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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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...

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.

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

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.

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.

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...

Weird that Porter doesn't cite 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

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.

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.