This sentiment, branded differently but functionally the same, is punished in the US currently, because the hordes are upset their Shein costs more in the short term.
We've entered a new era where every nation is walling up its industries (tariffs and fines), its demographics (via immigration), and it's culture (internet and social media control).
A customs duty and a tariff are functionally the same, raising the cost of foreign goods to protect local industries.
Hyperbolic drivel: : “The people sitting in that building (Google HQ in London) are probably having a pretty good time. They have lots of ping pong tables and Huel. But the cobalt that they’re using in their microchips is still often dug up by artisanal miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo, getting paid less than a couple of dollars a day.”
Like much of the oligarchic class, the boy-gods of Silicon Valley still cleave to Hobbesian myths to justify their grip on wealth and power. Their techno-Utopian convictions, encapsulated in Bill Gates’ mantra that “innovation is the real driver of progress,” are merely a secular iteration of the divine mandates that Goliaths once used to legitimize their rule. Promises of rewards in the afterlife have been supplanted by dreams of a technological singularity and interplanetary civilization."
- Google doesn't serve Huel
- Google has maybe two total pong pong tables in the London office and staff here are some of the most diligent coworkers I know.
- Google actively is working to, and has reduced, conflict cobalt from the supply chain.
- No one I know in Silicon Valley "cleaves to Hobbesian myths" to "justify" their grip on anything. Everyone I know shows up to work to provide for their family, grow professionally, or self-actualize.
- People who "dream of Singularity and interplanetary civilization" isn't a thing, no one dreams of this fantasy.
If the so called professional being cited here cannot avoid use hyperbolic drivel and unfounded fantasy to substantiate the claim, it's difficult to give credence to the case.
The US has a large cobalt mine in Idaho. It's closed.[1] They got all the way to startup, and then the price of cobalt dropped.[2] Peaked at $37, dropped to $10.
Right now about $22, but that's a recent spike. Break-even for that mine is around $20.
Similar to the rare earths situation, which I've mentioned before.
This is why we have raw material shortages. The materials exist, but prices are too volatile for the capital required.
The Mountain Pass mine is running again. There are deals with DoD and General Motors to establish a price floor, so they don't go bankrupt yet again when the price drops.
The current bottleneck in rare earths is separation. There are four steps - mining, beneficiation (mechanically sorting the good stuff from lots of unwanted rock, done at the mine), separation (sorting out the different rare earths chemically, can be done anywhere), and conversion to metals (smelting). The US doesn't have anywhere near enough separation capacity and Mountain Pass has been shipping ore after beneficiation to China for further processing. That's being fixed, but not fast enough.
Market price and availability swing wildly over about a 4:1 range, resulting in repeated gluts, shutdowns, and bankruptcies. Last big rare earth glut was in 2015, and most non-China production shut down.
- Google actively is working to, and has reduced, conflict cobalt from the supply chain.
That's good, but doesn't change the fact that the supply chain for tech exemplifies "the hub exploiting the periphery".
- No one I know in Silicon Valley "cleaves to Hobbesian myths" to "justify" their grip on anything. Everyone I know shows up to work to provide for their family, grow professionally, or self-actualize.
"Like much of the oligarchic class, the boy-gods of Silicon Valley" is likely referring to the CEO/founder/VC class.
- People who "dream of Singularity and interplanetary civilization" isn't a thing, no one dreams of this fantasy.
That's patently untrue. A bunch of them post here.
And when one of the parties is a group of men with guns who abuse their neighbors in order to produce the something they're selling to the other party, it becomes exploitation in a quick hurry.
I use any number of professionals’ knowledge or skills or supplies just the same as I use natural gas to heat the home or water to hydrate myself or clean whatever.
Maybe something about the seller (or buyer) being under duress would be a start to defining exploitation.
> Bill Gates’ mantra that “innovation is the real driver of progress,” are merely a secular iteration of the divine mandates that Goliaths once used to legitimize their rule.
I'd like to point that that mantra on its own can go in two wildly-different directions, depending on whether you believe "innovation" comes from:
1. An incremental process of millions of contributors doing small unsung pieces of work until eventually some threshold of opportunity, motive, preliminary ideas, and luck is reached which makes for a visible shift and simple story.
2. A magical threshold only broken through by Great Men, who were not lucky at all and deserve Great Wealth for their Greatness.
As you might guess, I subscribe to (1). Humans are wired to dislike randomness and broad causes, so we dramatically underestimate (and undervalue) all the people making innovations of higher-precision parts, or a chemical reaction that can use a cheaper reagent that's also waste from another process, or basic research like "these proteins are highly conserved in the virus."
It's both. Individuals are also constrained by perverse incentivzes that sometimes you do need someone unconstrained from it all to make the critical push.
I dream of those things as I believe a lot of others do on HN. I also provide for my family and achieve more in my career but those aren’t dreams, that’s just what I do everyday.
Dreams of the singularity and interplanetary civilizations are actually achievable at some point in the future. Random god king paychobabble isn’t.
I’m not for this Luddite bullshit and you’re severely harming any legitimate opposition to the billionaire class by undermining yourself.
To not be would be utter madness. For those who can and opt not to, they are perpetuating the tragedy of the commons.
We face the largest demographic crisis ever and we're passing the problem onto the young while draining them via taxation, whislt demanding ever increasing benefits in an all out land grab.
In 1950 the ratio of those paying into the system versus withdrawing was 15:1, were now at 2:1.
The problem is the draining by taxation, not the absolute number of productive people.
It is far from evident what size of real productive population is needed to sustain a society. With modern tools it does feel like it could be in the realm of sub 10% of the population. This will get even more wild if the techno-optimists are correct.
Depending on how close we are to biophysical bounds trying to increase the population to the historically required productive ratios is just going to make living conditions worse for the average person.
There seems to be a fairly strong correlation between wealth and childlessness, so the obvious guess is that the world is getting wealthier. Exactly why that stops people having kids is a bit unclear to me though. Maybe being a parent is one of those things that is a harder sacrifice to make the more alternative comforts have to be given up.
It is true. That article doesn't really back up the idea that wealthy families have more children and in most of the graphs you can actually see fertility has dropped off with income. Eg, in Figure 1 it looks like the only demographic consistently meeting the replacement rate are low income women in certain cultural groups and a marginal number of wealthy migrants. It is obvious [0] that more wealth -> less children. The effect enormous.
The topmost graph on Wikipedia is about GDP, and when it comes to children-per-village, you’re absolutely right. But down some is the J graph, which looks like the American graph in the link I posted.
Economics has a simple answer: public pensions are a classic tragedy of the commons. If the pension system didn't exist, then people would be incentivised to have more children to support them in old age, instead of a free rider problem where everyone relies on everyone else having children.
The demographic crisis of refusing to allow young people and families into the country? You want people to have kids so that we can keep America white?
Why not? It's not like every country in the world can rely on immigration and brain drain. Don't you think it is alarming that the country can't produce enough people to maintain a stable-state population and instead has to rely on a parasitic strategy?
Not intrinsically alarming, no. If I thought the country should be self-sufficient in isolation then there are many weak points I’d prioritize before birth rate.
How does the set of people who arrive illegally overlap with the set of people that would come if we let them in legally, given that we can define the set that is allowed in legally?
America has a more liberal immigration policy than practically anywhere else on the planet, as evidenced by the massive change in demographics over a mere half century. You would like it to go faster?
Please go advocate for the Chinese to take immigrants from everywhere on earth at the same time, which they currently do not at all. Or do you not care about that for some reason?
The topic was “Americans must have babies because we need more young people”. There are plenty of young people who would move here but aren’t allowed in - would you like to disagree with that? Or address it in any way whatsoever?
Do you think there is any chance that the characteristics of human territories are determined in significant part by the natural tendencies of their inhabitants?
Do you think there is any chance that there is a diverse set of natural tendencies among humans, clustered by what sort of environmental filters those humans passed through? For example, surviving “trying to kill you” winter every year for thousands of years in a row with survivor man tier technology, where planning and tool design/making are critical, vs not?
I’m literally asking if you think there’s no chance, and if so, how do you know that? Was it scientifically proven? I’ve looked long and hard for that, and gosh I just couldn’t find where that ever happened.
If there is a chance, though, then we are gambling at (further) becoming Brazil in order to save the comfort of one single generation of old people. Yeah I think I’ll pass on that, thanks.
As for alternate solutions. We could allocate available resources based on how many descendants the old person produced. Why should we tolerate free riders and make the young produced by others pay for them? Let them be in old people dorms. Let them have insufficient medical care. It isn’t worth risking the quality of the country over, obviously. And if we use the scheme I mentioned, then they aren’t anybody’s grandparents, anyway. Who will fight for them?
The values you hold, the ones you are defending right now, are western values. Your type seems so sure that the newcomers can be brainwashed to think like we do. Good luck with that! Egalitarianism is not the norm historically or globally. It certainly isn’t the human default.
Ironically, your interpretation of what I said as “white people are… better” (which isn’t what I said, or what I meant) is itself deeply Eurocentric.
If we assume there are many, or even infinite, valid ways to structure a large human group, and the structuring of the large human group depends on the humans executing certain behaviors, then, unless we assume that all humans have completely identical natural instincts and behaviors, an assumption which has no basis in fact, then structures developed by a particular group may not be equally operable by another group, because the two groups may have differing instincts or behaviors. If particular behaviors are required to operate the large human group structure, then humans who have an easier or harder time performing these behaviors will tend to produce a version of the implemented structure with higher or lower fidelity with respect to its abstract design.
No structure of humans is “better” or “worse” than another structure. That is the Eurocentrism in your frame. The style of societal structure we live in is highly contingent. It was developed by Europeans. Can it be operated just as well by other groups? We don’t really know for sure, but the attempts we see around the world have had quite mixed results. That doesn’t mean those people are “bad people” or whatever, or “inferior”, it just means they may be better suited for a different sort of social structure than the one that was developed by our ancestors and people similar to them.
This issue is so highly moralized these days from childhood brainwashing (unintentional, I think) that people’s minds simply won’t go there in a calm and rational manner, absent substantial deprogramming (which is not a fun experience, let me tell you).
Not sure why you're being down voted. SNAP was bleeding us on the front end by subsidizing sugar water mega corps and on the backend by subsidizing the collosal medical bills that come from the overweight, diabetic millions.
One day we'll look back and wish we had the self-control to both impose austerity measures to get the spending under control and the foresight to spend wisely on long term functions like infrastructure.
Until then it's business as usual from both political parties.
> Not sure why you're being down voted. SNAP was bleeding us on the front end by subsidizing sugar water mega corps and on the backend by subsidizing the collosal medical bills that come from the overweight, diabetic millions.
Letting people starve is a better solution than letting them drink soda and potentially develop diabetes over the long term? Preposterous. I don't understand why the common sentiment is that everyone who uses SNAP must enter into a contract with the state to lose weight and only eat heads of iceberg lettuce, lest they be labeled leeches.
It's not one extreme or the other. There's a reasonable middle where SNAP can't be used for soda or candy, etc.
But such regulations are easily subverted and ultimately may not make a lot of difference. If people want to live on Dr. Pepper and cigarettes they will find a way to do that.
I personally agree it shouldn't be one extreme or the other, but the person I was replying to was defending a comment about the suspension of SNAP. My wife and I used SNAP when we first moved in together and she couldn't find a job, so it annoys me when I see people imply that SNAP users just need to make better choices, be less lazy or eat healthier.
people shouldnt be prevented from ever drinking doctor pepper because they are poor.
snap should reclaim their money from dr pepper if peopleare spending too much on it, or they should be pushed on making doctor pepper healthier if thats what people are spending snap money on.
"The notion of “identity” under capitalism has always been bound up with surveillance and discipline."
This is the classic surface level grasp where the author uses words like capitalism where they really mean corporatism -- I hope the author isn't against the free and mutually beneficial exchange of goods and services between two willing parties
Secondly just replace the word in this quote ^ with communism...or any large state apparatus for that matter, and it still could work.
The problem is that the author is referring to a body of arguments that most people aren't familiar with, and wouldn't agree with if they were. Within certain leftist circles these are well known, and it's standard to assume the usefulness of ideas from French poststructuralist writers from the 1960s and 1970s, as well as Frankfurt School writers from 1920s and 1930s. These are sometimes called "critical theory".
"Surveillance and discipline" comes from Foucault's book "Surveiller et punir," which was translated into English as "Discipline and Punish". It argues that the logic of surveillance from prisons has worked its way into a bunch of institutions in modern society.
Articles in this style feel to me like a word salad of leftist shibboleths that never really amount to an actual argument: capitalism, resistance, settler-colonialism, domination, class rule.
The article had clear arguments. No continental philosophy reading is required to understand By embedding digital checkpoints into daily life, whether entering a building, logging into a service, or accessing healthcare, surveillance becomes routine.
My point is not that you need continental philosophy to understand the article. It's that the author assumes the truth of the philosophy. It's not argument. It's just repetition.
The rote narrative that somehow all the Native Americans were some peace-loving Earth shamans is factually incorrect.
>"stolen from the hands of the Native Americans who had stewarded them for millennia before colonialism in different forms devastated their tribes."
The Comanches, the most powerful tribe in the country, were brutal, vindictive, plundering murderers who took slaves and delighted in killing as a rite. They "stewarded" only by murderous foray 250,000 square miles. Read "Empire of the Summer Moon"
They had no concept of private property because their territory ended right where their massacres couldn't reach, not because of some transcendent and noble ideals.
That's a bit of a catch-22 argument, isn't it? If a history of violence and conquest invalidates land claims, then the white settlers who violently settled North America have no legitimate right to this land, right? But if that history doesn't invalidate their land claims, then you can't really turn around and say that somehow Comanche land claims are illegitimate.
Or maybe you're arguing that there is no such thing as morality in land claims, and it's simply a matter of who is better able to kill and steal, and white settlers just were better at this?
Does anyone have a right to land, except for that which is enforceable by the threat of violence? Why are they called Native Americans? Is all land simply owned by the first foot put there anywhere in the planet?
I'm not defending "white" settlers, or any settlers. My goal is to dispel the intellectually lazy myth this article leads with.
> stolen from the hands of the Native Americans who had stewarded them for millennia before colonialism in different forms devastated their tribes. Through invasions, plagues, violence, coercion, bribery, war, and lopsided deals with the United States government, Indigenous groups and their ways of life were nearly obliterated
This clearly implies that invasions, violence, war, were brought by the US government to indigenous groups.
In reality, their "way of life" always consisted of these things.
It's a clear myth being perpetuated in the language of this article — even in words like 'stewarded' vs. 'stolen'.
It's much like Europe and everyplace else - regular warfare and invasions and vast territories changing hands. The only difference is the people in Europe wrote things down.
(In contrast, very little is known about England for centuries after the Romans left, as the inhabitants were illiterate. Nobody knows if King Arthur existed or not, for example.)
DNA evidence has been slowly illuminating the pre-Columbian history of the North American Indians.
Is it possible that private property and/or violence against humans is orthogonal to so-called stewardship of land? E.g. cultural norms could result in better natural preservation, even if by accident rather than by what a modern person see as a noble motivation.
It is certainly possible. It's also not just possible, but true where some private stewards cultivate beauty (vineyards) and some public lands cultivate destruction (downtown Seattle). Violence takes place on land, but stewardship I don't think is some inherent thing. All animals war over territory.
"The story of the human race is war. Except for brief and precarious interludes, there has never been peace in the world; and before history began, murderous strife was universal and unending."
In fact, I agree with you that illegal immigrants abuse the system and unfairly consume resources. I also agree with the parent comment that people acting as a police force (i.e., ICE) should carry and present ID.
As a legal immigrant who waited years to get my citizenship lets point out that most of those immigrants actually pay for the same programs too, though not always "in their name". Undocumented immigrants still pay tax and deductions on their paychecks, too.
"critical of people for defending the city from ICE stormtroopers. I see people justifying paper-checking, something I'm sure we roundly mocked the Soviets for doing - I thought gestapo agents checking the papers of people in the streets was commie shit?"
Truly curious, what methods are you suggesting we use to keep our immigrant population tracked and controlled? If the immigrants aren't leaving after being asked nicely, what steps can we use other than force to remove them? Surely you don't believe unchecked immigration in our modern Nation is good? If you do, then how much is too much, at what number, and what if those immigrants still collected benefits of your tax dollars while not themselves paying into the system? What if they voted for someone you don't like?
> what methods are you suggesting we use to keep our immigrant population tracked and controlled?
You can't track and control only immigrants. Any such system would include tracking and controls of citizens, simply in order to sort them into the "not immigrant" category.
That is true, but it doesn't answer sQL_inject's point. You can't track and control only immigrants, therefore... what? Don't control immigrants at all, once they're here? Make it across the border and you're good forever? Or all, citizens or not, have to show papers to prove who they are?
I don't like either of those alternatives, but those seem to be the only options that are being advocated at the moment. Is there a better option?
And if not, are you really content to advocate for one of those two options? (Either of those two options? Because personally, no, I am not willing to advocate for either one.)
There is no other (let alone better) option — those cover all possibilities.
If you don't check papers (or an equivalent), you automatically don't control immigrants at all once they're in your borders. To control them requires everyone has an ID, because otherwise some immigrant who doesn't want to have ID for whatever reason can just say "of course I don't have papers, only immigrants have papers and I'm not an immigrant".
The entire point of papers is to determine if someone is or isn't in some category (including but not limited to "immigrant").
What you can do is automate ID checks. So long as you don't mind your ID being tested at random, and the way that such systems have a tendency to randomly fail and deport people who were actually allowed to remain.
It’s pretty simple, verify on the employer side. The fact that they are not doing this tells you all you need to know about how genuine this “immigration crackdown”is from a policy side.
It’s purely about terrorizing people and expanding the power of ICE. Citizens and non-citizens.
Surprise, you’re already tracked in a dozen harmless ways that enable modern life: drivers license, Social Security number, birth certificate, etc; even before you get into quasi-public records like credit reporting, bank accounts, and insurance.
Acting like showing ID to an immigration official is some unprecedented intrusion is absurd. Fly domestically, shop at Costco, or buy a 6 pack of beer and you’ll end up showing more “papers” than a typical interaction with Customs/ICE, assuming you’re not illegal.
"In 2017, Stevens began studying cases like Watson’s, combing through court records for instances of ICE detainees being released after the government acknowledged they were citizens. She connected with dozens, including many who had been deported before the government could correct its error, and who got in touch with her from other countries. 'This is happening all the time,' she says. In her study, she found that, on average, U.S. citizens detained by ICE spent 180 days behind bars. Deportation is always a real possibility. At a mass removal hearing she attended, Stevens remembers the judge declaring that all 50 defendants would be deported; as the bailiff cleared the room, a man stood up and shouted, 'I thought I’d have a chance to speak to a judge!'"
"It took years, but eventually the BIA, even with the naturalization papers in front of them, denied his request for a stay, concluding the government could deport him. The court’s argument was arcane: It maintained that Watson couldn’t prove his father had custody of him when he was naturalized."
"A court would eventually rule that Watson had been wrongfully imprisoned. But the statute of limitations to sue the government began the day he got locked in ICE detention; it had passed by the time he was released."
It is a core tenant for criminal trials, not the civil proceedings of immigration. Instead, lower standards, including probable cause for detainment, or a "preponderance of the evidence" standard for the immigration proceedings is sufficient. That is and has been the American standard.
Legal immigrants to America for over a century accepted and complied with these legal processes, many of which were even more burdensome or discriminatory (quotas, Chinese Exclusion Act, Immigration Act of 1924, etc).
It's unamerican to undermine a core tenant of the US's national sovereignty: the "sovereign right of States to determine their national migration policy", by arguing that unregulated, irregular migration is the norm and that any action to enforce immigration law is unthinkable.
Your understanding of American immigration law is incorrect, I'd like to correct you to perhaps help align your understanding of American history with the somewhat wrong-headed idea you have of American values. America didn't become "the melting pot" by having communist-style border checkpoints.
For basically the entire first 80% of our history, the most the federal government would do in regards to immigration was write down someone's name and nationality, then send them on their way. You're right that in the early 1900s, there were finally some restrictions passed, but by that point the national fabric of America was already sewn, and even those restrictions only applied to specific countries. Right up to the modern era, millions and millions of people have been moving to the USA, and only very, very recently has there been an extremely formalized process, or efforts to go out of the way to deport people that aren't committing actual crimes (overstaying visas is a modern thing, and isn't the kind of crime I'm talking about) (and before you get on me about breaking the law making someone a criminal, lemme know how many times you've driven over the speed limit, and whether you verify your turn signals, headlights, and brakelights work every time you operate a motor vehicle).
I grant you that the government is often at odds at our values, such as with the Chinese exclusion act or when they put Japanese in internment camps, but the American culture has been pro-immigration and pro-refugee for our whole history. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses..." No way in hell bureaucracy is more important to us than that value.
American conservative media are really good at repainting history, so they seem to have convinced some people such as yourself that American sovereignty is predicated upon a tightly controlled and monitored border, but that's basically the opposite of the truth of our history. My guess is that the conservatives need scapegoats to distract from the collapse of the living conditions of the working class from the true reasons (higher concentration of wealth) and so they've picked immigrants this time, a typical target. What genuinely surprises me is that people on hacker news, who I consider typically more media-savvy than the average person, are falling for this as well.
If your argument against immigration regulation and enforcement boils down to “we’ve only been doing it for 120 years”, that’s got some pretty rough consequences for welfare, civil rights on the basis of race, and even the income tax, right?
If you want to go back to a pre-1900s American system and return to that national fabric, sure! Repeal the NFA and free our 2nd amendment. Repeal the income tax and welfare state, and go back to funding the government via tariffs and excise taxes (the liberal media sure convinced some people tariffs were an anathema to America, right?).
Your idealized “America the melting pot” thrived on the basis of people actually working for what they had, both immigrant and 3rd generation American; rather than sitting around drawing Social Security, disability, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, WIC,TANF, EITC, and housing assistance. I think you’re on to something!
Genuine question: Are you a communist, or perhaps a member of a former communist state? What you're discussing is how Americans perceive the Soviets or the Maoists, it doesn't really align with American values as I grew up understanding them.
"Show me your papers" is not something I think most Americans think is acceptable to be asked of them.
Excepting “sovereign citizens”, most Americans comply when asked to show ID on a traffic stop, their passport at customs, a drivers license when renting a car, or even ID when swiping a credit card at Walmart.
Do you think all Americans are just running around bartering for corn with bullets? Showing ID when engaging in modern society has become common - except when voting, of course, oddly enough :P
> most Americans comply when asked to show ID on a traffic stop
It's not just sovereign citizens asserting their rights to not identify themselves out of turn to a cop. You're right that cops in America are becoming increasingly authoritarian and trying to intimidate people into giving up their rights, but check out any youtube channel that's essentially just a reuploader for full cop chest cam videos, and almost every encounter with a cop has people pushing back on unlawful search and seizure.
Anyway, your examples are all not exactly good faith, since we were discussing random "show me your papers" stops, which is what ICE has started doing. Needing to prove you have a legal right to drive is relatively uncontroversial. As for showing your passport at a random DHS stop, I've refused every time (over 20 times, I'm a Texan), and everyone I know does as well, and we're certainly not sovereign citizens. "I'm an American citizen, thank you." On my way. They're completely used to it so I know we aren't outliers.
> even ID when swiping a credit card at Walmart.
I've never had to do this lol, not sure what this is about, but again irrelevant when discussing government overreach.
> Do you think all Americans are just running around bartering for corn with bullets?
Ok, this might be a rural American thing, but, yes, many people are basically doing this. Maybe this is just a Texan thing but there's whole ass grey market economies around this.
IDK man maybe we just roll in different circles, maybe it's a redneck thing, but my perception of American values is hot rodding cars so as to escape the cops, not welcoming federal agents into your city to deport your neighbor that watches your kid when you gotta run to the post office real quick, just cause of some frivolous bullshit paperwork.
We're being downvoted but no one has offered answers to my question.
In an advanced society where citizens are tracked, and receive the benefits of that tracking, why is it somehow okay for others to not be yet to reap the benefits? Why should others immigrate the 'proper way' if one can simply walk across? I can wait until anyone here who defends the lawlessness of the past ways answers.
the solution is trivial. It is easy. We've whitnessed it several times. Illegal immigration follows jobs. When the economy does poorly, less people come across. I recall a few years ago, they said it was negative immigration! More people were leaving because jobs were hard to get.
Instead of letting the economy do the work, simply enforce the laws we already have on the books. Don't let employers employ non-verified citizens.
The problem is that a common sense solution solves the problem and removes a platform for politicians to yell about and continue to do nothing over.
Step one: enforce labor laws. Step two, watch the system drain itself. Step three, look to naturalize and or remove those left behind.
Not really a theoretical, but either way, I would love it if the current admins were making an impassioned plea to answer the questions your asking, and working with Congress to get the laws changed. I think we desperately need to have that discussion. As it stands they’re not, they’re just appealing to emotion with arguments like “they’re eating your cats and dogs”, and forcefully bypassing due process.
We've entered a new era where every nation is walling up its industries (tariffs and fines), its demographics (via immigration), and it's culture (internet and social media control).
A customs duty and a tariff are functionally the same, raising the cost of foreign goods to protect local industries.