6/6
So the idea isn’t new. What’s changed is its centrality (slow growth, overcapacity) and the push to turn a case on labour standards into explicit border charges.

5/6
b) The toolbox: the EU now uses border adjustments (carbon, foreign-subsidies rules, EV probes). Not labour tariffs but they normalize non-classic measures.
c) law vs rhetoric. In WTO law, dumping = price discrimination, not low wages. A labour-based tariff would be novel and contentious.

4/6
What’s new is a) the salience and framing, b) the toolbox and c) the rhetoric.
a) After the "China shock" and today’s overcapacity exports, the claim went mainstream. Piketty now floats ~15% “compensatory” tariffs (labour-income shares: China ~49%, EU ~64%).

3/6
Europe used this language 15–20 years ago (even naming China), but mainly to promote labour standards, not to price them at the border.
Inside the EU, the fiercest “social dumping” rows were about posted workers (east–west wage gaps). Asia featured, but wasn’t central.

2/6
“Social dumping” is a critique that low wages/weak labour rules distort trade. It's not a WTO term; WTO has long said labour standards concern ILO (International Labour Organization), not tariffs.
enb.iisd.org/events/1st-m...

If we are adrift, it is because our inquiries remain superficial, because philosophy has been held in abeyance for decades now, largely due to excessive specialization. Above all, it is because the vision of an enlightened society has run aground on the shores of a fool’s paradise.

Calling Trumpism an ideology seems like an overstatement for a hollow concept that is not underpinned by any coherent logic—only by fragmented imaginaries and a desire to undermine the rational foundations of democracy: laws and justice.

Figure's BMW use case:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlUF...