Skis

You may have noticed a little facelift around this blog. This is to signify that I am now taking my blogging in an entirely new direction: instead of blogging about books I read, I will now blog about...books I read and economic tidbits! I may, on occasion, even combine the two and blog about the economics in books, but I'm thinking that one step at a time is in order.

So evidently after Obama slapped Chinese tires with a 35% import tariff several months ago, things have been becoming downright tense. China followed up with its own tariffs, and now everybody is trying to protect everything. Steel, chickens, and salt are just a few more disputed imports.

The whole thing is ridiculous because protectionism like this doesn't accomplish anything useful. Sure, some tiremen might go out of business, but there is no way they are the real target. The target in China would be some political leader who gave Obama the crook eye, and running tiremen out of business is an exceedingly roundabout way of evening the score. (Actually, the real goal is almost definitely to help out US manufacturers who are rather philanthropic to lawmakers).

Additionally, it makes things worse for everyone in the state doing the protecting. Now stuff we buy from China (that is, everything) is going to be more expensive, so we protected Americans are all having a little bit lower of a standard of living.