I had a good chat with a retired old school economist at a restaurant bar last night, and we talked about anything from tariffs to the Black Scholes model. He was talking about how tariffs were quite useful to us as part of establishing our country and weening off British influence back in the 1800's, which is definitely true. Moving on to today, I explained to him how this isn't going to work in a modern economy because 1) wages would need to dramatically fall and 2) much of what we would produce would be dependent upon automation. So sure, we can try to bring as much production back onshore as we want, but it's not going to actually create that many jobs. Corporations will get around the tariff taxes, employ only a handful of employees, while the machines and AI will do the work. Obviously that only would benefit the 1%. He agreed.
You look at a manufacturer like Bounty for example, the paper towel guys. I was reading yesterday about how those massive plants are operated. They span like 5 football fields, have a bunch of machinery that is self-maintainable, and only employs 6 engineers to monitor the systems and quality control. 24/7, only six employees onsite. So perhaps that one factory has at most 20 employees. So what, you're going to have massive factories everywhere only employing 20 people with AI and automation doing 99% of the work, while the remaining "public good" is all the environmental and societal impacts of having massive factories and trucks driving around everywhere? It's not going to work.
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