Tariffs are a moral and economic necessity. Every country should have some kind of tariff on foreign goods and services to offset regulatory asymmetries. It's

Tariffs are a moral and economic necessity. Every country should have some kind of tariff on foreign goods and services to offset regulatory asymmetries. It's not fair that an entire industry in one country is wiped out and replaced by that of a foreign industry with fewer regulations (and thus lower operational costs and higher margins)... It's bad not only from the business and opportunities perspective, but also from an environmental perspective as the damage is merely relocated to a different country with fewer regulations. Tariffs help to protect local industry which adheres to local laws. It provides a mechanism for the government to offset the business harms of the regulations it introduces whilst also blocking regulatory arbitrage loopholes which it would otherwise create. It's pretty straight forward; if the government introduces some environmental regulation which increases production costs by 10% for local producers, but foreign producers don't have to adhere to this regulation, then that just wiped out 10% profit margin from all local producers... If they were only just profitable before, now with the new regulation, their margins are now negative. To stay profitable, the local producer would have to increase the price of their products but this would cause sales to collapse as they will no longer have the cheapest product on the market. They may have the most cost-efficient process among all the local environmentally-friendly alternatives, but they can't compete against the foreign environmentally-harmful alternatives. And this is extremely harmful in the current financial system which has a tendency to eliminate people's surplus income. Without significant surplus income, the consumer is forced to buy the cheapest product available. Even if the quality is lower and even if it's not their first preference. The entire banking system is predicated on the idea of sucking out every dollar of surplus income out of the economy. This creates the race-to-the-bottom environment which keeps eroding quality of goods and services; the consumer is forced to accept increasingly low quality goods over time. Price becomes the only metric which matters and this ensures that businesses can never afford to adhere to any ethical frameworks. Of course tariffs don't work instantly, it can take decades for them to take effect. You can't revive a local industry overnight after it has been killed off. Also, there has to be confidence that the tariffs will remain in place in the foreseeable future. People aren't going to start businesses if they fear that the tariffs which protect them might disappear after the next election.