A large amount of my knowledge in this area is infantile. I'm going to preface this with a couple general principles.
1. I believe in free trade.
2. What we currently have... Isn't really free trade. And I mean, before the tariff stupidity. When we live in a world where China, a "Communist Utopia:tm:" is exploiting the labor of its people to enrich its ruling class, while redistributing wealth from its own tax (and tariff) policies to keep those anticompetitive enterprises afloat, that looks to me like a long-term national security risk.
3. I don't trust Trump or his administration to lead us through anything resembling whatever the F they think they're doing. And I was a Trump voter, to be clear.
Now a question that comes to mind. It took a while to get to where we are, but ultimately, what did the landscape look like before NAFTA? I can't say with any meaningful granularity, beyond the fact that a lot more manufacturing happened here. I'm certain it would take a very long time to unwind some of our foreign manufacturing and bring some of it back. I also think we need a lot more level-headed leadership than we currently have to even begin to form a coherent strategy leading us back in that direction.
Certainly, China didn't used to be the global export powerhouse it is today. Some goods will have to be more expensive in the short term under any sort of attempt to resolve whatever issues might exist, and even medium to long term if that trade relationship is a thing that's worth rolling back. I'm not against suggesting there may be merits to exploring that option. I just wish we had strong enough leadership to try to formulate, I don't know, any sort of plan.
