Stuff I found interesting or amusing and thought I'd share.
- Sweet Deals, Bitter Costs. Sugar protectionism is an issue I've long been well aware of. Central Mass has a number of candy manufacturers who might be able to stay in business or even increase the workforce if sugar prices came down because of international competition.
- VDH: Why DEI was already dying. He's not wrong.
- From the archives: Richard Feynman and the pleasure of finding things out.
Re sugar protectionism, you're absolutely right -- it benefits a tiny handful of domestic sugar producers and makes the other 340 million of us pay twice as much as we should. (If soft drink manufacturers like Coke and Pepsi are compelled to switch to cane sugar, expect to see those prices go up, too. The reason they adopted high fructose corn sugar in the first place is because it is so much cheaper than cane sugar.) This is a shining example of how trade barriers benefit the few but harm the many. It's ironic that you mention in your F&J article, seemingly with approval, that Apple -- under pressure from the Trump administration and its threat of tariffs -- will be using domestic sources for chips and other components of its devices. Thanks to thus abandoning free trade we can expect the prices of iPhones and Apple watches to go up dramatically.
ReplyDeleteI love a lot of the things Trump is doing but he seems to have a blind spot when it comes to international trade. I think that starting trade wars with tariffs and trade barriers is a catastrophic mistake, one that will have long term effects. I'd invite you and anyone else interested in this topic to browse some of the Youtube videos of Milton Friedman discussing trade and tariffs.
Any time you eat a piece of chocolate know you're overpaying simply so some domestic producers don't have competition.
ReplyDeleteDon't mind the Apple or auto industry reshoring jobs or creating new factories for new products in US mainly because these were products that had jobs shipped overseas so stock prices could go up. Meanwhile our unemployment rates went up and we learned to our detriment how vulnerable our supply chain was because many of these jobs were now in China or elsewhere. Having Apple make chips and new AI plants here is a good thing in my eyes.