It is wild to see someone bringing the benefits of tariffs and free markets at the same time.
The two are kind of antithetical.
Well, an internal, relatively free market with some barriers against foreign competition is exactly the strategy that a number of Asian countries employed to get rich, and furthermore, earlier in its history the USA did exactly the same thing. Whether it is "antithetical" or not.
I think your comment is low quality. Like I made an effort here to write at length about how government and economics work in the hopes that someone would learn from it, and you strawmanned one idea and called it "wild." This is not the Hacker News way and it is not commenting in good faith.
Free markets are unnatural. Monopoly is natural.
Free markets only exist in unnaturally heavily regulated circumstances. If you let the markets to be on their own devices then you get monopoly. Regulation is ironically what makes free markets possible.
It's basically exactly the same as democracy vs feudalism.
Government makes policy.
Government decides when and where to apply tariffs.
If government applies a tariff on imports from any country that has cheap labor, businesses will stop offshoring to that country because it will no longer be cheaper.
Or at least, that's what businesses do in a free market economy. In the free market where many firms compete for your dollar, they can and will compete on price when they have to.
But in a "managed monopolies" economy like 2025 America, they may just raise prices instead because they have at most 2-3 competitors, and all it takes is a few games of golf, a wink and a nod to keep prices high.
We used to call that a cartel, prosecute the shit out of those companies, and defend the free market.
America's government stopped doing that. Now our enforcement is Luigi. When and where will the next Luigi strike? How many Luigis do you want to see? I would rather have government resume serving the People, it will work better, like it did with Standard Oil and AT&T.
Patriotism is not required. Policy that puts the people first plus competent law enforcement against corporate crime is all that we need.