The mental midgets we lovingly call Free Traitors are some of the stupidest people on earth.
A tariff is a tax.
When you tax something, you get less of it.
Taxes raise the cost of an item.
That raises costs for all producers who use that item. Take car companies, for example. If it costs them more to buy steel, they buy less steel and/or they raise prices on their products.
Buying less of the raw materials (in this case steel) means less production, lower sales, fewer people working for the company. Then they have less money to buy other products and we get less of those, which sets off this circle again.
Raising the price of your product means fewer people buy it. Reduced sales means reduced payroll, which again leaves fewer people working, reducing purchasing power in the economy as a whole. Our standard of living is lowered.
Then the politicians see this and they tax those who are still working, of whom there will be fewer, to provide benefits for the ones who are no longer working, and to subsidize the companies lest their failure collapse the economy. (Never mind that the policy that put them in that spot does the same thing.)
If that’s the world you want, then you should support tariffs. In fact, I’d make a similar argument to the minimum wage. If a 10 percent tariff is good, why not have a 200 percent tariff?
But if that’s not the economy and world you want, then we need to stop this protectionism, this modern mercantilism, before it can do its damage.