If we had an economic system that worked for human beings, we would compete to improve workers’ standards of living rather than to reduce them. We would compete to improve their working conditions rather than to worsen them. We would compete to improve our environment rather than to pollute it.
Instead, we have a “race to the bottom” in which workers must compete on factors over which they have little or no control. We cannot raise wages because it would make us less competitive. We cannot improve working conditions because it would make us less competitive. We cannot improve the environment because to do so would allegedly put companies out of business and workers out of work.
This is a competition where only the rich win and only the rich have the resources to influence the powerful. And we treat this “law of the jungle” economic system as if it was “natural,” when any economic system is inherently a social construction.
If tariffs were used to redress wages, working conditions, and the environment, they would be defensible. The tariffs we see make no attempt at this; they can, as widely reported, only raise workers’ (and everyone else’s) costs. When factories take years to build, as many have pointed out, they cannot, in even the middle term, bring jobs back to the U.S. and, to the extent that factories do return to the U.S., capitalists will likely substitute robots for as many workers as possible. This is no way to improve workers’ standards of living.
But it is a way of pretending to improve workers’ standards of living and of pretending to bring jobs back.
The proof will be in the pudding. We will have tariffs because Donald Trump adores them. We will test the obvious as living standards continue to collapse, as the climate crisis worsens, as extreme weather events become more extreme and more common, and as our environment is more polluted.
After all, anti-intellectualism is superior to intellectualism in the one place where it really matters: our political system, which has rarely cared about ordinary people and, as a few have pointed out, where the world’s richest men compete to get off the planet they have destroyed, leaving it for the rest of us, the meek who shall inherit the earth.
We do not have an economic system that cares about humanity. It cares about profit—for the rich and only for the rich who fantasize that they can take their profits elsewhere.