There's a lot of examples like this. Coffee, and bananas come to mind. You can only grow those in Hawaii, or maybe Flordia, and there's absolutely not enough land to sate our imports. The whole theory behind international trade is that some countries do things well and others don't. In the case of food the reality is more that others can't.
Want to put tariffs on Chinese electric cars or batteries? Ok, fine. But tariffs on all imports? It's the most brain dead policy in my lifetime. I can't think of any products that are produced 100% domestically without any foreign inputs. These tariffs will drive up the price of just about everything.
There's no other rationale for this other than thinking this.
In return for a minor reprieve, you ensure your factory bathrooms and hiring policies are aligned with the president's agenda, among many other things. This can be a cudgel over the heads of the Apples and Costcos of this country who dare to defy the edicts of POTUS on social policy.
The problem is not so much that people don't like doing such things - they get by - it's that, at some point, enough people will start getting more favours than you do, and you'll start feeling the need to stage a coup, which is a lot of work.
I wonder how it will work out in a world where tiktok is always there as a much less exhausting form of entertainment than revolutions.
Personally I don't mind not having strawberries in the middle of winter, but for some they care about that.
Kinda sad to go from that back to "well I guess I don't really need these nice things we took for granted. I suppose I can live off jellied eels again."
If we could snap our fingers and domestically produce most or all of our own products, would you not prefer that?
> If we could snap our fingers and domestically produce most or all of our own products, would you not prefer that?
Yeah, then every city could be like SF or LA or NYC.
But it's not even worth it as a thought exercise because it completely ignores reality. The reason I live in NJ and pay high taxes is because this is where the high paying jobs and good schools are. Cottontown, Alabama theoretically could be a financial capitol of the world and if you want to base your position on that, then you should probably re-examine your position.
Lets talk plastics. Plastic needs oil. We’re the largest oil producer in the world now. But we still import oil! Why? Because the oil we produce isn’t entirely the right kind for everything we do with it.
An end state where the US is an island cannot exist without massive shifts in production and consumption habits.
Maybe you’re saying though that shift should happen and that end state is good?
I had said this somewhere else in the thread as well, but domestic production is a pretty bad idea if success metrics revolve around prices, quantity, or some specific quality metrics.
Where it would potentially be a good approach is if the primary goals are relates to self reliance, sustainability, resilience, etc. I don't think many people actually care about that at the national level though, and our economy as-is almost certainly couldn't allow it.
> No, you're reaching for something humans largely can't control - the weather
You should try farming mangoes in Vermont!
Do you think we could grow enough coffee, tea, bananas, avocados and olive oil?
No, I would not prefer that. A robust distributed system is less likely to crumble under local pressures. A blight could more easily sweep through a single nation and take out a staple crop or two, where it'd be impossible for that to happen globally. You can't spin up additional global trade quickly after you've shut it down, which could lead to people starving in America. I like systems that can't fail. That's especially true when that system is how I'm able to eat food.
Global trade isn't a security issue, national or otherwise. We don't increase safety or stability by reducing sources of consumables.
Edit; super timely example because this isn't an unlikely hypothetical: egg availability due to bird flu.
I'm not the person you asked, but I would definitely not prefer that. Trade & economic dependencies prevent wars. Wars are really, really bad things.
I could have sworn they were bad wars when they were happening ("No blood for oil"?), but opinions on that seem to have shifted all of a sudden for some reason.
Its a lose-lose proposition.
Also a world trading with each other is a world disincentivized from war with each other.
Maybe that's fine, maybe its not, but its not as simple as trade makes everyone better off.
But the current administration is itself actively opposed to worker or environmental protections, and the result of the current tariffs will just be that the poor people overseas end up even more impoverished and still lacking in protections.
That's definitely happening, but there are other possible reasons. For example a good could be more efficiently grown or produced in a country because of geographical reasons.
Also, from a pragmatic standpoint, it is simply not the case that all wages and wealth across the countries of the world are equal. Maybe that could be a goal but is anyone talking about that? Either way, it does not follow that the workers in that country are necessarily exploited when paid lower wages compared to the importing country, unless we are using different definitions.
This is not to mention that untargeted tariffs can increase the cost of living _for no gain at all_. If Germany manufacturers some specialty tool (not with slave labor, I would hope!), and no US manufacturer wants to make it, then I suddenly have to pay X% more for no reason at all.
Producing the same good in the US, at anywhere near the same price, requires automation or prison labor (legal slavery in the US) and likely won't result in more manufacturing jobs and likely won't result in higher wages for workers. Florida's approach here is child labor, which is both exploitative and cheap.
This can easily be overdone. If you stop doing business with poorer people, you all but guarantee that they stay poor. Counter-productive to say the least.
In my lifetime, I saw a lot of countries grow at least somewhat wealthy from extensive commercial contact with the West, including mine (Czechia).
Or can hire some child labor in Florida since they already changed the laws there.
Environmental concerns would actually fit the bill too, if one is willing to consider externalized costs. Its easy to ignore mining damage in other countries and all the oil burned shipping over the oceans. When that all happens at home people would more acutely feel the costs and may be more likely to fix it.
describe how a entirely domestic food chain would be more resilient than one that is global?
Self reliance is a defective meme that breaks down once you want anything other than individual survival. Dependence on a community allows humans to specialize. Humans being able to specialize is the only reason this comment, or this thread exists. More simply, not just the Internet, but modern life couldn't exist without it.
Once you acknowledge that interdependency is a reasonable trade-off for the other nice things about life. A simple infection no longer being a death sentence is a nice thing we've commoditized reasonably well. The only question is, how do you build a robust and resilient system?
Autarky is very bad.
If someone only cares about price, quantity, or some specific measure of quality certainly domestic production is limiting.
You'd want domestic production for other goals like self reliance, sustainability, or resilience.
This is basic fucking common sense: I'm good at some things and other people are good at other things. We each specialize in the things we're best at, and everyone ends up better off.
It's a bad idea for the same reason.
The US never lacked for smart entrepreneurs looking for a business opportunity. See wine.
In Italy it is not Italians who work in agriculture they also have (illegal) migrants.
An adult tree can be so expensive that there are cases of theft. It takes a heavy truck and a tree puller to steal an olive tree.
Is that because we can't grow olives here, or because we don't have federal subsidies propping up a domestic olive industry that can compete with corn and soy?
I ready don't know the details well enough there, but it feels like this could just be selection bias at play.