It occurred to me this morning, that if Trump is going to slap tariffs on things that other people want to sell for less than it costs US based corporations to make them, we should slap tariffs on transactions on Amazon, destroying our distribution sector just as surely as these other people are destroying the US steel sector. How about 20% on all transactions with a delivery address in the UK?
In computing the take of such a tariff, one would need to factor in the cost of the work of the expensive lawyers who would be needed to counter the dodges and wheezes the lawyers which Amazon would no doubt hire would no doubt come up with. Perhaps involving more or less fictitious routing through one of the island tax havens basking in Crown Dependency status. But at least such lawyers would be true Brits.
Slightly harder to work around, I read in the NYRB of an observation by a senior West German, in the margins of trying to bring Greece to heel, to the effect that our West European welfare states are unsustainable in a world market dominated by India and China, neither of which treats itself to such luxuries. Lean and mean in a way that we have not been for some time now.
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