Tariff Wars and ASL

Tariff Wars are not all Bad.

A lot of people are worried about this. And perhaps they ought to be.

However, I am not worried. I am preoccupied but not worried.

As a Canadian, I live in a country that has all the resources it needs to produce everything domestically.

If your country is in the Red, that means you’re losing money due to a negative trade balance. In other words, you are importing more than you are exporting. This is unsustainable in the long run.

If your country is in the Green, that means you’re making soldi hands over fists, as they say. That means your exports bring in more cash than you’re spending on imports.

One thing they don’t tell you about tariffs is how they create resiliency domestically. When an imported good becomes too rich for the domestic consumer to afford, the importing country has the opportunity to start making the same product domestically at a competitive cost.

It is up to the importing country to take this God-given chance and run with it.

This is exactly what happened inadvertently when the West slapped Russia with sanctions. Instead of crumbling under the combined effect of tens of thousands of sanctions, Russian producers become resilient and started producing almost everything they had hitherto imported.

It sure helps to have everything in terms of resources under your roof.

I am not worried for Canada on the production front.

What keeps me up at night is getting to keep our resources.

You see, folks, the world at large is a dog eat dog experience.

If you cannot protect your borders and country, you don’t get to keep either.

The message here is this: Canada needs to become resilient not only economically but more importantly militarily.

Only those who can protect their countries will get to keep them.

The time has come for our people to realize that there are no eternal friends in politics or in life. Only aligned interests. And we can all see now how easily things change in this respect.

So, yeah, we should continue our policy of speaking softly. But we owe it to ourselves and our children, to start carrying a motherfracking big stick… just in case.

The bigger the stick, the softer we can speak.

If the stick was nuclear, we can always start communicating in American Sign Language.

I am confident the world would start learning ASL pretty goddamn fast.