It was me not Felix. It was an essential oil. I ordered it from the US to Sweden. I presume it came through the general EU tariff.
The tariff was not huge, though the fee to decide on that tariff was pretty stiff percentagewise. Prohibitive. I saved money despite the long delivery distance by ordering from the US, but then lost, to some degree, due to the tariff process.
My issue is that when Trump introduced tariffs and tariffs talk, he was called, more or less, an idiot. Reading the way the issue was covered, both here in the local press and then in US press, one would have thought, as I did, that tariffs were a thing of the past. But they are not. And this is not a recent tariff or really set of tariffs in the EU. All sorts of products are protected via a complicated set of processes. Now perhaps the specifics of Trump's tariff suggestions were dumb. But reading the various media, one would have thought tariffs always do damage to both the host country and to other countries. Period. LIke we outgrew that. Like we outgrew slavery or indentured servants or colonies. We know that protective stuff is bad. But that does not seem remotely like consensus, even in the states where the media joined in the Trump bashing. (as always I feel the need to say, I don't like Trump. It's not about that. It's about the way the media acts in general and then on this specific issue)
I could put it this way. I suspect that Trump was going against the stream of the neo-con agenda which does not really want any states protecting any markets. And the neocons want it to seem dumb, period, that any protective measures are taken by anyone. They want to NAFTA the world. They want no third world country to try to protect any of their own industries. They want into China fully and Russia fully. They want to undercut, in the end, any protective or restrictive practices in the EU and in allies. What they call free markets, is to be everywhere. So when Trump went for tariffs, he was siding with nation states over corporate 'rights' and neocon plans. Since the Left hates Trump and to the neo-cons he is like some black sheep member of the family who never listens when they have family meetings, the media just stomped on Trump in an unnuanced way. Tariffs bad, Trump bad. Stomp.
I am not so worried, per se, about people being down on Trump. But my concern is, that this binary couching of the issue, will do real damage when India or some African nation wants to protect a fragile agricultural sector and the IMF or some trade organization says, this is old, outmoded evil economic policies and we don't care what your government/people chose to do, change it. For example. At some point the EU is going to be told that restricting gm products is illegal in some international trade tribunals opinion and that barrier will come down. Anything that puts democracy or policy against 'free' markets is to come down. Do I like Putin? Nah. But really his big importance to the neo cons has to do with markets and money and corporate freedom. They don't mind dictators who do exactly what corporations want.
