April 04, 2025

Forget about AI: America is about to be the world leader in socks and underwear [Podcast]

31 minutes

Governments love to tell you tariffs are about “protection”. But protection from what? More affordable goods? A higher quality of life?

In today’s podcast, we dig into the many, many unforeseen consequences of the new tariff policies. For example:

Examples from countries where I’ve lived which have heavy tariffs and import duties— and how those countries are vastly worse off as a result. Their citizens are poorer and less prosperous. That’s because taxing something always leads to less of it… which ultimately means a decline in standards of living. Hooray tariffs!!

They just slapped some of the highest tariffs on products the US doesn’t even make— like socks from Vietnam or underwear from Bangladesh. Do they really want America to be a ‘socks and underwear economy’? Is this really the future of economic growth?

And even if so, where are they going to get the workers to staff those factories? Are America’s 20-year olds, who, heretofore have been posting butt-selfies on Instagram for a living, really going to put down their iPhones to go work in factories making socks and underwear?

Plus there are painfully obvious reasons why American-made goods will become more expensive… due to tariffs on raw materials.

We can’t imagine how big the customs bureaucracy will become to enforce tariffs… let alone the complexity and confusion, when, say, a Swiss-owned vessel sailing under a Panamanian flag crewed by Danes and Filipinos carries chromite from Zimbabwe, granite from Mozambique, and graphite from Tanzania into a US port…

And then there’s the golden opportunity that tariffs give China to assert global leadership. April 2, 2025 may be the date that future historians mark as the day American dominance ended.

Why tariffs are just the first phase… and how this escalates from trade wars, to capital controls… loss of visa-free travel, cyber attacks, and more.

You can listen in here.

https://youtu.be/CLc4XAiSO4E

You can access the podcast transcript here.

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By James Hickman

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