The educated view on tariffs is crazy. No wonder a Trump alternative got attention.

The educated view on tariffs is crazy enough that it prompts Trump alternatives and alternatives to alternatives

...according to my degree economcis textbook, which was crazy on that point (Economics, British Edition, by Begg Fisher and Daunbush 1982 or something like that)
The author turned a little nerd maths into concice laymans's prose in two-colour ink and went-on as though this proved his next crazy points. I think it's this uncritical view of globalisation, as promoted by Hilary Clinton and David Cameron and most or their predecessors, that turns votors towards the opposite, left wing or right wing or just anything that happens to be gaining ground. If it turns them towards my Veganline.com online shoe shop that's great but the earth does not seem to be turning that way.

This educated view allows one good tariff, some middling, and a good one it thinks bad

• prevention of over-demand causing a shortage. This is the only good tariff to the educated view. Whatever it is, it's not topical. 

Middling Tariffs in the educated view

• infant industries: learning by doing. A middling tariff that could be done better by subsidy
• defence industries and security. A middling tariff that could be done better by subsidy
• preservation of a way of life. A middling tariff that could be done better by subsidy

Bad Tariffs : the educated view is just wrong

• defence against cheap labour in another country. The educated view, in the economics textbook, is that a welfare state has not yet been invented. Or if it has, it belongs down the corridor or in another building where they teach another subject. Maybe Politics. Why would anyone want a welfare state to reduce a huge population explosion among the poor which tends to happen without it? Who cares? The economics textbook only has one chapter called "welfare" in whch it acknowledges the problem by saying this in a rather crass way; it has been observed that countries without a welfare state have extreme disparities of income according to someone called Parato who went to a library and looked it up. That is as far as the economics testbook will go.

Survival: the problems that pundits need to solve so democratic welfare states survive

• the country that sells cheap gas to buy guns to shoot you with. "you" being the nearest country, and the gas customer being any country that wastes chances to sell gas gazprom customers.
• the country that sells cheap electronics to buy guns to invade Hong Kong or Taiwaan and is so bad at human rights that nobody can even question plague spread of bad vaccines and the country exports plague to the world when not invading it.
• the country that sells cheap clothes because there are so many poor people that they will sleep on the factory floor and work for pocket money if they are lucky. A country where the rich find it easier to employ a maid than buy a washing machine. This is not efficiency. The country needs pressure from other countries to introduce a welfare state by a certain date.
  
  I did not know where this was going when I started typing, after a quick re-read of my 1980s economcs textbook. Most adults who studied economics in the UK did so when the UK was part of the EU, so tariffs were done by head office and nobody talked about them on courses as I remember - they were a missing chaptor like the welfare one.
  
  

Conclusion

Taiffs based on a country's poverty-reduction or welfare state or whatever you want to call it. These can be delayed a year or two after the figures are known each year to say what a government has spent.

Tariffs based on hostility to human rights according to some index. The Veganline.com web site which sells vegan shoes online has an example but probably not great - you see some details under each shoe. If any MAGA Donald J Trump supporters are reading this, please ask your oligarch news moguls to change their editorial position and their hiring of weird journalists who become politicians; ask them to find people who want a welfare state that does not want to invade us in the countries that we trade with.