This is a great question. For me, the steelman argument is the following: Without trade barriers, the local production economy is disadvantaged. Local companies have to comply with things like environmental and labor law regulations, making it more expensive to produce things. Other countries may not have these regulations. Therefore, by institution these rules without tariffs, the net effect is a reduction of environmental and social standards, as manufacturers move to locations where they do not exist.
A strong version of the policy would thus involve directly tying tariffs to environmental and labor laws of the producing country, thus equalizing the field with the local companies. Not only would this allow for fair international competition, it would also economically incentivise the global development of good standards.
I've never understood why countries like the EU pass strict environment and labor laws and then DONT place some kind of tariff or tax on countries without those restrictions. Not only to offset making your own market less able to compete on cost, but to provide a financial incentive for the other countries to up their game on environmental and worker quality-of-life issues (if that is the overall aim).
>I've never understood why countries like the EU pass strict environment and labor laws and then DONT place some kind of tariff or tax on countries without those restrictions.
This happens all the time though? GMO are very restricted there, so farmers there can't use them. Imports are also banned.
Because those ither countries would and do lie all the zime to placate delusional western citizens . it would result in tax carousels with countries were there is no legal recourse.
There are already ways to enforce those -- for example, Democrats and US labor unions used the USMCA negotiations to enact a "facility specific rapid response mechanism" that lets the US essentially strong-arm Mexico and Mexican companies into improving collective bargaining rights within the context of the trade deal; section 307 products (created by forced labor) have been illegal since 1930 (and enforced more strictly over the past decade, given concerns about Chinese slave labor); carbon import taxes addressing environmental regulations have been proposed in Congress, but haven't been implemented yet. The government also has existing authorities under anti-dumping and countervailing duty (ADD/CVD) legislation, so long as those duties comply with American obligations under international treaties (Trump's tariffs exist outside the ADD/CVD framework, and place the US in noncompliance relative to our WTO obligations).
Trump's tariffs don't really serve any specific policy goals other than "trade is bad and everyone should buy more from us than we buy from them," which is self-evidently absurd; why are we punishing Madagascar because we buy their vanilla and they're too poor to have extensive need of our services-based economy? Beggar-thy-neighbor trade policies inevitably beggar us as well, as we're likely to find out quite soon.