Ok cool let's go back to then and cut the budget to match. Sounds like a decent tradeoff to me I guess. I would prefer a more incremental experiment though.

I'm not a free market fundamentalist. I also don't think we ever had a free market. Implementation details always matter. My standing policy is basically small informed perturbations around free trade, included targeted tariffs. Everything has tradeoffs. Restricting lumber from canada and fucking Americans? Not smart. Letting China openly steal from us? Asymmetric trade policies hurting the US? Also not smart.

The trouble is that the US realized long ago that they could get free stuff by giving out imaginary paper (aka trade deficit) ad infinitum and, in turn, stopped doing much. China, on the other hand, doubled down on trying to do everything and now has the luxury of largely being able to ignore the rest of the world.

The US could theoretically start doing things again, but it is never clear how to make that happen. The people much prefer to get free stuff (who wouldn't!?). Even if you can convince them otherwise, a lot of the institutional knowledge required to do things is gone. As capital moves to where it is most economically useful, the 'free stuff' economic structure has shaped where the capital is found. To move to a 'do things' economy would require turning the capital allocation upside down. To have all the pieces fall into place to see all that align just right requires great upheaval.

Maybe tariffs really are trying to be the catalyst to convince the people that free stuff isn't the way to bring on the revolution, but even if that's the case, that's a different environment to how tariffs were used historically.