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this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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It's not that simple and presenting it as such is disingenuous. Your fellow employee asked an important question, why cant we produce our own stuff? Relying on a frienemy to manufacture what your country needs to function is an extreme oversight of national security. Europe is experiencing that lesson as we speak.
This isn't even even economics 101, this is just what trade is. You have something I need and I have something you need. If we both have extra and we trade, we both win.
So, how about you produce everything you need without anybody's help, subsistence living. Drop your phone drop, your clothes. Go out into the woods, pick your own food and find your own clean water.
Because that is exactly the position Donald Trump has put our whole country in in relation to the rest of the planet.
So, if you don't want to get along with society, if you want to do everything on your own, more power to you. But don't make claims that other folks are being disingenuous because you didn't bother to understand what trade is.
I don't disagree with your point but I think this argument could have been more compelling. The way you've phrase it here almost makes these tariffs sound good to a socialist and we don't want to accidentally push people to the other side. Basically, your intentions are great but execution could have been just a hair better if you don't mind a bit of pedantry from someone who has studied debate for a few years:
A lot of us want to be producing everything we need and giving away/trading what we can. That sounds ideal. We need to be certain how how we do it though. Tariffs are a bandaid to a bigger, more systematic issue. We need to build up the infrastructure required to take care of our people, create the systems to ensure our people are taken care, and export every bit of excess. We also need to make sure people don't say they're going to do that (Like the orange and the melon did) and then turn around and do the opposite (like the orange and the melon did).
If you'd like, I can give you a some more specific pointers on what to say to be more effective as well (bring solutions along with problems)
Hey, democratic socialist here, this does not sound good at all, nor does it sound remotely socialist to me.
That's because you're probably smart enough to hear what they're meaning and not take it at face value. Not everyone is, so we need to pick very careful words. Subsistence living is something that sounds nice to a lot of socialists, so we can't call our enemies policy subsistence living. We need to call it what it really is, isolationism. They didn't build the infrastructure required for subsistence living first
I've never seen subsistence living as a core belief of any large number of socialists. At least, no larger than the average amount of people in the general population that also find subsistence living to be a good idea.
Most socialists understand that many goods can't be fully produced by any one individual, and that we get a benefit from working together as a group. Hell, most of Socialist ideology revolves around groups of workers owning the means of production, and a government/society that shares resources between people to keep everyone as reasonably comfortable as possible.
The notion that subsistence living is something that more socialists would support than the average person isn't exactly something I've seen to be true in my personal experience. In fact, I see a lot more of that on the very much anti-socialist right, what with all the homesteading and "rugged independent man" stereotypes you'll see thrown about over there.
You're right, subsistence living in an individual level is impossible. There's a lot of Americans though, and they could do subsistence living if they worked together. Again, you and I aren't disagreeing. We just need to make sure to use the right words. Even if subsistence living isn't a commonly held thought, it's one with a more positive connotation than Isolationism. We should use words with negative connotations to describe negative bills
All right so you were just being pedantic.
Because my examples did not make it sound appealing lol
And I personally prefer to use neutral words, as folks have a lot of defense mechanisms toward words with negative connotations.
Meaning, they will just tune it out.
Yes, you're right. I'm being pedantic. I should have forewarned that, my bad.
And you're also right that people tend to tune out negative words. At first, sure. But, assuming you're American, I bet I could cause some cognitive dissonance in you if you I use the right ones. Isolationism isn't one of those yet, but in 30 years we need that word to sound the same as "Feudalism"
No you did mention maybe you're being pedantic, that's why I brought it back up. I wasn't trying to be a bitch lol
And yeah, isolationist really is a more accurate term. However I'm thinking that the right has indoctrinated their voter base against it.
I don't have hard evidence for that argument, it's just the vibe I get living here.
I can't say for sure how much indoctrination has happened, but I remember hearing "isolationism" as a sort of bogeyman in history classes. So there's at least that for some people
Because we don't have every resource in the world contained within our small slice of a single continent? Not to mention, it isn't 19-dickety2, so Europe and the rest of the world aren't brain-draining into the US as much as they once were, thanks to local-stability and our newfound US-instability. And, speaking of which, thanks to the morons grabbing the wheel and directing us into a brick wall, well...that brain-drain we benefitted from since the Nazis...yeah, the opposite is happening now. Turns out smart people don't want to live under fascism...weird, I know. Why can't they just hate the same people I hate?!?!?
Assuming the theory that tariffs pushes local manufacturing is true: We could produce our own stuff, but it takes time between the institution of the tariff and when a factory starts producing , so there's still going to be a lot of expensive stuff in the mean time.
More expensive steel (for example) means lots of things like cars get more expensive, which means fewer people can afford them...which means fewer cars to produce...which means less need for related industries (textiles, plastics, rubber, etc.), which (in general) means fewer employees needed to build those cars and supply those related industries....which means more people with less money....which means those people are going to buy fewer things, which means less money for all of the other businesses... and so on. It just spreads. Everything depends on everything else.
You can't just build a factory and start producing say, steel, overnight. And what happens if the tariff is dropped right after you finish your factory? You're going to get hosed, so it's a huge risk - especially with someone as inconsistent as Trump.