“”a fool’s errand to think you’re going to be able to get China to change the fundamentals of their economic model by poking them in the eye with some tariffs.””
Anyone that thinks this is what Trump is doing ... is a fool.
If the tariffs be the “errand of fools” that Pete Buttigieg claims it to be, then why are the Chinese being driven to comply with the new strategy? The Chinese could solve this all within a week, if they were not so compelled by their own vision of becoming the new superpower in single domination of the world.
The Chinese have come far, it is true, compared to the China of 1950. But they are still in an economic model that was obsolete before World War II, the paternalistic nation-state that harnessed the power of enterprise and mass consumerism for the benefit of the State rather than give the innovators the reasonable expectation of being rewarded for clever adaption of new and existing principles of “how things work”. Command-and-control is an institution as old as human society once it rose above the tribal level, and it has been the source of most of the devastation visited upon this planet in the last coupe of centuries.
The American Experience was as notable for the restraints it LIFTED against imagination and innovation, and allowing the products of this imagination and innovation to bring fame and monetary reward to the entrepreneur, as all the high-minded platitudes about “freedom, liberty, and justice for all”.
Sure, some people get very wealthy. But money, wealth, is a very fungible and highly plastic commodity, and the greater degree to which it is accumulated, the more easily the FLOW of money is available to the great masses of people. Money is not static, but INCREASES in value the more it is made available on an equitable (not :equal”) basis to the widest number of people.
Sure, some people DO get left behind. But the greater mischief here is to penalize the highly successful and arbitrarily redistribute the flow of wealth, not to compound its growth and power, but to artificially increase the “buying power” of the have-nots, without also making a pointed and reasonable effort to educate the class of “have-nots” in the basic economics and the means by which they may participate in and further increase the size of the pie to be divided up.
If you’re not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.