Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's the opposite! A universal tariff is a tariff on all inputs that manufacturers need to be competitive. How will Ford or Tesla ever be competitive if all their inputs are 24% more expensive than Toyota's inputs? Autarky doesn't work. Juche doesn't work. Comparative advantage works, both theoretically and in practice if we study economic history.
Do you really believe in the comparative advantage argument though? Surely it’s only true if comparative advantage is fixed over time. And surely in order to leverage comparative advantage, an economy would need to know how good they would be at producing every possible good. There are good reasons to trade, but comparative advantage doesn’t feel like the correct theoretical underpinning to me.
The invisible hand of the market will let you know what aspect of your output is most valuable for others.
The benefit of this invisible hand is that the "economy" as a whole does not need to know how good they are at producing everything. People just need to know if what they are producing now is more valuable than the next best alternative. Everything else will be sorted out with market forces.
In university lectures we were given the famous argument about olive oil from Greece and that it would never make sense to do our own olive oil because we both lack the natural resources (unique soil + sunshine) which allow olive trees to grow easily and we'd also have much better yields growing other things on the fields.
So to me, both opportunity cost and comparative advantage are really basic building blocks of economic understanding and I'm a bit dumbfounded that someone wouldn't understand these concepts.
