When UPS charged me a $684 tariff on $355 of vintage computer parts

Tariffs are great. They protect the struggling domestic IT industry and gives it time to ramp up its production of vintage computer parts.

Too bad all the competent politicians were dead set against preventing the "free market" from hollowing out American manufacturing.

I understand your sentiment, but I feel like your position is somewhat simplistic, and the actual situation is more complicated.

First, overall, the US has increased manufacturing output over the last couple decades. 2019 was the highest year ever, covid interupted a bit, but levels are back there again.

However the number of people involved has dropped a lot. US manufacturing prefers automation and prefers to manufacture things which are high-volume, low labor.

A good parallel is agriculture. Foods produced in the US (and the US produces a lot of food) tend towards low-labor. Think fields of wheat or corn, not vegetables. Most fresh produce comes from cheap-labor regions like Mexico (or is grown locally with foreign labor.)

So really your point is not about American manufacturing, but rather American labor.

Secondly, this free market you refer to is the American consumer. They are very price sensitive, and deeply favor cheap over good. This contrasts to a lot of the rest of the developed world which strikes more of a balance in this regard.

Since labor is cheaper elsewhere, it follows that cheap imports are favored (by the consumer) over the locally produced items. Unfortunately the imported good is often of a higher quality now (because foreign manufacturers can afford quality and still be cheap.)

So, the politicians you speak of (regardless of party) are reluctant to medel, partly because of unintended consequences, and mostly because the only real lever they have is to increase the cost of imported goods (ie tarrif them) which in turn gets consumers upset. (Witness the fury of the voter in 2020 because of more expensive goods.)

Thus while it's helpful to blame politicians, politicians are elected by consumers. Consumers who could by local, but choose not to. Consumers who vote against politicians that cause price hikes. (Even when those same politicians incentivise local production with things like CHIPS act.)

You can blame politicians, and indeed corporations all day long, but the consumers are voting with their wallets, and "cheap" is the only metric they care about.

... "cheap" is the main metric consumers care about because whenever anything can be supplied for less, the Federal Reserve calls that "deflationary" and creates enough new money to make sure prices go up to erase those gains. So the cost of buying anything isn't bottom of the barrel keeps going up in real terms. Most people can afford to swim against the current in one product category, and some people [the affluent] can afford to swim against the current in many product categories, but most people cannot afford to swim against the current in most product categories.

Dang it no! That isn’t remotely how deflationary works.

There’s always things being supplied for at lower prices. That is what product or service improvements do.

Your car is vastly safer than a Ford Model T. Air bags, better brakes, power steering, AC - all of which make it a vastly superior vehicle. If inflation worked the way you implied, the price of it would have constantly gone up, and never would it have managed to be affordable.

Firms reduce the cost of production and get to sell more to larger numbers of consumers. Total revenue = $ value * N customers.

You expand further on your position in the second part of your para, but that is fundamentally about how wages have not gone up over time. Which has nothing to do with inflation. It has MUCH more to do with the labor markets, and the pay people are getting for their labor.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/deflation.asp