Mr. Cass has a competitive advantage in annoying people... or, in this case: cloaking controversial, contrarian opinions in some pretty sane arguments.
I don't have a good way to refute them... but luckily I don't have to so I'll just enjoy the show:
"The bet on tariffs is that the free market, even at more limited domestic scale, can deliver better outcomes than a global market dominated by state-subsidised national champions."
The error contained in [the free-market/comparative advantage critique of Trump tariffs] is the same one that free-traders have been making for a generation: imagining a global economy that operates like the friendly free market on the economist’s blackboard in which competitors sharpen one another and capital flows to its best use. Productivity rises, prices fall, everyone flourishes. The free-trader is nostalgic for a bygone era when a developing country could offer its labour at a discount, subsidise its producers, and sell the resulting output to wealthier customers in other places.
That's not what we have, says Mr. Cass
the global marketplace is dominated by government-built national champions. Capital flows towards the biggest subsidies and the most exploitable labour. Productivity falls, in the US anyway, where the typical factory requires more labour than a decade ago to produce the same output.
Instead, he thinks, with tariffs putting up economic walls toward the rest of the world, the American internal market can flourish. And because it's so big and so dominant, per Trump, other players will come to America and build it all here. Plus source their material inputs here... (since, somehow, there's vast amounts of unused resources around??)
the US, when its market was much smaller and trade volumes much lower, spawned most of last century’s major innovations. Progress has been much worse in the globalised era when free trade undermined the free market.
Both of those statements can be true without it making tariffs the obvious fix, or the free international trade being the reason progress has been slow/bad.
Worth reading, worth reflecting on. This is what one might call an economically literature steelman case of tariffs. Whatcha think, econ Stackers?
non-paywall here: https://archive.md/JebZa