originally a textile corporation but the government forced them into electric industry.)

Wrong. Smith's advice isn't arguing for static stagnant maintenance of the status quo. Economies, markets and products are always evolving. There's always opportunities to grow and change. That doesn't mean there's always an opportunity at every moment to outcompete a dominant foreign manufacturer.

>In my view, a country should have as many diverse industries as much it can

Countries do this already. If it's a capitalist economy and there's opportunity people will give it a go. I think you're grossly oversimplifying this and don't really understand how huge the market is and the number of industries there are.

I think you'll find it's much harder to manage your fantasy in reality than you imagine.

>It's great if you e.g. produce agricultural machinery and you can talk directly to the farmer, who is going to use it. If you sell this machinery to people on the other side of the planet, with a cultural barrier, this gets much trickier.

And yet people do sell all sorts of things on the other side of the planet, all the time, because while it may be "trickier" it means they have a much larger market, and greater opportunities for revenue and growth.

Frankly if your vision was at all workable it would have been settled upon by now.

Just look at the U.S. as an example - if they followed Smith's advice, they would still continue to trade cotton.

The US is (still) the third largest cotton producer in the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_production_in_the_Unite... https://www.npr.org/2013/12/02/248243399/technology-subsidie...

This idea is often formally referred to as the "Law of Comparative Advantage", and most economists do believe it provides a logical defense of free trade. That said, there are some interesting criticisms of it [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage#Criticis...

Basing your current economic decisions on Adam Smith is akin to saying, "Why do we need traffic laws? No one wants to hit anyone else."

Dismissing history’s most recognized economist out-of-hand seems like you have already decided the answer before hearing the arguments.

Edit to add: Michael Porter (one of the most influential living economists) made is career studying the economic theory of competitive advantage.

"clusters: critical masses—in one place—of unusual competitive success in particular fields."

Link: https://hbr.org/1998/11/clusters-and-the-new-economics-of-co...

"...but The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith states that all country will have certain expertise they are just good at."

Weird that Porter doesn't cite Smith.

In fact, in this HBR article [1], he does the opposite of citing Smith:

==

According to standard economic theory, factors of production—labor, land, natural resources, capital, infrastructure—will determine the flow of trade. A nation will export those goods that make most use of the factors with which it is relatively well endowed. This doctrine, whose origins date back to Adam Smith and David Ricardo and that is embedded in classical economics, is at best incomplete and at worst incorrect.

In the sophisticated industries that form the backbone of any advanced economy, a nation does not inherit but instead creates the most important factors of production—such as skilled human resources or a scientific base. Moreover, the stock of factors that a nation enjoys at a particular time is less important than the rate and efficiency with which it creates, upgrades, and deploys them in particular industries.

==

Their disagreements aside, the two theories line up fairly well. Smith argues that competitive advantage is inherent based on natural factors, Porter says that it is a by-product of investment. I would argue that the reality falls somewhere in the middle.

Take the Chicago region, we have a commodities cluster. It includes institutions like CBOE, CME and the University of Chicago and companies like ADM, State Farm, John Deere and Caterpillar. Porter would say the cluster exists due to all of these institutions and knowledge. Smith might argue that those only exist in Chicago due to the natural factors of fertile land, centralized location, fresh water and navigable rivers. In this way, both Smith and Porter are correct.

[1] https://hbr.org/1990/03/the-competitive-advantage-of-nations

"I disagree."

In other words you think that subsidies and senseless bureaucratic obstacles are better than tariffs?

The OP is not saying that tariffs are a good thing, he's saying that tariffs are so obviously bad & stupid that they're easier to get rid of and negotiate away. Subsidies and senseless bureaucratic obstacles are just as damaging as tariffs but they are harder to get rid of.

Regulatory requirements on product safety and environmental standards are not senseless bureaucratic obstacles.

Which is why I added the adjective "senseless", implying that there are bureaucratic obstacles that aren't senseless.

Depending on who you're talking to "senseless" isn't as objective a term as you seem to imagine.

Of course it's not objective, it's highly subjective. c.f. "ugly cars". Ugly is subjective, but it doesn't mean "all cars are ugly", it's referring to the subset of cars that are ugly.

(OP) No, they're not senseless but they are barriers. They can be senseless and they can be designed to be obstacles, a disingenuous way of having obstacles without admitting it. The truth is in the specifics.

One advantage of tariffs is that they let you have product safety and environmental standards that were designed for consumer & environmwntal safety instead of an ulterior motives. The most obvious example is the entirely estranged European & American dairy regulations which started as a way of protecting consumers but are now a way of protecting industries.

My argument is that if you could just admit that an industry is being protected, and have tariffs then we could enjoy eachothers' cheeses (at a higher price). We'd also raise tax revenue and probably have better consumer safety regulations, since they wouldn't have to (disingenuously) make the case that the way cheese is made in Scotland or prosciutto is made in Italy is fundamentally unsafe.

At least the ones that actually improve commensurate with the increased cost product safety or environmental impact rather than protecting the established players aren’t.