313 - Tariffs

In the US a trade war is jacking up the price of everything, with US prices already 2x or more too high on many goods before it began. Meanwhile, I'm sitting 12 time zones away gloating to friends and family over prices that are 2 to 8 times cheaper than prices in the US before the trade war began (across a very wide variety of goods). That advantage is only certain to grow, and any time I find overpriced junk on the shelves here it is from…*drumroll*….the US.

At this point, no financially competent person with the option to work remotely should live in the US, and this downward trajectory has been extremely predictable since the US Supreme Court became a Theocracy in 2020, even when the specific means of detriment were unpredictable. Imagine if you made 2-8x more, as that is roughly equivalent to 2-8x cost reductions.

"Tariffs" are a way that countries very intentionally screw over their own citizens, both in the short and long term. Short-term they massively jack up prices that their own citizens pay, and long-term the countries doing this almost never produce the goods for cheaper than the jacked-up rates of importing with tariffs. In effect, this imposes an additional 25-100% sales tax.

Just as a 100% interest rate loan would only come from organized crime, 100% sales tax from tariffs only comes from the same. In previous centuries, this was the kind of thing that would send rulers to the Guillotine, or in the case of the US get some tea thrown into a harbor and start a War of Independence. Any US citizen who has gotten angry over paying 10 cents more per gallon for gas should be preparing for full-scale war given this massive increase in severity, including the price of cars.

Those who work with organized crime are called "accomplices", so try not to be one of those, as they don't fair much better than the primary culprits across history. Those who won't be accomplices to such crimes have the opportunity to demonstrate non-compliance, the ethically mandated bare minimum to avoid culpability, by sending the US government into a shutdown, and keeping it there until the criminals are purged. No government at all is still better than a malevolent one, so lean into the shutdown, not away from it.

In all probability if they did this (which is unlikely), it could trigger a power grab by the US's organized crime, such as initiating martial law or some equivalent, but the US will in all probability require such a severe shock to move out of apathy and complacency into a position of taking action to restore the country to some semblance of freedom. Until then, it will remain a joke, and the joke is on every US citizen. The US will soon have no allies left if this continues.