Tariffs Won’t Make America Great
In announcing new tariffs on China, Evader-in-Chief Donald Trump again showed that he believes reality will conform to his wishes. Tariffs won’t make America great. They never have, and they never will.
Contrary to Trump’s claims, trade does not occur between nations. America does not engage in trade with China or any other nation. Individual Americans engage in trade with individual Chinese. Trump’s claims are founded on collectivism—the subjugation of the individual to the group.
Tariffs, the MAGA sycophants tell us, will make America great again. Tariffs will serve the “public interest,” we are told, by stimulating domestic manufacturing. In truth, tariffs benefit some at the expense of others. For example, tariffs on auto parts from Canada will benefit workers in the auto industry while raising auto prices for everyone, including the beneficiaries of the tariffs. And when consumers must spend more on transportation, they will have less money to spend on other items. Jobs may be saved in the auto industry, but jobs will be lost in other industries.
One of the great fallacies in discussions of economic policy is to focus on what is easily seen while ignoring what is less easily seen. The jobs saved in the auto industry are easily seen. The jobs lost elsewhere are not.
Tariffs have never made America great. They always lead to economic calmity. In 1828, Congress passed the “Tariff of Abominations” to benefit Northern manufacturers at the expense of Southern planters. The economic destruction was so severe in South Carolina that the state threatened to secede from the Union. The destructive nature of tariffs was again evident after the passage of Smoot-Hawley in 1930, which raised tariffs on over 20,000 imported goods. Other nations retaliated with their own tariffs, and exports from American companies plummeted, thereby exacerbating the Great Depression. Trump wants us to believe that somehow his tariffs will defy economic reality.
America’s greatness was not achieved through tariffs and government edicts. Its greatness was achieved when the government protected each individual’s freedom to produce and trade, that is, property rights. If the MAGA movement truly wants to make America great again, it must first discover what made America great in the first place.