Companies receiving tariff refunds after passing the tax on to the people who got the free money on the left.
Morton’s Fork.
Interesting thoughts about tariffs et al.
Do you or does anyone else here remember the hype and praise for George Gilder’s "Wealth and Poverty, the Reagan era’s textbook (along with Milton Friedman) for “free trade”?
I don’t recall hearing about that book while in school. I do, however, fondly remember reading “The Phantom Tollbooth” which featured a dog that had a ticking clock for a belly and “alarm legs”…
Hope that helps 
Flectcher attempted to argue away David Ricardo’s “Competitive Advantage” Aka he was interventionalist attempting to change the cycle. You can try. Such attempts failed in history. United Kingdom post-WWII industrial efforts: Argentina’s heavy protectionism= STAGFLATION.
Attempts by the state to override the market signals that reveal comparative advantage. He wrote that capital and labor naturally flow to their most productive uses under free commerce; government will always misallocate. And history will bear this out.
David Ricardo—The Comparative Advantage | PragerU
Protectionism includes the mispricing of projects, difficulty picking winners, retaliation, higher input costs for other domestic industries, and failure to close overall trade or current-account gaps when domestic savings-investment imbalances
JD Vance doesn’t want us to have a comparative advantage? And he doesn’t want you to go spend $20 at Chipolte. We know what’s best for you. You’ll consume less and you’ll like it. Not too many steps away from Klaus. You’ll own nothing and be happy.
“…it allows Americans to consume too much and do so too cheaply.” J.D. Vance
If a communist leaning person said this, everyone goes nuts. When they hear it from a conservative VP who actually ran against such policies they applaud it.
You’ll walk right into the arms of the tar baby and love it.
“This country has been ripped off from every nation in the world, every company outside in the world, we’ve been ripped off at levels never seen before,” Trump said in a recent Fox News interview.
“And all we’re going to do is get it back. We’re going to get a lot of it back.”
In effect, Trump and his advisors claim the whole rationale behind these tariffs is fairness. Or, in Trump-speak, ensure every single deal must absolutely favor the US at the expense of everyone else. “That” kind of fairness – ok?
He claims he is doing it for his country.
According to Henry George, there is likely a hidden agenda that the president is hiding from everyone.
Tariffs lift the prices of goods by removing competition. With less competition, domestic (in this case think US) production can now increase their own prices, which they then pass on to the US consumer.
However, what actually occurs is these excess profits end up flowing into land values instead.
Trump treated the trade deficit like a business loss that could be fixed by tariffs and tough negotiations, but the underlying macro identity shows those tools cannot shrink the overall gap when fiscal policy is expansionary.
If a country invests more than it saves, it runs a current-account deficit (financed by capital inflows from abroad). The public-sector gap is essentially the government fiscal deficit a country’s current-account/trade balance is determined by the gap between domestic saving and domestic investment:
When calculated this way, domestic saving is shrinking. One check away from homelessness.
So, in other words, landowners and monopolists are the true winners of the Trump led global tariff campaign.
While Trump and his cronies argue that tariffs create jobs, George contended that they do not increase wages. Instead, they raise the cost of living because imported goods become more expensive, and domestic goods remain artificially high-priced. Workers ultimately pay more for necessities without seeing a proportional rise in income.
the Law of Economic Rent (Ricardian Rent Theory). First proposed by English economist David Ricardo, George built upon this law .
In other words, as economic activity increases (for instance, due to tariffs or other interventions), land in desirable locations becomes more valuable, and landlords can charge higher rents. George argued that tariffs artificially inflate profits, but these profits ultimately flow into higher land rents rather than benefiting workers or capitalists.
who has the US president decided to surround himself with? Tech and finance billionaires. it’s you and I who end up paying far more for basic goods and services that we need to survive. And it concentrates the wealth of nations into the hands of monopolists and the biggest landowners.
Make America Grotesque Again??
If you think because you reside outside the US, and the ultimate cost doesn’t concern you, think again. We are seeing a cycle of reciprocal rounds of retaliatory tariffs on imported US goods by many nations.
Henry George saw retaliatory tariffs as self-defeating. They don’t punish the foreign country effectively, but they do hurt domestic consumers, benefit landlords, and reduce overall economic efficiency. His argument aligns with the idea that free trade is a unilateral good—a country should keep its markets open regardless of what others do.
And if you place land at the centre of your research when it comes to finance, economics, and investments, it just makes too much sense not to retaliate.
Because the outcome here, should every nation engage with nostril-for-tat tariffs themselves, is this.
Your cost of living will increase. Your take home wages will decrease. The cost of buying a home will increase.
1856-1926: Stages in Trade Cycle
1: Financial Panic
2: Rebound from panic
3: Commercial depression
4: Recovery of commerce
5: Over-production or competition
6: Inflation boom
Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs were explicitly imposed to reduce the US trade deficit, but it reached an all-time high (in real terms) in 2025.
analysis from Cato Institute scholars.
The definitive account of the Reagan administration’s trade
policies12 was penned by William A. Niskanen, who was fired
as Chief Economist at the Ford Motor Company because he
publicly opposed the U.S. government’s efforts to restrict the
importation of Japanese cars.13 As a prominent member of
President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers,14 Niskanen’s
summary is stunning:
“Trade policy in the Reagan administration is best described as a strategic retreat. The consistent goal
of the president was free trade, both in the United States and abroad. In response to domestic political pressure, however,
the administration imposed more new restraints on trade
than any administration since Hoover. A strategic retreat is
regarded as the most difficult military maneuver and may be
better than the most likely alternative,rump and his entourage of neo-mercantilists. By the time the
Trump administration took office, China had overtaken Japan
as the major contributor to the U.S. trade deficit. Today, China’s
48% share of the total U.S. trade deficit dwarfs Japan’s 7.7%.
So, given President Trump’s mercantilist mentality, he has taken
aim at China. The President has imposed tariffs and quotas on
virtually everything under the sun.17 He has even gone so far
as to “order” U.S. companies to stop doing business in China
under the questionable cover of the International Emergency
Economic Powers Act of 1977.18 As a consequence, the U.S.
is deeply engaged in a trade war with China. Remarkably,
however, this war has generated nothing in the way of reductions in the total trade deficit; in fact, the overall U.S. trade deficit has increased significantly since the arrival of the Trump
administration.19 As Figure 1 shows, China’s share of that
increased deficit has also slightly increased. Let us now turn to
an analysis of why this trade war cannot be won.
Let’s end this with one more meme…because memes are fun!
Presidential Promises, More Promises and Collective Delusions.
Remember when Big Balls was going to cut the debt by 6 Trillion dollars?
I’m not so sure that A.I.P.A.C. isn’t actually FUNDING the “D.S.A. adventurism.”
“Defund the Pentagon”…everyone can agree it’s budget should be slashed significantly, but somehow I think that’s not what these D.S.A. people have in mind.
Those that have followed Netanyahoo enough have heard about of his alleged speech in which considered the U.S. “a calf to be sucked dry of blood”,. The Zionist project is inextricably linked to the destruction of the United States as we know them.
The ultimate geopolitical goal at the top of the Zionist organization is very similar to how British foreign policy (hmmm interesting coincidence) has been oriented all the way back into the 19th century: identify regional and global hegemonic nations and use soft power to provoke civil wars as a mechanism to cut much larger nations down to size they feel comfortable dealing with. It can never be Vietnam, it must be North and South Vietnam, it must be East and West Germany, and so forth.
What better way to finish off the Great American Destruction Project that the forerunners of today’s British and Israeli political elite started back in the 1860’s, than to stretch the fringe elements of both the American Right and Left till the entire concept of E Pluribus Unum breaks apart into a flaming fragmentary conflagration.