 All I'm saying, Bob, is that you could have gotten that thing a lot cheaper at the big box store down the street instead of having a friend of a friend sculpt it for you. That is so unpatriotic of you, Sarah! Down the street at the wall, I general, everything is made overseas! If I bought it there, I might as well have shipped off an American job to a foreign country myself! No, thank you! Actually... What now? I get that it's upsetting when an American factory lays off workers or shuts down altogether, and it's good that you want to help those affected. But allowing American businesses in their production facilities to focus on things they do better than anyone else is patriotic. When we put barriers up to global trade, like tariffs, it drives up prices across the board. Not only that, but when people look to local companies to fill the gaps left by the imports they can't get a decent price on anymore, it forces American companies to make things they wouldn't have made ordinarily. Well, what's so bad about that? Think about it like this. Imagine your house is a country. Everything you use that you didn't make yourself would have to have been gained by trading things you can make yourself, like those cakes you like to bake. Bob does bake a really good cake. Thank you! When it comes to cakes, you have what's called a comparative advantage. But when it comes to producing eggs, wheat, and milk, your neighbors have the comparative advantage, which is another way of saying they can do it better than you. So you trade with each other. But one day, your neighbor Karen, who also makes cakes, but not as well, gets tired of losing out to your superior baking. So she gets together with her friends and convinces them that you're totally cheating. I never cheat when baking! But she convinces them that you do. So now they won't sell you flour and you have to grow it and mill it yourself. In fact, you have to produce everything you need to bake a cake by yourself with no outside suppliers. I guess that makes sense for that, but I don't see what it has to do with national economies. When it's no longer cheaper to hire someone else to make something for you, which is generally what tariffs result in, you have to make everything in-house, as it were, generally for more money than it would cost otherwise. This harms low-income people who are no longer able to afford the goods and services once available to them. By the way, who did you buy that thing from anyway? Oh, my good friend Karen recommended a great toy maker to me.