The beauty of a trade war, if you can call it that, is that it’s waged by men who have never had to balance a checkbook but believe they can balance a nation’s economy with the stroke of a pen. They sit in their offices, fat and bloated with the power of regulation, puffed up on their own delusions of control, signing orders like old drunks writing bad checks, convinced that reality bends to their whims. And this time, the grand idea—the masterstroke of economic brilliance—is to slap tariffs on everything that moves and call it victory.

Ah yes, tariffs, the old game of punishing your own people and calling it strength. The grand lie told with a straight face by the kind of bureaucrats who have never produced a damn thing in their lives but think they know how business works. The lie is simple: raise the cost of imported goods, and suddenly American companies will rise from their graves like Lazarus, strong and mighty, creating jobs, making America great again. Except reality doesn’t work that way, never has, never will. But that’s the thing about governments—they don’t have to live in reality. They only have to sell the illusion long enough to win another election.

And so, the man who buys his morning coffee for a buck twenty-nine finds it creeping up to a buck fifty, then a buck seventy-five, and he doesn’t know why. He just knows he’s working the same job for the same wage, and somehow, he’s getting less for it. The grocer, the car dealer, the factory owner—they all feel it too, because tariffs are just taxes with a prettier name. Not on China. Not on Mexico. Not on the big bad foreigners who supposedly deserve to be “punished.” No. The tax lands right here. On the factory floor. On the grocery aisle. On the bill for that new washing machine that costs twenty percent more today than it did last month.

But the government tells him not to worry. It’s for the greater good. He’s suffering for America. It’s all part of the grand economic strategy of national strength. Strength, they say, comes from cutting yourself off, from shutting the doors and making everything within your own borders, never mind that no economy in history has ever flourished that way. Never mind that even the Roman Empire, in all its arrogance, collapsed when it started believing it could sustain itself on mandates and arrogance alone.

The truth—the ugly, simple, economic truth—is that trade must balance. You cannot consume what you do not produce, and you cannot sell what no one can afford to buy. When you tax imports, you make goods more expensive. When goods get more expensive, wages don’t magically rise to meet them. The worker doesn’t suddenly have more in his paycheck just because steel costs more. He just gets poorer. But it gets worse. The moment you slap tariffs on the world, the world slaps them right back at you. Suddenly, American farmers find their crops have nowhere to go. The soybean man is sitting on acres of crops that China no longer wants. The steel manufacturer who thought he was getting a break realizes too late that now his biggest buyers are looking elsewhere—Brazil, India, anywhere but here.

And what does the government do? Bailouts. That’s the next step in this little tragedy. The same government that created the problem now steps in to “fix” it with subsidies. So they take more money from the taxpayers, throw it at the industries they just crippled, and call it supporting the American worker. As if robbing Peter to pay Paul is some kind of grand economic strategy instead of the idiotic cycle of destruction it always has been.

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S. Tominaga AKA CSW
Mar 20, 2025
https://x.com/CsTominaga/status/1902635061008330882?t=aF7E5S8cw-ITCFU6PBMZaw&s=19

https://t.me/S_Tominaga/2710