As usual among politicians and the media, there has been a lot of half-baked, half understood, but unthought out disagreements concerning the application of Tariffs on goods or services entering a country from another country. There has been the anti-Trump Democrats and fellow travellers declaring that Trump and his economic advisers do not understand business economic transactions at an international level. The Democrats argue (correctly) that US tariffs of 25% levied on any foreign goods and services will have to be paid by US purchasers of those goods and that this will only negatively effect US purchasers.

This argument, of course, is partly true, but in typical fashion it is only half true or rather it only depicts half of the typical trade war story. For this outcome will only be true as long as US citizens continue to purchase those tariff increased (now more expensive) goods and/or services.  Which of course is actually highly unlikely. Therefore, if US citizens cease buying those particular goods or services because they now find due to the tariffs they are far too expensive, they will neither pay the extra 25% tariff nor pay the previous basic unit cost. Thus in that case US citizens would then retain these savings to spend elsewhere.

Furthermore, that scenario is the particular economic outcome the Trump,Vance and Musk tariff imposing authoritarians hope will happen. Their MAGA (Make America Great Again) policy is based (at least theoretically) upon getting more things made or grown in America (steel, aluminium, fruit and veg etc.) and this, if successful,  might (again in theory) increase the number of jobs for American workers employed to manufacture or grow replacements for the tariffed goods. So again theoretically, American unemployment could fall and US employment statistics could improve. However, this theory rarely unfolds in practice.

In fact, this whole US MAGA led Trade War Tariff campaign is premised on this simple dualistic, nation-based trade war tactic. If it works, as the MAGA enthusiasts hope, it will be the foreign company sales that are drastically reduced because of these financial (Tariff) reasons, and it will be those other countries who will have to find alternative countries to sell their goods and services to, or alternatively ‘unemploy’ their own workforce. The latter being an outcome that would cause their governments to lose income from their workforce tax deductions.

But of course that scenario only presents one side of the trade war story, because the countries suffering the imposition of Tariffs (such as Canada) invariably retaliate and impose their own Tariffs on the offending country and then the situation unfolds in reverse. In the case of US and the retaliation by Canada, (at 25% tariff levels) the citizens of Canada will have to pay 25% extra for future American goods and services and face the same decision to continue to buy or not to buy American goods and services. And they have already decided not to buy many of them.

So the citizens and manufacturers of neither country will gain as a whole by this Tariff tactic even though some individuals or individual manufacturers may benefit individually. Where goods and services are essential rather than optional luxury items, then alternative sources of supply will need to be sought from alternative non-tariff charging countries. But it should be clear (at least I hope so) that the working people in every country who rely on employment to keep body, soul alive and families fed and housed are the captured and sacrificed pawns in these elite instigated trade-war chess games. This is because it is their jobs and futures that become even more precarious and by needing a weekly or monthly  wage to survive they are the ones who will be first to suffer hardship.

This scenario will become particularly acute in the current 21st century period, where technological changes in production and distribution, are already under constant transformations in an efficiency and cost cutting direction. Replacing jobs by automation, robotic machinery and various Artificial Intelligence applications, is already displacing and replacing working and middle-class jobs and such disruptive changes are invariably increased and intensified during trade wars. Hence, in this current case, of US initiated Tariff increases, Canada has already negotiated with Europe to sell more of its goods and services to Europe and buy more from Europe what it will no longer wish to purchase from the US.

Essentially the same inter-connected reciprocal dynamic will be repeated in all the countries effected by the implementation of the current US trade war tariffs or any future ones. It is at this point that such tit-for-tat trade wars can begin to alter previous supply chain links and forge new ones and these new supply chains can incentivise producers to implement labour-saving computer and mechanical technologies within them.
It is also at such exacerbated trade war junctures that historically the systemic social and economic crises implicit in the hierarchical mass society systems and now further intensified by the turbo charged capitalist mode of industrialised production begin to resurface.

As inorganic and organic raw material resources needed for production become scarcer and more costly to acquire and available markets become more glutted and protected, elites administering as yet unresolved trade wars and imbalances, become tempted to resort to initiating military solutions to resolve protracted contradictions more quickly and more favourably. In this regard note the recent frequent hints by Trump etc., at considering how best to obtain control of the Greenland, Panama and even Canadian land based amenities and resources. Note also the recent attempt by Trump and Vance at the Oval Office to brow beat and terrify Zelensky (“your risking another World War in Europe”) into signing away numerous rare and valuable mineral rights in Ukraine to extraction by US based finance and industrial capital.

Spoiler alert. These same resources are some of the material objectives that Putins crisis riddled Russia has had their eyes on for some time hence his authorisation of a Special Forces Mission to occupy resource rich parts of Ukraine. If Trump and Vance had been successful in their attempted Maffia style shakedown (by making him ‘an offer he couldn’t refuse’), in all probability Trump would have cut Putin in on a deal to share part of those mineral extraction and exportation rights, for Putins own particular part of the global turf, which he considers is his own ‘manor’.

You see it is essential to not forget that behind this heated public trade war, all major hierarchical mass societies in the 21st century are in severe socio-economic and financial crises. Some are more desperate than others and at least five out of the seven major ‘advanced’ countries in the world are technically bankrupt with trillion and more state debts each. The next lower tier of countries are also in unsolvable insolvency crises as well as suffering severe social and climate crises – none of which are resolvable by normal economic and financial means.

So it should be no surprise (to those who have woken up and smelled the coffee – so to speak) that more abnormal measures are being considered everywhere. Indeed, major military wars and genocides have begun yet again in a number of significant regions of the planet, as they did in the 20th century. It was then when such severe socio-economic and financial crises wracked (and wrecked) the countries of USA, Europe, the UK and elsewhere courtesy of the hostilities occurring during two world wars – which, incidentally were also over territorial and resource (oil etc) access gains.

Fast forward to the 21st century, and each advanced country and many less advanced ones are again producing more goods and services, than can be profitably consumed even by a globally connected, but already credit-saturated humanity. Furthermore, the current economic systems are using more raw materials and energy sources to produce those goods and services, than can now be sustained by natures growing cycles and by the planetary energy sources of sun, wind, water and fossil fuels that can be utilised safely, without excessive pollution and without even causing more climate changes.

Therefore, in addition to not fully understanding the economic system of tariffs, or how fictitious the financial system and state debt is in reality, (its actually all paper promises and ledger entries) our elites in politics, government, academia and media in all countries also have no serious understanding of economics, history, biology or ecology. All governments, with the full support of politicians, intellectuals and media, are currently doing their best to increase general commodity production and also increasing the production (or procurement) of military equipment.

They have still not understood, that increasing general production means increasing general pollution and will cause more general ecological and essential species loss. They still haven’t grasped that military equipment does not prevent wars, but by providing an available option to be used, it increases their likelihood; nor that increased military expenditure makes the state fiscal (paper insolvency) worse, not better; that further arms manufacture increases general and specific forms of pollution and ecological loss; that it squanders already scarce energy and mineral resources and also has further negative impacts upon general climate and weather patterns.

So if at the global level, it seems at the moment that the inmates have taken control of a series of national asylums and that they don’t really know what they are doing, beyond the immediate satisfaction of their acquisitive appetites, current mood swings and fantasy imaginings, then this is not quite accurate, even as a dark humoured metaphor. For our elites are following the logic of a deranged, un-natural social system which is designed to function primarily in the interests of the elites at the expense of the masses and the rest of life on earth species. Furthermore, they are not ruling over communities made up of a masses of deranged individuals.

Our world communities are actually made up of a majority of hard working, sensible, community minded, working people who over generations have been deprived of the means to adequately challenge the current system of governmental rule and are as yet unable to enact the much needed  measures that would secure the essential prerequisites for something which I suggest they actually desire and which is incredibly important.

These essential and incredibly vital prerequisites are 1, for self-governing communities to ensure their own community’s peaceful survival, in such a manner that 2, self-governing communities are able to ensure the survival of the integrated biosphere system of nature, which materially supports their communities, and 3, for those self-governing communities to ensure this inter-dependent system of nature will continue to support the future generations of all those species of life who contribute to maintaining it and thus to ensure the food, water, air and biosphere habitat resources, life on earth – as a whole – needs.

And finally 4, such self-governing communities by ensuring points 1 to 3 are achieved and maintained, would in turn also be a form of organisation best fitted to ensure the stability of planet earth’s biosphere and consequently the continued existence of the many biological forms of life that have so far evolved together within it and upon it.

Roy Ratcliffe (March 2025)