Who can you ask, if you live in the US, about the effect of tariffs? And why do I stress “trenches”?
Last week, by way of illustration about “who to ask,” someone posted that our big creative building, C-space, would be closed for both Good Friday and Easter Monday. I responded, “Do you know this, or are you guessing?” Answer: Guessing. Turns out the building, unlike the banks, would be open Monday.
Guessing is common: On the BBC News there is a clip of an American “man on the street” saying confidently that there would be tariff pain for six months, and then life would be fine, and America would be great again. I responded with a skeptical look, remembering what General Patton told his officers: Know what you know, and know what you don’t know. Specifically, Patton was talking about the milage for a battle tank on a single tank of petrol—he didn’t trust the “vested interest” owner’s manual—but he could have been thinking, because he had been a young lieutenant in 1914, of how the mighty generals in the Great War were so far behind the lines they didn’t grasp how the battlefield had changed into a lunar landscape—and what that meant.
As for the theory and practice of tariffs, you may ask an economist in Canada or Europe. But don’t ask one in America, not with the US broken university system, as judged by the university graduates in the Capital Building, or by the economist I saw on Fox News.
Instead of consulting US academics or guessing, better to ask an American who is in the trenches: Molson Hart has maintained a manufacturing business in the States that requires importing… has looked into manufacturing in Mexico… has built a factory from bare ground up… has inspected factories in East Asia and China, and he speaks Chinese. He’s a smart man writing in a smart magazine, Ars Technica, about tariffs.
As for speaking Chinese, if you follow his link to his Tik Tok account,
(Vocabulary: KPI’s are key performance indicators—something business books didn’t have when I was a boy)
be sure to look at post #65, where he walks on camera in Shanghai explaining that “Countries Rise and Fall.” It blew my mind to hear that China today felt like Japan.
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Today’s post feels nostalgic. Back when blogs were new, while some were “destination blogs” by writers like in Ars Technica, I think most were “conduit blogs” with interstitial comments around links directing one to cool web sites. Cheap daily newspapers, besides offering opera reviews and travel features, would have articles listing web destinations for readers to try. URL’s were so exciting! At the time, I would read the newspapers but I could not explore any URL’s—a new computer cost as much as a used car.
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At this point a schoolchild, raised on a “stupid essay model” will be saying, “Ya, but where’s your conclusion?” Answer: Your eyes were made for scrolling, Kid: Do you see any magazines or blogs in the real world using your child model? Does a New York Times feature end with “In conclusion… “? Take off your training wheels. For you to “read while thinking” and for an essayist to create her thesis while composing, is not to plod like a horse along a canal tow path, but to frisk like a colt on bare grass…
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Sean Crawford
On mountain standard time,
Canada
April 2025
Note: For the only time I saw an economist on US news (I see none on Youtube) see my essay of March 10, “Fox News, like Fox Russia, is Fox Editorial.”
Footnote on US schools:
As for China and national strength, David Halberstam wrote in The Next Century of being surprised at a talk before a gathering of US state governors, because Henry Kissinger, the other guest speaker besides Halberstam, seemed to equate national strength with military strength. This while the governors, Halberstam wrote, being closer to the ground, knew the state of their local high schools, and the implications for the strength of the economy. Halberstam published in 1991.
As for blogs, old professors blog about the changes they’ve seen. I’m still cringing over a professor saying he daren’t ask students to read aloud anymore, because some read so slowly and haltingly.
I care about US colleges, but I won’t do any essays about them. Why? Because despite an Atlantic article exposing how students at university won’t read as many books as before (high schools now assign only excerpts!) and despite cold hard statistics about things, such as the skyrocketing percentage of undergrads getting A’s, I sense Americans aren’t ready to face the state of their higher education yet.
