Tariffs might help a very few people, those working in a factory that makes these 'higher human overhead' objects. But everyone else will (1) first pay more for the object that's probably still not made in the us but not imported at higher cost. Things built by using that now higher priced widget will cost 25% more because of the tariff. so they have to lose most/all profit and/or increase their price, kicking it up the food chain.
So it's a net negative to have tariffs on things that can be made by basic hourly workers. There must be some people helped, like say a steel producer who makes things that was competing with China. But like coal workers, there aren't that many. Remember there are more Arby's workers than coal miners.
Why is paying higher wages while keeping the money in the community/country a "disadvantage" exactly? Aren't you looking only at consumption without considering production?
Honestly, this sounds like parroted ten year old globalist propaganda. Craft beer has already shot this entire line of argument down, and other industries show signs of beginning to follow that model.
And the sharply increasing cost of long haul as manual truckers exit the industry is hastening the trend in 2018. Historically transportation costs exceeded any efficiency of "comparative advantages".
If I was a worker in a factory making things with physical labor, and I have a typical us standard of living, how can I do that more efficiently than someone in china, who gets paid less? I love craft beer, but it's a combination artistic and luxury product. It's not like making ball bearings. It has an aspect of knowing what the micro local market wants. It has a marketing and uniqueness possibly. On the other hand, no one is I know is making craftsman lumber to make houses out of (but they could I guess).
It's not the workers who have to do something extra to justify what they're making.
I think the right way is sealing tax system to efficiently gather tax from businesses so that productivity gains can properly benefit everybody and just tax employees less if you want that gains to improve employees wellbeing. Or even subsidise poor people through income tax credit or basic income.
Well, the theory was that if his workers could buy his cars he'd make more money.
But that is the same type of logic as selling items at marginal loss and trying to make a profit by moving huge volumes. The fact that it worked so well suggests there was something else going on that I don't know about.
> Why is paying higher wages while keeping the money in the community/country a "disadvantage" exactly? Aren't you looking only at consumption without considering production?
So obviously the absolute number doesn't matter - otherwise we could multiply all dollar figures by 10 at the end of each year and call ourselves wealthy! :D
The relative distribution is everything. The game is to split people up into the nearly-everyone camp who take resources and consume them, and the rare talent camp that can turn resources into more resources. I'll call our rare and talented individuals group 2.
Take a silly example, wood. Give most people wood, and most people can burn it for heat. The more productive individuals can build something out of it, like a house (which is a better long-term investment in terms of conserving heat). Maybe the most productive would turn it into an axe shaft and cut down a few trees, liberating more wood.
The aim of the game is to move as much of societies resources to group 2 as we can reasonably manage, because then we will have massive resource surpluses that we can all enjoy.
"Keeping [resources] in a community" is a fine if your community has a couple of people in group 2 that you can divert them to. Otherwise, you'll find that all your resources get consumed and mysteriously there is no surplus any more. If you give all your resources to productive foreigners, they can give you back the same amount, plus a little extra, and themselves be wealthy. Discovering this little dynamic is the heart of economics.
The downside is that true group 2-ers are rare, and usually busy enough that they aren't very visible. People forget about them and try to divert resources to the deserving but chronically unproductive instead. If it gets extreme, communism happens and everyone starves.
Nonetheless it’s still illustrative of, as you call it, economic orthodoxy. Put more plainly, most economist say this shits no good. It can be very counterproductive, dangerous even.
More generally, as I understand it, the reason economic orthodoxy is against tariffs is because of "comparative advantage", and the idea that different countries could produce different goods or services more efficiently than others, not just more cheaply, due to subsidization or other distortionary interventions like that.
You could make an argument along those lines here, and that would be valid, but the superficial observation that your prices went up isn't really enough to say either way.