Tariffs and sky high audio prices.

@inna 

I apologize if anything I've written has come off as a lecture. That was not my intent. I've just noticed alot of your postings seem angry but many of those posts were deleted by the moderators, maybe at your request. Anyway, my apologies.

Now I will take issue with "dilettante" which is intended to convey that there is no knowledge to back up the statements. In the immortal words of Bob Newhart, "I would never mean to denigrate you, which by the way means to put down".

If you are angry and miserable, its highly likely it didn't happen over night and it may also be likely that you are exactly as you have intended. If that's the case, my apologies for trying to spread a little sunshine. Nothing worse than a happy SOB bouncing in and spoiling the fun.

@nonoise 

I like it...to bring it back to audio, didn't Bob Marley record something about shooting the tariff?

😂😂😂😂😂

Just for educational purposes, we should focus on ghasley's comment about tariffs and how they caused the great depression of the 1930's. Here's a link to the Smoot/Hawley act:

https://fee.org/articles/the-smoot-hawley-tariff-and-the-great-depression/

Again, ghasley ... excellent stuff.

Frank

People are really clever, creative, greedy and stingy. All you have to do is let them trade among themselves and over time you get a lot more really good stuff at lower and lower prices. Exactly what happened over the roughly 100 years of sound money due to the gold standard.

Prices, like I already said, were remarkably stable in the US for 300 years. Its a fact. You could look it up. The track record was not perfectly flat. A few wars created some inflationary spikes when paper money was created to fund the wars. But standard items like a bushel of corn or wheat were virtually the exact same price at the end as at the beginning, 1600 to 1900.

Seriously people. Its a fact. You could look it up. Really. You should.

Then consider how many tariffs, and a lot bigger ones, were enacted back then. So drop the ideas mentioned. They are contradicted by the facts of history.

Tariffs in the current circumstances are wonderful. Not perfect. Nothing ever is. But the downsides are all relatively small and limited and short term while the upsides are all big and widespread and long term. Already we are seeing more investment and hiring. Only gonna get better the longer it goes on.

This same exact thing happened back in Colonial America. Naysayers will have to contend with the reality of how beneficial tariffs were then.

So why do prices rise then? Because instead of money we have debt. Pull a bill out of your wallet, if you even have one, and look at it. Federal Reserve Note, it says. Well, its private, not Federal. There are no reserves. And do you know what a note is? Its a loan. When you buy a house you sign a note. A promise to pay. A mortgage. The literal translation of which is "death pledge."

So, in other words, a Federal Reserve Note is an IOU. Which if you visit any coin store or look on-line its interesting to follow the history of this fake currency as over the years it deteriorates from being coined of actual gold or silver bullion to paper with a literal claim on those metals to a promise to be exchanged to .... nothing. Today it is not even exchangeable for anything. The "dollar" is not a dollar. And the Federal Reserve Note is an IOU

An IOU what? An IOU NOTHING!

There’s the crime at the root of it all.

Actually, if memory and google serves me correctly, the tariffs exacerbated the Great Depression, not caused it. They came about a year after the 1929 stock market crash. It’s a linear thing.

And there is a leading, noted, Nobel Prize winning economist who thinks otherwise:

"But didn’t the Smoot-Hawley tariff cause the Great Depression? No. There’s no evidence at all that it did. Yes, trade fell a lot between 1929 and 1933, but that was almost entirely a consequence of the Depression, not a cause. (Trade actually fell faster during the early stages of the 2008 Great Recession than it did after 1929.) And while trade barriers were higher in the 1930s than before, this was partly a response to the Depression, partly a consequence of deflation, which made specific tariffs (i.e., tariffs that are stated in dollars per unit, not as a percentage of value) loom larger."

--Paul Krugman

All the best,
Nonoise