Asklemmy

Thank you for a respectful and thoughtful reply. I understand your perspective, though we disagree. I just don't think we're in a condition as a country where we can really go for the nuanced approach. The country needs to take broad decisive action to bring back American labor and services.

As long as the focus is on price, we need to make the price of importing higher than the cost of domestic production. This isn't about whether the quality of Norwegian goods or Bangladeshi goods is higher. It doesn't even matter if American goods are of lower quality than those Bangladeshi ones. It's about whether it was made in America by American labor, and thus supports an American labor chain. That's really where my focus is at this point. The environmental concerns are secondary, but important - simply that it takes fuel and money to bring those goods to our shores.

There are unemployed Americans, while goods and services are being imported from abroad. That shouldn't be considered an acceptable outcome. I don't particularly care about workers from foreign nations, sad to say. In abstract, yes, I would like for everyone on Earth to have a good job and a good life, but our government (and our people) need to focus on the needs of Americans first.

As far as the difference between natural Ethiopian coffee and monoculture Hawaiian coffee, right now I care whether or not the Ethiopian coffee plantations employ American workers on American soil, paying taxes to us and supporting the businesses within their community. The rest is really just a matter of degree at the moment - optimally we'll sharply reduce imports for both the social and environmental benefits. We shouldn't be worrying about whether our companies can pay Ethiopians a fair wage right now - that's the problem of the Ethiopian government and local Ethiopian companies. We need to worry about the fact that there are Americans not working and not receiving a fair wage. We need to clean up our own house first and shorten our reach, before we can reach back out into the world.

Circling back around to the retaliation, that's fine by me too. I almost want to see retaliation, actually; it saves us from putting up export tariffs. It's not a 'trade war', it's the desired outcome, to limit trade outside of the United States. I want it to be expensive for us to export goods, services, and labor. Companies here in the US should focus their production on serving the needs of our own people first.

Given the massive debt we're running right now, the way I see to do that for the time being is to economically punish behavior we don't want to receive money, rather than spend money and incentivize what we do want. That gets more money into the government that doesn't directly come from individual income, property, or sales taxes; the debt can be paid down by irresponsible companies who aren't willing to adjust to the America first paradigm.