Trade War: Tariffs Are Needed To Defeat Globalism But They Come With a Cost
This article was written by Brandon Smith and originally published at Birch Gold Group
Ever since the days of Herbert Hoover and the official start of the Great Depression the concept of trade tariffs has been readily demonized across most of academia and among the majority of modern economic ideologies. Is is actually one area where globalists and free market economists tend to align (though each group has very different reasons).
Proponents of Adam Smith’s free market philosophy or Ludwig Von Mises and his Austrian school are Just as likely to be opposed to Donald Trump’s tariff plans as any globalist from the halls of Davos.
First and foremost we have to make it clear what tariffs are: Tariffs are taxes on international companies importing goods from other nations. These taxes are designed to force companies to import from countries outside of the tariff list or produce goods domestically. The primary targets of tariffs are actually corporations. The secondary targets are countries on the tariff list.
Austrian economists in their opposition to tariffs operate on the assumption that large corporations are “free market” entities. They also assume that globalism is a product of free markets.
Adam Smith might have witnessed the corruption of mercantalism, but he had no inkling of the monstrosity of modern globalism and how it would ultimately pervert the free market ideal. The same goes for Mises. Their support for global trade was contingent on the idea that government interference is always the root problem, the fly in the ointment.
They did not take into account the blurring of lines between corporations, governments and NGOs – They did not consider the corporate shadow government of Davos and the manipulation of markets in the name of “free trade”. They couldn’t have even fathomed the creation of organizations like the IMF, World Bank, the BIS, etc. at the time they came up with their economic theories.
After the Bretton Woods conference Mises would go on to question the motives of the new “global order” and the trade agreements being put in place. He would also oppose at least some aspects of globalism before his death, leaving Austrians to debate the merits of “good globalism” vs “bad globalism”.
The reality is that today there is no “good globalism”. It doesn’t exist because the entities dictating global trade collude rather than compete. They are not actually interested in free markets, they are interested in global monopoly. And corporations are the key to this monopoly.
Adam Smith criticized the idea “joint stock companies” (corporations), but there are a lot of Austrians and Anarcho-capitalists that defend international companies as if they are an inherent evolution of free market progress. This is simply not so. Global co
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