This article is about how the US is turning its back on free trade, which has actually made the US very rich.
Trump wants to get trade deficits with other countries to zero, but the author of this article says “there is no inherent reason why these numbers [trade surpluses and deficits] should be zero”.
As the author explains, “different countries are better at making different products, and have different natural and human resources”. One country might grow lots of food, and another might have large iron ore deposits. These differences can create trade surpluses and deficits between countries, which aren’t necessarily a bad thing.
But as the author says: “according to the White House, the act of selling more goods to the US than the US sells to you, is by definition ‘cheating’ and is deserving of a tariff that is calculated to correct that imbalance”.
Put differently, with over 200 countries in the world, only an imbecile would think that a bilateral balance of trade of zero between each pair is either possible or desirable.
To show how backward Trump’s thinking is, David Ricardo, who died in the early 1820s, developed the theory of comparative advantage to explain why ideas like Trump’s make no sense, and how everyone can be better off by specialization.
But I don’t think Trump cares. He was put in to crash the US (and if possible the global) economy, as well as to destroy US soft power and its military alliances.