Yea there's a quote I read somewhere, something like "I want computers to do my work so I can spend my time making art, not computers making art so I can spend more time working." Resonates here.

Although, fun fact, my brother in law still makes pizza this way at his shop.

To break from the pizza analogy, and this is purely my opinion, but it seems to me that as a country we should be encouraging economic growth and job creation in areas like medical research and energy technology, not coal mining and production of raw materials, but maybe I'm wrong?

Creating jobs that require less skills and pay less money while reducing jobs that require specific skills and pay more money doesn't seem like an economically sound idea if you want your country to prosper. The world economy is built on trade, and isolationism is a fast track to poverty.

We're good at pizza so we focused our economy on pizza-making. Selling pizza makes more money than selling flour. We trained an entire workforce to make pizza. Now that we can't sell as much pizza, do we force the pizza makers to make flour? Making flour won't pay their rent.

So, a few questions here and I don't want to ramble, so I'll ask you a couple of questions that might make my opinion clearer. First, why do you assume the pizza costs less if we produce the flour here? And second, who is the "we" you talk about being lazy?

Tariffs raise the price on this trade agreement so that it's now too expensive for us to trade flour with our neighbors. So instead of spending most of our time making pizza, which we're great at, we have half of our workforce back to harvesting flour.

Also we have a pizza shortage again. 🍕

Turns out our neighbors are great at harvesting flour and love our pizza. We agree to trade flour and pizza with our neighbors at a fair price, and train more people to make pizza. Now we can make enough pizza for everyone because we don't have to spend so much time harvesting flour. Enter tariffs:

In this analogy, say we make the greatest pizza- it's so good everyone wants a slice. But half of our workforce is busy harvesting flour so we can't make enough dough for all the pizza demand. It's a major pizza SHORTAGE! People are pissed because they can't get pizza. How do we solve this problem?

In short, the cost to make things outside of the US is cheaper than making it here. That's why we import. Shifting the making-stuff part of the process into the US, where labor and production costs are higher, will make things more expensive. Folks arguing for tariffs seem to miss this point.