Who invaded whom this week?
What's the latest DISASTER?
What excuse can we find today to impose more trade sanctions/obstacles?
What happened when Russia invaded Ukraine? The west had to decouple with Russia.
It did not decouple very much. And the little decoupling that happened was mostly unnecessary. This had virtually no measurable effect on the economy, though every time there's an accident or a store gets robbed there's a tiny negative effect, if it could be identified and measured. It's best not to fuss over every possible negative glitch that might happen if this or that change should take place.
This caused great problems in the supply chain; dramatically increasing costs.
Not overall. Only a few players who had to make adjustments. The market works best if those tiny glitches are left to individual producers to deal with. It's not a national crisis, not something impacting on consumers generally. 99% of consumers felt no impact from this, other than just the unnoticed routine ups and downs which happen anyway, always, throughout the year, every year. It's silly to think the government has to dive into the economy to patch up whatever someone imagines did damage somewhere. Individual producers make their own particular adjustments to the changes.
When the planners jump into it to "fix" what went wrong, they all have a different theory about what the proper remedy is. So there's no predicting what they'll do, and this unpredictability actually does more harm than whatever they think they're fixing. Their fix is usually determined by whoever is giving the higher campaign contributions at that particular time. A better system is where the fixer-tinkerers stay out of it and let the market respond in its normal predictable way.
It would be far worse if (some say when); China invades Taiwan. I used to be a free trade person. But now I more believe in smart trade with allies or countries that we can count on.
"smart" = subjectivity, and whatever special interest currently offers the most bribe to get the changes or corporate welfare to benefit them. Everyone in power to make the choices has their own "smart" scheme to fill the need or fix what's wrong.
The short term cost savings and trade benefits are not worth it if we have to decouple from that country.
In a hypothetical world only. In the real world there's no example where any decoupling was necessary -- or, in a rare case where maybe it was necessary, there's no example where the economy was disrupted and made worse off than if there had never been the trade benefits. If there were any real example of such damage or threat, caused by the decoupling, someone could give a real example, instead of always the hypothetical cases and paranoia only.
All the above paranoid excuses for more trade barriers are really inspired by one impulse only -- pandering to uncompetitive producers who clamor for restrictions on foreign imports, whining for protections against the more competitive foreign production. And especially pandering to the "jobs! jobs! jobs! jobs! jobs!" fanaticism of the Trumps and Bidens who imagine we need more factory jobs into which to put the horde of worthless whining crybabies in order to keep them out of mischief.
hbr.org
