We pass all these struct labor and environmental rules in the US, then just import goods made with far worse labor and environmental treatment. This is why we need high tariffs.
Maybe we need the political will to credibly threaten with high tariffs, but you could scratch the same itch by sequencing the lumber's genome on receipt and checking it against a registry of plantation-grown species maintained by companies known to have paid for whatever environmental auditing we require of our lumber imports.
Trying to do that with tariffs creates a situation where only domestic companies are able to break the rules--which of course they're going to do domestically. I don't want to buy things that are harming Cambodia, but substituting them with things that are harming America is not any better.
Requiring companies to sequence the genome on every lumber that they buy would seem a bit expensive, especially if they are liable if they get sequencing the genome wrong and sells products produced with illegal wood. The Government could do this as a vetting service for companies, paid through a tax on imported wood, but that would look very much like a tariff. That said, why not give companies and the free choice.
If we are considering domestic companies that are willing to break the law, neither tariffs nor regulations works. A company can smuggle to bypass tariffs, and they can ignore regulations.
At any significant scale the sequencing cost would be much lower than the tariff. You wouldn't have to do it for every tree since they're all clones.
It's just nice because it's verifiable at any point in the supply chain without requiring oversight at every point. You'd only have to pay for the sequencing:
- when adding a new cultivar to the list of ones that are legal to sell
- during sting operations
The threat of being fined/jailed should be enough to get the market to police itself. No need to add bureaucracy in the middle.
I think realizing that you're a large landowner who owns a company employing hundreds of people easily informs many of the opinions you espouse on your account.
Like the parent I have a hard time processing the narrative that environmentalism is an existential issue except when we need cheap Asian goods to undercut American workers.
I guess it’s a dead horse though since clearly this kind of cognitive dissonance has handed all branches of US government to those advocating for tariffs and the same populist sentiment is well on its way in the EU.
I have family in the furniture industry. Most of these goods imported from overseas are only 10-20% than American made with the side effect of trashing the environment in the race to the bottom. 20 years ago it was all made in the USA. Building a coffee table is not like building a chip fab.
