Carryfast:
Rjan:
If I’m not mistaken, it is Trump himself that began the talk of import duties! And although the British steel industry is not what it was in the 1970s, we stand to lose out as much from Trump’s mooted tariffs as Germany does. Or is Trump your daddy, beyond criticism?
No surprise you’re all for free markets when it suits you.
I don’t have to accept his premises to point out that he’s contradicting them, unless his real argument is that US steelworkers are having a hard time and that UK steelworkers can afford to take a haircut to share the burden and redress our obvious privilege against the long-suffering US worker and the spare-a-dime US economy.
It’s actually American workers who’ve rightly voted in Trump in the hope that he’ll do something about the one sided trading relationship between Europe among others and the US.Europe in this case being all about the interests of Germany and Brits actually being on the same side as US workers in that regard.
The US is on it’s own side, singularly. The reason it is contemplating tariffs is because of China, not Germany, and the reason it’s running a huge trade deficit and has seen it’s manufacturing capacity shrivel, is precisely because it’s preferred to wage class war against US workers for the past 40 years, whilst offshoring a huge chunk of its jobs and industry to China and running a huge trade deficit with them.
And because the Chinese are not fools and use their state to manage the economy strategically - and in a manner that is clearly and steadily bettering their citizens and society every single year - that’s why the US is left with a problem. It has spent 40 years participating in the rapid betterment of the Chinese worker, to enable it to wage war against it’s own workers and privilege the interest of American capital and profit (which continues to gain spectacularly from the arrangements, which is why the Republicans are up in arms at Trump’s tariff proposals).
And to be clear, I’m not against a system of tariffs in principle. What is dangerous is when the working class fail to confront the rich or locate the problem in other nations rather than the class war that the rich are waging, and an entire set of nations then turn to ■■■-for-tat and beggar-thy-neighbour tariffs, which simply then hit the workers in every nation (because the rich, still unconfronted, are in a position to ensure profits are protected and that workers shoulder the economic costs of a tariff war).
Germans don’t buy UK or US products but the Germans expect to have carte blanche to flood the markets of UK and America with German products with trade figures proving the scam.On that note it’s a lot easier for Americans to buy Mercedes and BMW’s in the US for example than it is for us to buy US cars with bs EU type approval and tariff and quota barriers put up against them.While it’s not much good us expecting to sell our products to Americans if Americans don’t have jobs to afford to buy them because their industry has been wiped out by too many imports.
Indeed, but why is it our fault that Europe has safe, efficient cars that comply with standards? Thus, our cars can be sold over there, whereas their gas-guzzling junk finds little market over here. That’s aside from the fact that the US internal market is comparable in size to the entire EU, and the US is very much more car-centric, and with that marketplace entirely under the control of the US government, it’s not as though their carmakers are being starved out. By any logic, the fact that the EU has higher standards (which are presumably costly for us to comply with), ought to put us at a disadvantage in selling cars in the US, all other things being equal.
Also, they already have the political freedom that the right-wing Brexiteers claim Europe has taken from us, and yet their workers have done even worse than those in Europe in the past 40 years (unless you’re the type that likes to work long hours for low pay) - simply because, as a nation, they subscribe even more slavishly to the principle of free markets, and as the Soviet ideological threat has receded the American state no longer has to demonstrate to its workers that capitalism is superior.
The US remains the most powerful nation on Earth, with the wealthiest economy in the world, rich in all the natural resources it requires, and it’s problems are decisively of its own making.