Stop Looking for Methods in the Madness
Does he really believe that Canada is a major source of fentanyl? Worse, does he believe that fentanyl smugglers pay tariffs?
But is it all a cover for the real, probably sinister agenda of Trump’s tariff push?
No. There isn’t any secret agenda, devised by people who know that the public story is nonsense. How do I know that? Because who, exactly, do you think is devising this secret agenda?
written before we saw how high the tariffs were and the nonsensical formula used to calculate them, but yeah, this is something you could have said any time in the past decade.
it’s weird how many people seem to want to believe, but maybe not that weird considering how many people believe in providence; they’ll project good intentions and a sound plan even onto brainless Nature. But if you’re actually looking, reason is visible. For any calculated plan, the calculations are written down somewhere. It was interesting for example looking into Tesla’s big success in stationary batteries for the electric grid and seeing that the reasoning behind their early investments has been done in public for almost twenty years. It’s simple arithmetic, but arithmetic has to be done on paper. This kind of thing is always somewhere. Even if not plainly in a company’s PR statements, it may be in investor reports. Even if it’s not in a politician’s speeches, it’s in think tank reports.
The turn to protectionism is not calculated. If it were, you’d be able to see the calculations somewhere. And as Krugman puts it in the post, “There can’t be any secret agenda behind the Trump tariffs, because there’s nobody around Trump with the knowledge or independence to devise such an agenda.”
I think the tariffs only make sense as a prelude to restructuring foreign debt, and while I’ve heard people suggest that’s in the works, given the chaos of the Trump administration I don’t think we can count anything as a “plan” until after it’s actually happened, and sometimes not even then.