Trump Promises a “100% Tariff” on Cars Made Outside the US

Tariffs are just another scam. Not because they restrict unnecessary and harmful "trade" activities, no, not because of that.

Unnecessary and harmful "trade" activities can just be BANNED. But there's no profit in banning, not for the government, in taxes, and not for the capitalists on either side of the "trade", which takes place merely between THEMSELVES, regardless of what "country" they "trade" between.

In the final transaction, it is the purchaser or "consumer" of the end-product who suffers in many ways. Let's us count just SOME of the ways the end-product purchaser suffers in the laissez-faire, BIG GOV + BIG BIZ tag-team against the citizen scam.

1) Offshoring of jobs in all phases, from raw materials to manufacturing to machines necessary for manufacturing, labor, and municipal taxes and local businesses which all suffer from the exodus of industrial and commercial infrastructures in their local communities.
2) Loss of self-sufficiency in both immediately-available goods, and in skills required to produce them.
3) Loss of local and state tax revenues from incomes and from real estate.
4) Attenuation of local small businesses who cannot compete effectively, and cannot service factories which are no longer there.

How do international, globalist banks and corporations, financial entities such as stock market underwriters and foreign elites benefit from this?

1) By gaining access to our domestic market.
2) By setting up in countries with weak or non-existent labor and environmental laws.
3) By using their wealth to bribe and pre-select our politicians who write our laws for us.
4) By flooding the marketplace with non-local, non-regional, non-indigenous megacorps.
5) By raiding the bankrupted domestic companies of their assets, converting those real estate assets into residential and office buldings they charge rent on.
6) By convincing politicians that the higher taxes from tariffs and import duties are "good" for the public trough, which only results in bigger government and larger spending, more military commitments to make those other countries "safe for democracy", and "reliable" trading partners.

I could go on but you should have the idea.

A real solution in specific cases is to simply pass a law PROHIBITING the import of "x", or the export of "y". Prohibiting, say, the import of Chinese cars costs nothing to anyone, and has only positive effects, unlike tariffs. Prohibiting, say, the export of natural gas would only lower the prices for Americans, and keep domestic fuel abundant, inexpensive, and available. But no. Laissez-faire capitalists do not want any of these good results. Not good for the average people. They want BIG GOV and BIG BIZ because they come to control BOTH via their money power. That's where we are. A separate and unanswerable great power of uber-capitalists have taken over because they brainwashed people into thinking that what's good for them is good for the masses. The scam is similar to the graduated income-tax scam, which does nothing but increase asset values, inflation of currency, concentration of wealth, and growth of government by proxy, the hidden hand of international high finance families - an exceptionally limited number of people.

Americans used to understand these things, and they used to discuss them. That was before the indoctrination and dilution of our identity. So, I'm here to tell you.. tariffs are bad, but unrestricted free trade is the fountain of pain that made tariffs appear to have benefits in the first place. True protectionism is good, costs nothing, has only benefits, and brought health to this country. Sadly, it ceased to exist, and now we're an empire of the banking establishment that conquered us, and our institutions defend that high council which seeks to conquer the whole world, and use our military and our people power as a its battering ram, seeking to ultimately knock down that last castle of resistance... so that they may enjoy a permanent hegemony over all mankind.
 
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Exactly the globalist plan.
Then all countries involved can be forced into submission through trade warfare.
Understood in the scheme of things. From Americas perspective, with all our resources, why should we fear any markets in a trade war?
 
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If anything you said were true, then the 1980s and 1990s would have been the era of the best American cars. Was it?

Yes, in many ways it was.

By the late 1990s engineers had managed to comply with most all government mandates, while at the same time not making cars too complex or overly reliant on computer systems.

A late 90s American car or truck was well built, durable, economical, with good performance, and most importantly, was still affordable.
 
You're typing on a computer made in china. If we stopped trading with china your standard of living would probably be cut in half. The average person would have to sell their house and their second car and move to an apartment just to afford food.

Name one protectionist success story in history.

Americans could probably figure out how to build computers.

Might even get them off of welfare.

But, that's not part of the plan.

A late 90s American car or truck was well built, durable, economical, with good performance, and most importantly, was still affordable.

And then they were deemed "clunkers."
 
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Understood in the scheme of things. From Americas perspective, with all our resources, why should we fear any markets in a trade war?

Because we outlaw slavery and our middle and labor classes built themselves a good seat at the bargaining table, this means places like China can always undercut us on labor costs to throw our society into chaos and destroy our industries so we become dependent.
Having all our resources means we have even less need or benefit from trade and more downside, it's places with few or no resources like Singapore that need trade and are forced to become dependent on other countries to survive.
 
You're typing on a computer made in china. If we stopped trading with china your standard of living would probably be cut in half. The average person would have to sell their house and their second car and move to an apartment just to afford food.

Name one protectionist success story in history.

Bunk, the standard of living has only fallen since we opened up free trade.
The average American has to go into far more debt to pay for the basics of life.
Prices may fall but wages have fallen far more.

Protectionist Success Stories: UK, US, Germany, Japan, South Korea, China.
More here: http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?562373-Against-Free-Trade
 
If anything you said were true, then the 1980s and 1990s would have been the era of the best American cars. Was it?


  • The entire point of tariffs is to artificially raise prices. If you didn't need to raise the price to compete, then you wouldn't need the tariff.
  • No tariff has ever been designed to create "lower profits to the foreigners," whatever that means. A tariff that doesn't price competition our of the market is a useless tariff.
  • Other domestic companies will also price their products accordingly in order to maximize the benefits they receive from the tariff. Why compete when you have a government-approved, government-enacted price cartel?
Regulations that destroyed domestic competitors to the Big 3 Detroit Automakers and prevented the creation of new ones were responsible for any drop in quality in the 80s and 90s, and cars back then were much better than they are now.

Tariffs are taxes and some foreign competitors do lower their prices to compensate for them, the Chinese did that in response to Trump's tariffs.
But it is desirable to discourage foreign companies from displacing domestic industry, so if they are high enough to do that it is a success.
But they don't have to completely eliminate trade, if they did they would not provide revenue and we would have to have other less desirable taxes.
As long as domestic companies dominate our market they can respond to any embargoes or other attempts to make us dependent or submit to globalist demands.

Other domestic companies will only collude if there are too few of them because of government regulations or foreign trade warfare.
In an internal free market they will compete for marketshare and drive prices down.
You also don't get to pretend that the small number of international size corporations don't collude under free trade, that problem is the same either way but is easier to deal with when tariffs enable lots of domestic competition than when unfree nations like China use trade warfare to shrink the number of companies in an industry.
 

Free trade makes big government tolerable because people can still buy things while mortgaging the farm and selling the herd to pay for it.
By the time people can no longer afford anything it is too late and they have no money to resist big government.
If we had protectionism the government couldn't dare regulate our industries out of business, there would be uprisings of people who could get what they needed.
 
Regulations that destroyed domestic competitors to the Big 3 Detroit Automakers and prevented the creation of new ones were responsible for any drop in quality in the 80s and 90s, and cars back then were much better than they are now.

That's interesting, considering all that started in the fifties and the task was done by the eighties. And because cars were crappier in the seventies than in the nineties.

If we had protectionism the government couldn't dare regulate our industries out of business, there would be uprisings of people who could get what they needed.

Lord.

If we had government protection it would protect us from government.

More "liberty protecting authoritarianism"...
 
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Free trade makes big government tolerable because people can still buy things while mortgaging the farm and selling the herd to pay for it.
By the time people can no longer afford anything it is too late and they have no money to resist big government.
If we had protectionism the government couldn't dare regulate our industries out of business, there would be uprisings of people who could get what they needed.


 
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Free trade makes big government tolerable because people can still buy things while mortgaging the farm and selling the herd to pay for it.
By the time people can no longer afford anything it is too late and they have no money to resist big government.
If we had protectionism the government couldn't dare regulate our industries out of business, there would be uprisings of people who could get what they needed.
Are you sure?
 

Yeah but your cause and effect is wrong. During most of that time we didn't even have an income tax. The US was by far the most free economic country in the world. Our government was tiny. That's why we became an economic power. Not because we had tariffs. I'll agree that a tariff may be the least damaging way to fund government. So if you want to massively cut government spending and eliminate the income tax then yeah, a tariff might be best.

Bottom 10 countries ranked by trade freedom (heritage economic freedom index)

North Korea
Sudan
Bhutan
Venezuela
Barbados
Central African Republic
Chad
Equatorial Guinea
The Bahamas
Burundi

Top 10 countries ranked by trade freedom

Singapore
New Zealand
Australia
Mauritius
Taiwan
Switzerland
Liechtenstein
Georgia
Bahrain
Norway


And of course Ron Paul is against protectionism:

"Today the policy of protectionism is again gaining favor in Congress, and in other countries. But it must be fought with all our strength.

Not only does protectionism make everyone poorer—except certain special interests—but it also increases international tensions, and can lead to war."


https://mises.org/mises-wire/ron-paul-case-free-trade
 
Yeah but your cause and effect is wrong. During most of that time we didn't even have an income tax. The US was by far the most free economic country in the world. Our government was tiny. That's why we became an economic power. Not because we had tariffs. I'll agree that a tariff may be the least damaging way to fund government. So if you want to massively cut government spending and eliminate the income tax then yeah, a tariff might be best.

We were not talking about income taxes, we were talking about tariffs.

As a matter of fact I do want to massively cut government spending and eliminate the income tax.

If we, as nation, could find the political will to do these five things, we would see an economic and manufacturing boom the likes of which the world has never seen before:

1 - Enact an across the board 30 percent import duty on everything.

2 - Eliminate personal income taxation.

3 - Audit the Fed and return to sound money.

4 - Regulatory and tort reforms/control/eliminations.

5 - Encourage and participate in private funded apprenticeship programs such as the Mike Rowe Works foundation, to encourage young people to dismiss the high cost and low return of a collage degree and go directly into training and working in the trades and skilled craftsmen professions.
 
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And of course Ron Paul is against protectionism:

"Today the policy of protectionism is again gaining favor in Congress, and in other countries. But it must be fought with all our strength.

Not only does protectionism make everyone poorer—except certain special interests—but it also increases international tensions, and can lead to war."

I was a Pat Buchanan "America First" man, long before I was a Ron Paul "libertarian" man.

While I have supported Ron completely in all his campaigns and efforts, I do think he is wrong about this.

In Buchanan's book "The Great Betrayal" he lays out very clearly how managed and so called "free trade" policies have destroyed the middle class and US manufacturing.

Having seen it unfold through my lifetime, I happen to agree.
 
We were not talking about income taxes, we were talking about tariffs.

As a matter of fact I do want to massively cut government spending and eliminate the income tax.

If we, as nation, could find the political will to do these five things, we would see an economic and manufacturing boom the likes of which the world has never seen before:

1 - Enact an across the board 30 percent import duty on everything.

Yes, because we must not not fund the federal government. That way it will find other ingenious ways to grow itself all over again.
 
Yes, because we must not not fund the federal government. That way it will find other ingenious ways to grow itself all over again.

I'm all for that as well.

One of the primary missions of the FedGov is to protect the country against invasion, and it is obviously failing at that point.

Fack, it's promoting the invasion.
 
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