Sparks: Canada says it will match US tariffs 'dollar for dollar' as trade talks break down

All I know is what I read in the papers, and it says our neighbors are going to start matching our bad ideas dollar for dollar until we both run out of money and friends at the same time.

Men in black coats sit in warm rooms signing papers that decree a crate of grain must stay in its hold, while the man who harvested it finds his own bread has suddenly doubled in price.

The tariff trap preserves the fiction of national competition to blind the worker to the fact that his own state is merely using his grocery bill as a weapon in a squabble between two sets of masters.

Forget the speeches about fairness; the northern prince has no leverage but his own indignation, and a retaliatory tax that harms one's own subjects is merely a slow way to fund a neighbor's victory.

The mechanism of the retaliatory levy assumes a degree of commercial autarky that our current credit structures cannot support without inducing a general paralysis of the very revenue streams the state intends to protect.

They have painted new flags over the old iron gates, but the customs house remains a place where the rich lock the doors and the poor pay for the privilege of standing outside in the cold.

Applying a tax to cure a trade deficit is like a physician attempting to treat a fever by bleeding the patient’s healthy arm simply because the left one is already wounded.

Naming this a 'trade war' is the hegemonic trick that makes the citizen believe his own rising cost of living is a patriotic duty rather than a symptom of a dying international order.

Behind the clean numbers of the levy stands the man in the shipping yard whose hands are numb and whose stomach is tight because the bosses have decided to fight with his dinner plate.

'Trade talks break down' is the phrase they use to describe the moment their vocabulary finally caught up with their total lack of intention to agree on anything at all.

It was decided that since the two nations could not agree on the price of a toaster, they would both agree to make toasters entirely illegal to own by mistake.

One government has decided to protect its citizens by making everything they need more expensive, and the other has kindly offered to do exactly the same out of a sense of neighborly competition.