A nation cannot tax another nation. It can only block the imports of the wealth of that nation, which it can only pay for with its own exports.
Try to image a national border on a deeper level. Instead, as a deliberate economic barrier between your city and the next city within your own nation. There will be no difference as to cause and effect to a traditional tariff. A national border is an image, a fools illusion.
Still not understanding? OK, you can go deeper still to an extreme case: imagine a border as an imaginary line in the street, between your own business and your neighbours business, where you as CEO have the opportunity to make the other business pay a tax to sell you their stuff. Do you seriously expect to do as much business in this way?
Oddly this is not such an extreme case - we have VAT, GST, also known generally as sales taxes. Identical to a border tariff. Only a sales tax, punishes your own fellow people, to 'protect' your business from their competition, within, your own nation!
One could go to an even deeper and more preposterous level - place a border tariff between father and son, or mother and daughter. Hang on a minute. This already happens too. My father is my master, right. I must obey their monopoly power or end up in hell?
I could even go to the ultimate depths and set up a tariff between two opposing ideologies in my own mind. This is not to be silly about it. It is to point right at why there are so many social problems which we create deliberately and then complain about later. I created my world, it belongs to me. If I can confess to this, it will be the first step in a personal transformation - by being true to thine own self.
Can a more absurd policy ever be imagined? Nonetheless, this is what the Power materially controlling every nation believes, evidently. Look in front of your face and observe. It is not an opinion. Do not listen to experts on this. Just look at it directly. Try to suspend your beliefs for long enough to look at it. Beliefs will blind you.
The absurdity goes further - a nation cannot force another nations people to buy its goods either. It can only improve them on price and quality if it desires the exports it must sell in order to buy imports. Unless it has some privileged and unjust power of conquest over the competing nations. By which it can force them to work for less or for free even. AKA slavery. Remember Rome?
Professors of economics 'believe' you can pay for imports with dollars. But this is mere expedience. Dollars are just another image of wealth, not wealth itself. In the final analysis you can only exchange one form of wealth, for another form. All wealth has value in exchange and money in dollars is not wealth. Think of professors as the modern day high priests. Sure, money has great utility by making the exchange of wealth that much easier. But it is in no way, shape or form, wealth. And yes, this quality in money does indeed improve the ability of an economy to produce more wealth because of its utility. Nonetheless its only true quality is that it is the best thing to use to buy wealth with. So dollars cannot be permanently owned in the same way as wealth tends to be, unless your desire is to wreak economic havoc.
And every nation, at heart, desires imports which are higher quality and lower price, relatively to what can be made at home. That is, more than it can find more expensive and relatively lower quality goods at home. Obviously one wants better stuff at a cheaper price than worse more expensive stuff no matter who is doing all the work and investing all the savings to make it. Or some various combination of the two.
If America proceeds with a tariff it must still pay, in wealth ultimately, not dollars, for the imports its home industry needs to make its own wealth to sell both at home and to sell as exports. There is no escaping this. The only exception is the case where she uses her fabulous navy to sink all ships approaching port with cheaper higher quality goods than you can make at home. Or likewise sink all ships leaving port with goods the foreign nation is willing to buy from you as exports. There is no difference between selling your goods at a local market as to selling them to a remote foreign one, except that government is deliberately standing in the way and screwing up that opportunity.
And even if you 'succeed' in adopting this psychotic policy don't be too proud. Your nations products, even if the same quality as other nations products, will now be much more expensive to buy because your policy means the parts constituting your goods and services are now more expensive relatively. Your nation will no longer be competitive and no one will want your products anyway to that extent. Your policy 'seed' will have grown into an oak tree of bankruptcy, unemployment and a larger welfare state where the state gains ever more power over its people, becoming ever more the peoples master, no longer the servant. Its curious that DOGE wants this.
The only power a tariff has is at inception perhaps for a few months only. As a threat or scare tactic to temporarily block what the foreign nation needs immediately due to the home nation having overwhelming economic power. That is, monopoly power at the highest of all levels. And this threat will only work against weak foreign nations who lack wisdom by thinking in the same way as the nation imposing the tariff. If your leadership is smart, say China or Russia, they will laugh, ignore your leader while pretending to do diplomacy, and start buying up your nations land instead as hard as they can.
So if the US proceeds with a tariff policy, all it has left to export are dollars which are not de facto wealth obviously. They are merely printed tokens acting as a nominal proxy for wealth.
And if dollars are all the foreign nations have in imports from you, because they no longer want your stuff given it's lower quality and more expensive relatively, they will be limited to the only asset they have left thats worth buying - The Land of America. Remember this point very carefully - Land is the only asset that cannot be exported! You cannot move land into a safe haven. Either for prudent tax planning or profit. Are you starting to get the picture yet, our dear leaders of America and the EU?
We can see this happening already in America. Gradually, over time, often under cover of the dark, China and Russia are buying up America. A 'silent conquest'. Where a costly invasion is not required. They simply buy American land and charge American people, rent, for the right to live on their own land. Slowly but surely. In silence. The banks and the state cannot do anything about it. There are many derivatives of land value - much stuff has rents embedded already. So even banning the selling of land directly will not be able to stop this powerful 'long march'. In fact, because this is a more stealthy approach, its more commonly used anyway. Thank your Cambridge, Harvard and MIT professor high priest experts for assisting so charitably here. They are largely landlords themselves anyway - they get it already.
If America resists this 'silent invasion' with a tariff thinking that will be of any help at all, then its industry will eventually be under water slowly but surely. America is so big economically, this will not happen within this electoral cycle though. So a new leader who intensifies a tariff policy will never take the blame, the cycle is too long.
But there's a Great Recession coming which a current leader will certainly take the blame for even though its not their fault per se. I don't say this lightly or to paint a dark picture to create fear for effect. I'm merely observing history to gain the ability to 'remember the future'. So that I can set up my household to protect against it.
In about 2 years, the fundamental institution of every nations' economy - The Mortgage, the biggest asset class of every top level financial institution, will be too expensive for the productive side of each economy to keep paying for. Owners of land and monopolies will reach a point where they're taking more out of the economy for free in economic rents, than is being put into it by entities producing wealth. The next Great Recession will be ready and willing to trigger when the total price of economic rent passes the line which the production of wealth by hard workers and enterprising businesses can still pay for.
But this correction will not happen suddenly and right away following this point in time. Every bubble only bursts when the collective unconscious of the world, aka 'the great masse of people' realises the mortgage and its derivatives are not worth anything like as much as they believed they were all along. And this psychic trigger will be a proximate cause in a way that allows the biggest class of perpetrator - the homeowner, to escape from complicity. Of course, everybody lies, especially the democratic majority!
This side cause will wake up the collective unconscious and cause it to recognise, in a blinding light, what has been going on systemically for nearly the past 20 years or so. My best guess is crypto will be the trigger this time. Last time in 2008 it was so called evil private banksters. Before that in 1990 central banking. And before that in 1974, middle east oil. All were hoaxes. Root cause was you and I as homeowners, snouts buried deep. Presidents are elected, prima facie, to help the electorate to escape from this.
Given the above is inevitable as shown by history to repeat itself, the only way to protect your household and family is to:
- get and hold property free from debt - and hold onto it for dear life (HODL or "hoddle")
- if you cannot afford that, only get debt that you can service out of savings for 4 years, the lifetime of the recession
- avoid any business that relies on capital formation for the next 4 years too
- avoid everything else including gold and crypto will be devastating for your household
- once under way, if you like risk, use your savings to buy up land and capital assets at a 30% discount soon after the great recession commences
You heard it here first. This is not financial advice. It is what I'll be doing to defend my household from the state and the great masse of people who freely selected it.
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