Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act
23 comments
·February 2, 2025fzzzy
This is what Ben Stein is lecturing about in Ferris Beuller's Day Off.
tmpz22
It appears Society has to periodically re-learn even the hardest of lessons. What did we learn from WW1 and WW2? What did we learn from the 60's? 70's? What prices did we pay for those lessons?
Will the old or the young have to pay the price to re-learn them? Did some countries, demographics, and ethnicities, have to pay higher prices? What are we leaving to our children?
firejake308
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/670089.The_Fourth_Turnin...
The Fourth Turning is a well-known book that discussed this idea exactly, that one generation learns lessons that the next generation forgets. There's a little more to it, but that's the simple idea.
thfuran
>What did we learn from WW1 and WW2?
How to industrialize killing on a grand scale.
gopher_space
Make sure you absolutely eradicate the power base you were in conflict with?
fzeroracer
I think the lesson we're going to need to learn this time is a different one, unfortunately.
We're ruled by oligarchs that are, effectively, a doomsday cult of personality [1]. They've realized that neither money nor fame can buy happiness, so they've gone all in on both pseudoscience and burning down the world for excitement. That's why Elon Musk and his cronies are tearing down the government and gaining access to sensitive systems under the hood [2] and why he bought Twitter. It's all a deranged game by people far wealthier than they should be, and far stupider than people think they are. But money is power and money buys propaganda.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/25/tech-righ....
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/02/01/elon-musk...
naruhodo
What do you think of this[1]?
fzeroracer
I've seen bits and pieces of this before and it's tied together with Project 2025. So I have no doubt this is what they're planning and trying to execute.
I think the problem is that they're genuinely stupid. Like far too stupid to actually execute a plan of this scale without either crashing the economy, causing a default, causing the military to overthrow the executive or an outright revolution against them.
They don't have a smart plan to descale and break apart the government, so they're just raiding offices and taking a hammer to everything. They're going to hit a load-bearing pillar with themselves still inside the building. And doing this sort of flash-speed deconstruction means the pain is immediate, obvious and devastating.
The Romans solved this because they understood you had to placate the population with bread and circuses. The current would-be fascists can do neither.
refulgentis
This isn't on Society: the is massively unpopular, was well-foretold, repeatedly, and the argument for ignoring it always relied on excuse-making.
We will all reap what a few sowed through their own obstinate choice, and it goes beyond a one off issue with understanding tariffs.
Is this just some ignorance we have to relearn as a group?
No, plenty of smart people, right here, right now, talked themselves into it, and from here, they'll never, ever, admit they were wrong on it. Even though they, daily, reap the benefits of free markets and extol the benefits of them. We'll just always have insufficiently tried relying on ourselves.
The site we're commenting on, the CEO retweeted some long fact-free nonsense on the subject, that when you're done reading it 10 minutes later, amounts to "juche will make us more powerful than ever before, and btw, the elites will be owned in this existential battle. dig in for war!!!" Sickening lack of self-awareness.
The elites who bray about "elites" are nihilist and a destructive force, necessarily, and always have been.
firejake308
Does anyone know why the Smoot-Hawley Tariff had to go through the Senate, but Trump can just sign an executive order? It's been a while since my high school government class
raldi
It was too easy for one state’s congressional delegation to hold out for a special concession in any tariff negotiation, and then when the amended version came up to vote, another state would do it, and then another. So Congress gave the president unilateral power to set tariffs, which also is better going into a negotiation since the other side knows you can deliver whatever you agree on.
paxys
The simple answer is that Trump can do whatever he wants, because the majority party in congress isn't going to challenge him.
callingbull
The actual answer is that congress has already authorized the president to set tariffs by executive order.
_DeadFred_
This should not be flagged as it gives us an idea as to the business environment we are coming into once Trump's tariffs go into effect.
paxys
Anything vaguely anti-Trump on this forum is going to be flagged and removed, as it has been for many years now.
slashdev
The bias on HN goes the other way, it’s quite liberal, much like Reddit
bdangubic
HN is whatever your echochamber is. right-leaning people are bitching that it is too “liberal,” left-leaning people are bitching that is too “conservative”
the main issue I see is that these-days-right-leaning-people do not like flagging, aka community-policing of content… same thing they don’t like on reddit or anywhere else :)
roenxi
People spend a lot of time looking inside the great depression for causes to the great depression. It doesn't lead to very persuasive arguments and I'm pretty sure they're making a mistake. The cause was probably in the 1920s somewhere, well before the action. It'd be similar to today where if the US went into a great depression the cause would be the questionable economic strategy from 2007 to today.
The flailing during the depression itself was also not clever, but the best approach to economic crisises is to keep the focus on not enabling capital destructive people in the first place. Smoot-Hawley didn't help. No taxes help, all taxes make the economy worse off. We still have taxes though.
llamaimperative
There is no "cause." It's a network of forces. Tariffs were one of the very significant forces.
Worth listening also to Reagan's commentary on this matter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tp1T7kPEdDY