I will respond to Steven's interesting post. First off, one of the *failures* of Marx and Engels, IMO, when talking about "free trade" is that they didn't examine it enough. Most importantly, they didn't examine the role of tariffs from the Federalists support for them through Lincoln's increase on reliance on them. I would of liked to see them focus more of their attention on the U.S. Just wanted to say that.
Secondly, while all trade wars deploy tariffs, not all tariffs are a trade war. Tariffs, implemented by Hamilton in his nation-building question, imposed I think it was, an approx. 4% tariff on all imported goods, meaning those imported from France, the UK, and the Nederlands. Just enough for "Americans" to not want to pay the tariff if now U.S. goods were slightly cheaper. They actually did want Americans to continue to purchase European goods otherwise they couldn't finance the huge debt accumulated by the new government and state but not so much as to inhibit domestic production. And for more than a hundred years that is how the U.S. economy developed (on the backs of slavery in the south of course, but also rising industrial capital in the north). Some of the original Trump tariffs on, say, something like aluminum imports, mostly from Canada, actually have worked. They didn't significantly increase costs and more domestic aluminum manufacturing investment increased. There are probably other examples of this. Tariffs, in order to work, have to be small not large or the impacts negatively on the capitalist economy. There are other forms of economic regulation that are also interesting, like the quota system where strict import quantities are imposed. Say a foreign automaker can only import x amount of automobiles..unless they build an assembly plant in the U.S. where they than can import more cars as production from the factory increases. Trump is actually calling for more manufactures to *export* their capital to the U.S. in order to do this. I'd like to see more discussion around these points. David -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#34846): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/34846 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/110809626/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
