Right, and there's a good case to be made for tariffs that are explicitly tied to another country's worker and environmental protections, where the country has actionable steps to improve their worker/environmental protections in order to avoid the tariff.

But the current administration is itself actively opposed to worker or environmental protections, and the result of the current tariffs will just be that the poor people overseas end up even more impoverished and still lacking in protections.

I worry about this, but I started worrying about it less when I read about Purchasing Power Parity. The same stuff costs less in poorer countries.

> but is that only because we're exploiting poorer people in markets with fewer worker protections and fewer environmental protections

That's definitely happening, but there are other possible reasons. For example a good could be more efficiently grown or produced in a country because of geographical reasons.

Also, from a pragmatic standpoint, it is simply not the case that all wages and wealth across the countries of the world are equal. Maybe that could be a goal but is anyone talking about that? Either way, it does not follow that the workers in that country are necessarily exploited when paid lower wages compared to the importing country, unless we are using different definitions.

This is not to mention that untargeted tariffs can increase the cost of living _for no gain at all_. If Germany manufacturers some specialty tool (not with slave labor, I would hope!), and no US manufacturer wants to make it, then I suddenly have to pay X% more for no reason at all.

If tariffs were being added as a response to poor working conditions, and a requirement of lifting the tariffs was to improve working conditions, that could potentially be seen as a generally positive outcome for the world.

Producing the same good in the US, at anywhere near the same price, requires automation or prison labor (legal slavery in the US) and likely won't result in more manufacturing jobs and likely won't result in higher wages for workers. Florida's approach here is child labor, which is both exploitative and cheap.

"because we're exploiting poorer people in markets with fewer worker protections and fewer environmental protections"

This can easily be overdone. If you stop doing business with poorer people, you all but guarantee that they stay poor. Counter-productive to say the least.

In my lifetime, I saw a lot of countries grow at least somewhat wealthy from extensive commercial contact with the West, including mine (Czechia).

Better not pay them anything and they can go work in an even worse sweatshop, right?

Or can hire some child labor in Florida since they already changed the laws there.

Shhhh, you're not supposed to ask those questions!