Psy Op Watch: Tariffs – by Freeman Tao

spend any amount of time listening to any global news brief and they’ll inevitably bring up the current climate of Tariffs (which is a tax levied on imported goods). Inevitably, every commentator mentions, as if obligated to do so, that should the United States impose tariffs on for-instance China, that the people who actually pay the cost of that tariff are the American Consumers buying the products or end products of the goods subjected to the tariffs. But continue listening and they’re sure to mention the “retaliatory Tariffs” being imposed upon the United States by the targets of their Tariffs such as Canada or China. They will go on to warn of the ways these retaliatory tariffs will hurt U.S. Consumers…

Just last week I was listening to an interview on the BBC World Service with one country or another’s finance minister (Bulgaria maybe), and he went on at great length about how China’s retaliatory Tariffs were specifically targeting segments of the United States Agriculture Industry that were key supporters of Donald Trump, explaining in detail that Chinese Tariffs on American cotton for instance would cause great pains to American Cotton Producers who would be unable to sell in the “vast chinese market” without dropping their prices an amount commensurate with the tariff amount. In this example, supported with specific examples and several referenced hard statistics, the burden of the tariff was paid by the producers of the tariffed good in the targeted country. But then IN THE SAME BREATH, he went on to repeat the now-familiar mantra that in the case of American Tariffs on chinese products, that the burden of the Tariffs would be paid exclusively by the American consumers of the imported goods.

If, as is so often insisted by sometimes-reliable journalists at generally-respectable organizations like the BBC, NPR, Al Jazeera, etc – IF the burden of tariffs was always paid by the consumers of the country imposing the tariffs, it would be irrational for countries to impose retaliatory tariffs in response to new U.S. Tariffs. Why would China shoot themselves in the foot in retaliation for our shooting ourselves in the foot. One could argue that in the case of China vs the United States specifically, that the scale of the chinese economy bestows some particular advantage that makes it so that US consumers bear the burden of tariffs imposed both on china by the US or on the US by china, but these same commentators and journalists make the same insistence about US/Canada Tariffs, that both the tariffs imposed on Canada by the United States and the retaliatory tariffs imposed on the United States by Canada, will harm US Consumers primarily.

This structure of consequence very obviously does not make sense, which is why it has been chosen for this inaugural episode of Psy Op Watch. Many readers may find this discussion uninteresting, others may find the subject itself to be of interest but find our data or interpretation to be suspect. This of course is the right idea, and we would suggest you consult a trusted source to verify our claims, but you’re smart enough to know that there’s really no such thing as a trusted source anymore, so what’s a boy to do?

It is extremely likely that you are broadly indifferent to this entire examination of Tariffs, and that you don’t have a sufficient pre-existing base of knowledge to even internalize this information in any meaningful way… AND YET, you probably still have some kind of opinion on Tariffs. Our point is that it’s okay to be uninformed on a topic, but you REALLY shouldn’t have an opinion about something you know practically nothing about. Pretty much all of you probably have strong feelings one way or the other about Donald Trump, and there’s an extremely high likelihood that a negative attitude towards Trump correlates to a negative attitude about Tariffs (and vice versa).

Please consider the possibility that your opinion is the result of an active psy op.

It is statistically likely that they “got you” to one degree or another with the Tariffs psy op. How many other psy ops are actively deciding what you think for you?

To willfully subject yourself to a less-polished but considerably more ambitious psy op, head on over to One3CuckMe.com to read Travis Mateer’s plan to stabilize the economy through the monetization of capital punishment (I suggest reading it with an eye for Travis’ natural tendency for submissive masochism. Try to guess which public figure he’s imagining himself dying vicariously through. I think you’ll enjoy the read even more.)

Stomp on my BALLS

– Freeman Tao

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