Will tariffs bring back industrial production?

Are there even Americans left to work in these new factories?

The current government administration is imposing some pretty wild tariffs on imported goods. The idea is simple: if goods made in China and elsewhere are more expensive, corporations will build factories in the U.S. and bring back manufacturing, since it’ll be economically viable to do this.

It’s a decent hypothesis, but it misses a pretty major trend that has happened in this country, and throughout Western civilization in general: people here don’t want factory jobs.

Factory jobs are hard. They’re dirty, they’re dangerous. You’re much more likely to get injured operating a chop saw than you are operating a computer keyboard (although computer use brings about a certain kind of long-term injury of its own).

After decades of moving these dirty and dangerous jobs overseas, the odds of successfully bringing them back to the U.S. are extremely low. Even though many factories are mechanized with robots and high-tech assembly lines, you still need people. And who is going to work at these factory jobs? The social media-addicted teenagers and young adults who need their instant dopamine hit at the click of a button? They want to be celebrities and social media influencers, not factory workers.

You might argue it doesn’t matter what they want, what matters is what jobs are available - but the follow-up question is, want or not, are these people even capable of doing the labor? These kinds of jobs require an entirely different upbringing. Both in terms of work ethic, physical endurance, and mental fortitude. A population that for decades has had its attention span and grit eroded and replaced with instant gratification and easy air-conditioned office jobs is unlikely to form a good labor pool for re-industrialization.

I suppose we could recruit factory workers from all of those immigrants, who often have better work ethics as they came from poorer countries with fewer luxuries. Oh wait - we’re in the process of deporting them.

In an ideal scenario, the U.S. would not have become so dependent on cheap communist labor in countries like China, and would have continued to produce at home, perhaps with the use of more automation and less harsh work - but now that this trend has all but entirely happened, with “Made in the U.S.A.” a rarity across virtually every product group, and given that this trend has happened over the past 2 generations, can we really expect a reversal to work?

Here’s what I think will happen: a few corporations will successfully bring back some production. In poorer areas where there’s still some desire for these factory jobs, they’ll be able to make some good ol’ Made in America goods. But by and large the effect of the tariffs will be:

1. Increased prices and therefore increased poverty for the middle and lower classes.

2. Decreased international cooperation leading to more tension and war.

I want to focus on the second point for a moment.

Why have China and the U.S. been in a strained but generally peaceful relationship for the past 35 years? Because of trade.

There are more millionaires in the communist party than there are in the U.S. congress. A lot of so-called Chinese communists have made millions or even billions off of the capital investments and trade that have happened because of international cooperation.

It should come as no surprise that when politicians can make tons of money during peacetime, they have no need of war. That’s what we want. We want politicians (even the corrupt ones) to have more wealth from peace than from war. The moment that equation changes - for instance due to sudden high tariffs that destroy international trade - we’re in big trouble.

Although China has danced around Taiwan for decades with military drills and threats, they’ve never made a move. TSMC, the corporation that produces virtually every electronic chip in the world, has been too profitable of an enterprise for the Chinese to risk destroying, which an invasion of Taiwan likely would.

But with tariffs killing the international trade goose that laid the golden anti-war egg (excuse the long-winded metaphor), I can see things changing rapidly.

The tariffs aren’t going to reduce the U.S. dependence on foreign goods. What they will do is reduce the dependence of other countries on U.S. good will. Why keep the Americans happy (e.g. by not invading Taiwan) if you can’t trade with them anyway?

We’re in dangerous territory folks. As Bastiat once said, “When goods don’t cross borders, soldiers will.”

These tariffs, far from making America stronger, will simply accelerate its collapse by making its people poorer and harming its security. The idea that a top-down government crackdown on trade will reverse decades of cultural decadence and decline is absurd. The ship has sailed. All the government can do now is accelerate the collapse.