Workers! Don’t worry about the tariffs.We have nothing to lose but the miserable lives capitalism imposes

I am of a mind that this tariffs business is a kind of homeopathic medicine: where the medicine aggravates the symptom which is arising as a result of the body healing itself. Aggravating the symptoms forces the body to heal faster.

Part of the illness is caused by economists peddling a distorted picture of trade. We built international trade on the Ricardian notion of comparative advantage. Ricardo was a trader who didn’t realise you can’t just convert factories overnight to making other stuff, yet here we are with economists telling us we must specialise and compete with other nations. This is the illness, and increasing tariffs just magnifies how sick the idea is, as Richard Murphy and others have pointed out.

The other cause of the illness is also from economic thinking: you can just expand the economy ad infinitum. That sickness is producing a lot of discharge. The total weight of man-made stuff is now more than the weight of all living things on the planet. And this infrastructure is hungry for more resources (it runs on fossil fuel). And, this infrastructure exerts an enormous pressure on nature- using the air as a recipient for greenhouse gasses. Not only that, it uses the surface freshwater as a recipient for nutrients to the extent that we long ago passed the planetary boundary for what nature can handle.

So the Earth is full. Not just of people but man-made stuff that itself has an insatiable appetite for more of the resources that a just aren’t available. And full of waste.

So we need each nation to become more resilient, to be able to degrow, ensure the provision of the basics at local level and basically redesign economics whilst we regenerate our natural ecosystems.

Economics: time to leave the stage

We should accept that the liberal fixation that the purpose of economics is to balance books – is outdated. And dysfunctional. We should accept the Modern Monetary description of the economic system: it’s something that has a function. The function we give it.

To any sane person, the function of the economy is to distribute resources so everyone gets an acceptably comfortable life. Fairly. And within the limits of what the planet needs.

Had we listened to sensible people when the symptoms were beginning, and abandoned the advice of the economists, we would not be in this position. Fortunately, Trump is bringing it all to a head. Forcing us to abandon liberal economics, forcing us to take on MMT and go full on sustainable.

We had to do this sooner or later, we are very late already. I see it as a wonderful opportunity to promulgate the alternatives.

We have nothing to lose except our growth-dependent, fossil-guzzling, non-resilient, dysfunctional way of life.