this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2025
213 points (97.8% liked)
Europe
3780 readers
1471 users here now
News and information from Europe 🇪🇺
(Current banner: La Mancha, Spain. Feel free to post submissions for banner images.)
Rules (2024-08-30)
- This is an English-language community. Comments should be in English. Posts can link to non-English news sources when providing a full-text translation in the post description. Automated translations are fine, as long as they don't overly distort the content.
- No links to misinformation or commercial advertising. When you post outdated/historic articles, add the year of publication to the post title. Infographics must include a source and a year of creation; if possible, also provide a link to the source.
- Be kind to each other, and argue in good faith. Don't post direct insults nor disrespectful and condescending comments. Don't troll nor incite hatred. Don't look for novel argumentation strategies at Wikipedia's List of fallacies.
- No bigotry, sexism, racism, antisemitism, dehumanization of minorities, or glorification of National Socialism.
- Be the signal, not the noise: Strive to post insightful comments. Add "/s" when you're being sarcastic (and don't use it to break rule no. 3).
- If you link to paywalled information, please provide also a link to a freely available archived version. Alternatively, try to find a different source.
- Light-hearted content, memes, and posts about your European everyday belong in !yurop@lemm.ee. (They're cool, you should subscribe there too!)
- Don't evade bans. If we notice ban evasion, that will result in a permanent ban for all the accounts we can associate with you.
- No posts linking to speculative reporting about ongoing events with unclear backgrounds. Please wait at least 12 hours. (E.g., do not post breathless reporting on an ongoing terror attack.)
(This list may get expanded when necessary.)
We will use some leeway to decide whether to remove a comment.
If need be, there are also bans: 3 days for lighter offenses, 14 days for bigger offenses, and permanent bans for people who don't show any willingness to participate productively. If we think the ban reason is obvious, we may not specifically write to you.
If you want to protest a removal or ban, feel free to write privately to the mods: @federalreverse@feddit.org, @poVoq@slrpnk.net, or @anzo@programming.dev.
founded 8 months ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Trump is the only person I've ever heard complain about the trade deficit. I don't think even the crazy libertarians ever talked about it. It's just such a weird obsession of his.
Right-libertarians would generally be some of the people most-opposed to barriers to trade. They'd be on the low-barrier end of the political spectrum.
Both Cato and Reason had some articles up, which I linked to earlier, complaining about how tariffs didn't make any economic sense. I thought that it was notable, because Trump was doing a lot of government-size cutting
something that one would expect them to possibly be happy about him, since they'd be the main cheerleaders for a small government
but instead both were just full of attack articles on him, angry about a number of his policies, and especially tariffs.
goes to investigate
It looks like now Reason has created a static "tariffs" section on their front page. The featured items are:
Trump Loves Tariffs. Fentanyl Is Just an Excuse.
In Speech to Congress, Trump Promises More Tariff Madness
Trump's Dramatic Crossroads Between Protectionism and Dynamism
Tariffs Are In Effect. Expect Everything To Become More Expensive.
Cato doesn't have a tariff section, but of their most-recent four blog items, three are complaining about Trump on tariffs:
Freedom, Not Tariff, Is the Most Beautiful Word in the Dictionary
The Drug War Is Failing, So Let’s Try… Tariffs?
Trump’s Tariff Walkback Bows to Economic Reality but Leaves Plenty of Problems
"Even the crazy libertarians" should be the group least concerned with mercantilist tomfoolery.
It's just that the crazier and the more consistent a libertarian is, the less they are interested in mainstream politics and related personalities. It's a hermit ideology in some sense, a full P2P society.
About trade deficit - in general you all are correct, but in specifics it's bad when a country doesn't produce something important or a whole family of something important and imports that something important from potentially hostile nations. That's why before Brezhnev USSR's elite would try very hard to have basic production of every kind of necessary goods inside USSR.
I'm just not sure what they are trying to prepare for and how do they expect to fix the core reasons for production of various things having moved out of the USA>
Yeah, true about the libertarians, they wouldn't be the group that would be talking about that.