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.

I know one US business that used to make niche electronic product. Most components they used were from China. Got hit by the tariffs that wiped all the operating profit. Guy also had to sell his home and is now couchsurfing. Business is unlikely going to recover.

Of course he considered making chips and other components in the US, but he was few billions short to start the fab.

Reminds me of a comment I think by Nancy Teeters the first female Federal Reserve board member. She said the other board members thought they could savage the US manufacturing industry to kill wage inflation and break the unions and it would come right back once they stopped. And it didn't.

From the other side of the Atlantic this sounds like straight Thatcherism, in which Chicago-school monetarism was an ideological anti-union weapon, and the Thatcher cabinet was not coy about it. However I think the US went that way first even if Reaganomics came later.

I think a lot of that in the US got spun up with Nixon, Reagan brought a lot of it to the mainstream though. Both of them hated unions with a passion that is for sure.

Unions are the best of all the bad solutions we’ve come up with so far for labor to compete with capital. The worst of course is collectivism through government, though that’s being tried again…

The best solution is antitrust enforcement and removal of anti-competitive laws/rules lobbied for by incumbents. When companies have to compete with each other for labor and customers, wages go up and prices go down. Whey they consolidate they can charge monopoly rents.

Unions often even make this worse because they'll latch on to a monopolistic employer and then lobby with them to retain the monopoly at the expense of all the workers who are their customers rather than their employees.

> removal of anti-competitive laws/rules lobbied for by incumbents.

If even if there are such ideas in new government, they quickly disappear over wine and steak dinners with the lobbyists.

Unfortunately this is not seen as bypass of democratic process. Nobody voted for having less rights and any bargaining power stripped and yet here we are.

That's where security services should come in (in many countries protection of democracy is their main statutory duty) - but they are not doing their job tax payers pay them to do.