Just so bad for the economy

Think of all the cheap shit they could've got with their economy stuck in the primary sector

It's weird how Austrians hate the labour theory of value and still make use of Smith's and Ricardo's model to justify free trade

Just think for a minute about the example usually given about wine and cloth being traded between Portugal and England
Somehow Portugal can just scale up the output of vineyards because they had timesavings. You just throw more labour at it and the Vineyards magically produce more
Somehow there's a magical advantage for England in producing cloth (cloth not wool) so only England should make cloth because you know Portugal as a country is just magically incompetent at turning wool or cotton into cloth

Tariffs are a good thing. The only upside to free trade is that you have marginal cost savings which can have some use if you want cheap raw materials for your industries so they can be competitive enough for export or if you want intermediate/labour intensive goods like steel for further use in your high value added manufacturing

But even then western wages are hardly competitive enough to make it worthwhile to produce anything for export in a western country, being limited to exports which depend on their reputation/branding/quality

The LTV is another issue. Arguement for free trade is that when its cheaper to import foreign, resources at home can reallocated elsewhere for better use. Portugal isn't magically incompetent at producing at turning wool or cotton into cloth. Tarrifs have use like protection of culture for example in agricultural communities which is Abby I support them for that reason though.

@Mr. Nessel What are you even going on about

> "Somehow Portugal can just scale up the output of vineyards because they had timesavings. You just throw more labour at it and the Vineyards magically produce more"

You talk about free trade and don't even bring up the concept of opportunity cost?

Opportunity cost isn't the main argument for free trade. It was comparative advantage

Wow

You're a meme

An actual right wing communist meme

Ah yes I'm a communist for not liking free trade and supporting the policy under which modern capitalism developed

Big brain

All the law of comparative advantage states is that countries will increase net supply of goods by producing goods at the lowest relative opportunity cost

Opportunity cost was characterized in terms of time being invested and I brought that up

I must be missing something?

Are you just saying labour time is to limited?

Because you have other factors of production

I'm saying the model by which free trade is justified relied on two flawed assumptions, one being that it implicitly endorse the LTV and secondly that comparative advantages are temporary in manufacturing

Oh yeah

The logic still applies tho

Well yeah in a given moment it demonstrates you can save a bit of money

But it's not how you develop an economy

Deardorff's general law of comparative advantage
Skeptics of comparative advantage have underlined that its theoretical implications hardly hold when applied to individual commodities or pairs of commodities in a world of multiple commodities. Deardorff argues that the insights of comparative advantage remain valid if the theory is restated in terms of averages across all commodities. His models provide multiple insights on the correlations between vectors of trade and vectors with relative-autarky-price measures of comparative advantage. What has become to be known as the "Deardorff's general law of comparative advantage" is a model incorporating multiple goods, and which takes into account tariffs, transportation costs, and other obstacles to trade.

Look ^

Models have been made with other commodities

Labour is just like any other commodity

Earlier you were actually getting at the law of diminishing returns

which is good

because you're correct, simply applying nothing but labour time in the absence of other factors of production would decrease marginal value of labour and be inefficient via Says law

The other part is that there is no inherent difference between nations in how well they can potentially manufacture something

Japan had a comparative disadvantage in car manufacturing prior to insituting tariffs

Under free trade conditions they just would've been stuck with the immediate gratification of importing cheaper foreign cars

"The other part is that there is no inherent difference between nations in how well they can potentially manufacture something"

You sure?

I'm sure at least in a geopgraphic sense. I know Africans aren't going to make processors and whatnot

It's different in the primary sector