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It will hurt everyone, as a basic fact of economics:

1. American innovators buying components from overseas, which include many on HN and in SV, will now have to pay more, reducing their ability to innovate.

2. American consumers will have to pay more.

3. American consumers will have less innovative products, as their ability to get innovative products from other countries will be reduced, and as innovators in both the U.S. (see #1 and #4) and in other countries will be hamstrung.

4. American innovators will face less competition, which is certainly not what leads to innovation; it leads to profit-taking based on market power, not meritocratic competition.

5. Reduced international cooperation and trade will reduce American innovators ability to sell abroad; the U.S. is only 5% of the world's population; the other 95% of the market is elsewhere. Cooperation and trade will not only be reduced as a direct effect, but also as a result of the U.S. appearing to be an unreliable partner, and as a result of other countries responding in kind by pulling out of treaties when they find any problems.

6. As reduced trade hurts economies here and abroad, Americans will pay more, have fewer people to sell to, resulting in lower wages and fewer jobs.

Finally, the greatest American innovation is democracy, the belief that all men are created equal and that's what leads to prosperity. That innovation has resulted in an explosion of peace and liberty unlikely anything the world has ever seen, and it has, as a secondary side effect, brought an explosion of prosperity unlike anything the world has ever seen. The U.S. is now purposefully killing that innovation.




This is the removal of market manipulation (subsidies on shipping). We should see more innovation because the market can act freely now. For instance, now that China will have to pay for their full shipping, some product may increase in cost to the point where they could be manufactured and sold in the US, spurring innovation. The fewer artificial market constraints the better.

> Finally, the greatest American innovation is democracy, the belief that all men are created equal and that's what leads to prosperity. That innovation has resulted in an explosion of peace and liberty unlikely anything the world has ever seen, and it has, as a secondary side effect, brought an explosion of prosperity unlike anything the world has ever seen.

Yeah, I don't know about that. Maybe in the US we've had a decent run of peace (with 50 years of nuclear holocaust hanging over our heads), but we've definitely dropped a lot of bombs on people. Enough that I think we can say that US democracy has not "resulted in an explosion of peace and liberty unlikely anything the world has ever seen".


> I think we can say that US democracy has not "resulted in an explosion of peace and liberty unlikely anything the world has ever seen".

But we have. Name any other period in world history that has seen the same spread of freedom and peace. There is nothing that comes close.

> The fewer artificial market constraints the better.

The Postal Treaty, and free trade and globalization in general, is a removal of artificial market constraints. Now we will return to artificial constraints at international borders.


> But we have. Name any other period in world history that has seen the same spread of freedom and peace. There is nothing that comes close.

I count the middle east and south east Asia as part of the world, and no what we spread there was not freedom and peace, it was/is decades of war and destruction.

I think you're referencing the cold war and the lack of direct conflict between major superpowers in the 20th century. That was a direct result of mutually assured destruction and the industrialization of the military. It was not caused by democracy. It was also replaced by a number of proxy wars. Again, not peace and freedom.


> I count the middle east and south east Asia as part of the world, and no what we spread there was not freedom and peace, it was/is decades of war and destruction.

I didn't say all the world had freedom and peace, but that it has spread far more than ever before. And it has. Again, name any other era that remotely compares.

> I think you're referencing the cold war

The Cold War has been over since, effectively, 1989, almost 30 years ago. Yet the world is, by some people's measures, more peaceful now than at any time in history. As simple examples, there is almost no international war anywhere. The entire North and South American continents, and Europe east of Ukraine, are at peace.

> It was not caused by democracy

The victors of WWII put mechanisms in place expressly to prevent more wars, including the UN and the EU, institutions designed to apply democracy to international relations. People can always make up reasons, since it's impossible to prove, but the results are what they intended. Further, with the spread of democracy in Europe, for example, the threat of war - which tore apart Europe for centuries before democracy became almost universal there post-WWII, war between European powers is now unthinkable. The exception is the sole non-democratic power, Russia.

Looking around the world, democracies don't tend to start wars or invade their neighbors - there is no chance of war between the U.S., Canada, European countries, Japan, etc. etc. All democracies. In East Asia, almost all threats of war are between the non-democratic power, China, and others. Japan and S. Korea, for example, have no interest in it and work out their issues peacefully.




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