Hey Paul I know! Let’s erect a high protective tariff, gut our foreign trade, and make domestic prices shoot through the sky. That’ll solve it.
We don’t need a “high protective tariff”, but if’s foolish not to enact a tariff to prevent labor/environmental arbitrage.
There’s more to this than just protecting the buggy whip manufacturers. As Fiorina explained quite well the other night - regulation favors the entrenched interests. I expect Musk spent way less time on approvals for his “megafactory” than the guy in my town who just erected his own workshop. Why bother with real work anymore? When bright STEM grads are choosing financial service careers over even Silicon Valley, we have a cultural problem.
Silly "unFree trade" propaganda as domestic competition will keep prices down; as it always has. Would protective tariffs cause inflation? In the short term yes, in the long term we survive.