… an April 5th, 2025, post on Facebook by Jason Brennan (links added):
Idiots over the past few days: “If tariffs are so bad, why do so many countries have them? Ha, take that, economists!”
Economists: We literally have a whole subfield of economics that explains why governments do things that create concentrated but small benefits for the few at the greater expense of the many . A dude won a Nobel prize back in 1986 for it. This isn’t even a hard problem for us.
“If tariffs are bad, why then…” is the economic equivalent of “If humans evolved from single-cell organisms why are there still single-cell organisms?”
