It’s quite fun because while this will hurt China the Chinese state can still actually do things, and the Chinese economy can still make things. Neither of which is true for the US outside the key industries of Tech grifting, corn so unprofitable a 1960s soviet agriculturalist would reject it, and genocide supplies.
Honestly it might even end up being good for them in the medium term to be divorced from the US.
Yes, great time to build up domestic demand and raise living standards in China.
It also just provides an impetus for the state to further restrict capital, it’s a state of exception.
Oh yes, that would be great!
If they negotiate and this fizzles out the nothing ever happens gang will be insufferable
I don’t think Trump’s ego can let him back down on this.
What’s the over/under till he gets JFK’d? 3 months?
IDK, he’s got the devil’s luck. There’s already been two failed attempts (that we know about)
The one we didn’t hear about was a successful attempt, and he has since been replaced by his Disney Hall of Presidents animatronic. Thus far, no one has been able to tell the difference.
Wait but…
That animatronic is actually a hastily rebuilt Hillary Clinton animatronic.
If Trump’s been replaced by that animatronic, then that means IT’S HER TURN!
Three if you count the British guy in Las Vegas the first time around grabbing a cop’s gun
This is what I keep wondering. A lot of extremely powerful people are losing a lot of money right now. They have the ability to get rid of him by throwing massive amounts of money at people behind the scenes. Time will tell. I think the powers that be are still very much in a weather the storm wait and see stance, and I can’t honestly guess how long they feel like they’ll be able to. Once they feel like they’re almost at the end of what they can sustain then we’ll see a violent change.
It’s my turn
But actually I feel like this is why SV elite wanted JD Vance as vp. For a backup in case Trump doesn’t work out
I figured Trump’s mostly doing this to bring those powerful “domestic” actors to the table, right? He’s consolidating power for something worse, probably.
I think there is a lot they can do before resorting to that. They haven’t even turned the propaganda machine against Trump yet. They could pay off congress to impeach him.
Me neither, also after JD Vance publicly called Chinese people peasants, I don’t think the CPC will back down at all and they can easily get the public on their side by just playing that clip on national TV. Meanwhile tariffs being unpopular in the US will only make Trump double down.
I think this is only going to stop escalating when the American bourgeoisie forcibly stop Trump from escalating.
from my admittedly limited conversations with irl Chinese people I think they have been ready to rumble for a few years now, I think America is severely underestimating their will and drive to avenge past humiliations. I keep thinking about this event that happened a couple years ago:
The incident happened Saturday at Lujiang Middle School in Anhui province, some 400km west of Shanghai. A video clip posted on social media shows a student walking onto the stage, taking a microphone from a professor and shouting, “He only has money in his eyes, thinks learning is just for money, worships the West and panders to overseas powers.”
“For what purpose do we study hard? It’s for the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation!” he added, echoing a phrase popularized by President Xi Jinping. “Do not cross-breed with Americans!” the student also said.
Libs will say Xi is just brainwashing the children or whatever but we know better. They know their own history, and these really want this next fight to show the world just how far they’ve come.
Thinking about the opening to the blowback ep in the Korea season where the Americans are just crushing turkey dinner at Thanksgiving and the hardened PLA fighters are hiding in the hills with a small bag of oats and sneakers on in subzero weather.
That revolutionary spirit is still very much alive. We would get our asses handed to us just by virtue of the fact that they own the means of production even if we were equally treat brained. But Trump is also dramatically underestimating the human will to sacrifice for a noble cause, which this very much is. They dont only have the means they also have solidarity, and a state that would be willing and incentivized to act with tools like price controls or direct subsidies. US doesn’t stand a chance.
don’t cross-breed with Americans
hmmm
I saw a shirt with a peace hand signal in a shenzhen shopping mall with the text “double peace love fingertip” this stuff doesn’t necessarily translate 1:1
It can. Look at what he crumpled into when the took his Twitter away.
That’s because without twitter, he wasnt able to scream at people as easily.
At least one country that’s willing to actually put up a fight against Amerikkka.
I wonder when the light bulb is finally going to turn on over Trump’s head containing what is effectively Trump’s jellybean sized brain. And Trump’s going to finally realize that “Oh, shit. I can’t beat China in trade war or a currency war. Bad. Very, very bad.”
After speaking with many very smart people (the best!), I’m starting to think maybe - just MAYBE - you can’t actually win a trade war with China. They have too many factories, too much stuff. Not fair! I was set up! Who knew economics could be this complicated???
Trump doesnt think he has ever lost anything, even though his businesses have failed many times. He’s always correct and always the expert on everything.
I think we need to abandon the “he is bad at business, look how many bankruptcies he has had” because it distorts what is really going on and also assumes that he is the same as what we were taught in school both about business people and heads of states/governments, which is a specious assumption. When we assume that the business owner’s goal is to have a successful and profitable business and, therefore, Trump is bad at being a business owner, we miss the fact that Trump’s (and modern finance capital’s) version of business is to suck the value out for personal gain and leave an empty husk behind, which they put into bankruptcy, leaving the creditors holding the bag. “Trump’s businesses failed” but Trump succeeded (the old Monorail scam).
Likewise, we assume that Trump’s interests with the US align with the long-term well being of the US. Like his bankrupt businesses, Trump can personally succeed while the US completely fails. He doesn’t care that he might lose a trade war or a currency war because the US and the US people are the losers in that, while he still plans to personally come out on top of whatever mountain is left in the aftermath. It’s just like all the tech-bro billionaires building
bunkers to go live in in other countries - their plan is to leave behind a hollow husk of the US and take all their gains to their personal libertarian paradise. They still “win” even though the US and the rest of the people there completely lose.Hey, that’s what my lib friends say about me except I am actually always right.
wonder when the light bulb is finally going to turn on
What light bulbs? Nobody in the USA can afford light bulbs anymore.
I’m starting to think that decoupling from China is precursor to war. Decoupling after declaring war would cripple the US military machine so maybe this is a gamble to get their house in order before some bigger offensive.
It’s certainly a necessary precedent to war, but thats because the US needs to establish supply chains independent of China in order to wage war without destroying their economy. Instead they’re just destroying their economy, making them even less capable of waging that war in the first place.
Well they are very stupid, that’s true. If they wanted to decouple from China then the smart thing would be to not crash their economy and piss off every single imperial trading partner.
with a side benefit of having lots of unemployed people in the states to press into military service
That’s the official reasoning even. They say it’s to make the “defense” industry more independent. And whether planned or not, it increases the likelihood of global war:
A similar thing happened in the lead up to the great depression and World War II: faced with a recession, the ruling class turned to protectionism with the Tariff Act of 1930. With the very high tarrifs, the recession worsened into the Great Depression until World War II saved the economy by enabling mass employment.
War is great for the capitalist class, if they want to win some time against an economic crisis, because it’s a way to have mass government spending without cutting into anyones profits. If value gets created by a not for-profit entity in any sector, profits go down, because businesses who need to make a profit can’t compete. Capitalists love war, because it only destroys value instead.
It’s the golden triple chance for profit: first accumulation by dispossession (taxes and austerity to finance the war effort flowing directly to weapons manufacturers), then imperialism (opening new markets, stealing resources), then restarting the production cycle (lucrative contracts for rebuilding efforts after everything is destroyed).
Leftists reaction to the tarrifs must be to shift organizing to focus more strongly on anti war efforts.
I’m gonna start learning Mandarin.
I’m still learning Spanish (well over 1000 hours at this point…) but if I ever learned a third it would be Mandarin. But damn now that I know what an undertaking learning a language is and that Mandarin will probably take at least twice as long… probably won’t do it unless I want to move to China or they invade or something
I’m hoping they invade or something…
Ni hao! Zhao huo le!
China slaps
So true
I remember learning about comparative advantage and opportunity cost, thinking it was the dumbest shit in the world. Now we get to see why 😈
How is opportunity cost dumb? Even playing strategy games as a kid, I understood it. “Oh if I spend this money on a tank I can’t use it for a helipad or a defense tower, so I need to figure out which of those options is the best use for it.”
In the context of macroeconomics, it refers to the idea that even if a country could make everything they need internally, it is ultimately cheaper for everyone if regions just specialized in producing stuff that they do better/cheaper than anyone else, and trade for the rest.
In a very simplistic sense, if Country A and Country B are each able to produce all the food and all the clothing that they need internally, but Country A is way better at making food and than clothing, and vice versa for Country B, it would make sense for Country A to just focus on producing a ton of food and import their clothing needs. Then everyone gets more stuff overall.
However, this implies that there are no geopolitical frictions between Country A and Country B. It works if countries can maintain friendly trade relations, but can make supply lines real fragile.
Also as homhom9000 says, sometimes “specializing” gets really stupidly specific.
It also doesn’t account for the common situation where a country could do something more cheaply internally if they had a decade or two to spool shit up.
See China where it’s gone from a comparative advantage in coal and not much else, to cheap manufacturing, to high tech manufacturing, to universal comparative advantage.
It’s all about actually having the capital. China understood the assignment and put itself in a position to attract capital and gain that comparative advantage, now it’s all paying out supremely.
they do better/cheaper than anyone else, and trade for the rest.
This is absolute advantage. Comparative advantage is when a country can make something relatively cheaper then the other goods. So if a country A can make a coat for 10 tögrög and a bicycle for 20 tögrög, while a country B can make both for 30 tögrög, it means that the country B has comparative advantage in making bicycles and it would be more profitable for both if country B makes bicycles and trades for coats with country A.
What if country A doesn’t produce that much at all and instead just prints dollars, then uses it’s military to force everyone to trade oil and everything else in dollars enjoying a steady flow of goods and services in exchange for cheap paper? And what if country A then suddenly reverses course (because other countries start to move away from the dollar anyway) and tries to cash in on this flow, while it’s still going, with high tariffs?
So much of undergrad macroecon classes is built on the idea that everyone plays nice and fair with each other.
You know, a fantasy land.
Opportunity cost to justify comparative advantage is dumb, not Opportunity cost in general.
Edit: “Moving my banana slicing factory to Thailand and picking the bananas in Brazil to sell to Canada has a better comparative advantage than slicing the bananas while they’re in Brazil” like that
Yeah you’re right because in that case it’s not really a difference in the marginal costs that motivates the spreading out of the supply chain (on the contrary, having to transport the goods around adds a lot of overhead) but the colonialist need to keep each place from being self-sufficient.
However, you shouldn’t throw out the baby with the bath water. Marxist economists still consider comparative advantage because means of production aren’t equal in each country. From Chapter 10 of Towards a New Socialism (from 1993 so this comparison is outdated):
The German clothing industry can probably produce garments with less labor than the Chinese clothes industry. The German car industry can certainly produce cars with less labor than would be needed if they were made by backstreet workshops in Shanghai. In both cases Germany has a productivity advantage over China, but it is nonetheless economical to export Mercedes to China and to import cotton goods to Germany. This arises because of the greater relative productivity of the German car industry. Compared with hand assembly, the highly automated car factories of Mercedes may give, say, a five-fold improvement in productivity; with the rag trade the scope for improvements in productivity is not so dramatic. Although a German clothing firm might be more efficient, the advantage would not be so great as for the car industry. It thus pays Germany to concentrate its labor force in those engineering industries where it has the greatest advantage.
Of course, Cockshott goes on to develop a theory of how this structure actually works when the ratio of demand for the various commodities inevitably doesn’t match the productive capacity of both economies. The point is, though, that even if we did away with exploitation we’d still have a situation where it makes more sense to do certain kinds of production in one economy due to unequal means of production that lead to comparative advantage.
also obligatory Cockshott is a TERF disclaimer
I don’t disagree that there can be a benefit, thanks for the source, but in Keynesian economics comparative advantage is mostly used to justify colonial power over smaller nation states. Local industries are undercut for profit, once the “profitable” production is moved elsewhere(assuming they have the means) nations states are saddled with whatever was decided to be profitable for them to produce instead. It pigeon holes nation states into capitalist set industries that are mostly only advantageous for profit/productivity. What happens if the means of production is given the opportunity to equalize? At the same time, we all don’t have to produce the same thing either.
I can’t remember where I was reading this, I think in Palo Alto, but there was discussion about before colonialism many countries were known for certain things. Like India and textiles or China and pottery, Rugs in west Asia, but as countries were thrusted into global economics and with technological advancments, these profitable industries became no more, devastating economies. In it’s place, is what’s advantageous,most profitable, and productive to the ownership class.
Naturally this is already in place and we can’t go back, nor would it be advantageous to, but we shouldn’t rebuild colonialism for productivity.
So glad I splurged and bought that comb last week instead of waiting. Now I can have fresh hair while I laugh at line go down.
Now I can have fresh hair
Long live the People’s Hair!
but it’s 
no more half measures walter
Even if Trump did undo all these stupid tariffs, the damage is already done.
Countries need stable trade partners, and the US is no longer trustworthy. Therefore, countries will developing stable trade relationships that exclude the US.
