Days before Halloween, fittingly, Trump uttered the following terrifying incantation to interviewer Joe Rogan: “To me, the most beautiful word... in the dictionary today, and any, is the word tariff... It’s more beautiful than love. It’s more beautiful than anything. It’s the most beautiful word.” He doesn’t just grudgingly use taxes to increase the price of imported goods—and any domestic goods that are made with imported ingredients or formerly had to compete with foreign goods and thus kept their prices low. He relishes the thought of raising taxes and prices with an almost sexual enthusiasm.
What a sadistic, stupid psychopath. No wonder so many of the worst people I’ve met love the man.
Pointing out how anti-market, anti-freedom, pointlessly impoverishing, and ignorant his tariffs position is shouldn’t for a moment be taken as an endorsement of the left or modern liberalism, either, each of those political factions being its own fount of other, often more terrible economic ideas, which in turn spawn even more numerous taxes and regulations—including other tariffs. But Trump’s rhapsodic ignorance shows the left and right increasingly offer, respectively, a grim choice between abject failure and loudly-touted success in doing destructive things.
Don’t pretend otherwise just to make it appear you’re on a side that deserves to “win.”
Even many right-wing figures prone to say pro-Trump things aren’t really on his side on the tariffs issue. Hungary’s Viktor Orban warns Trump that tariffs cause poverty no matter what continent imposes them. Economist and Trump supporter Art Laffer, a Reaganite too smart to fall for most of this nonsense, offers the half-hearted argument that Trump only threatens to raise tariffs in hopes of getting other countries to lower theirs. Historically, it never works out that way, though, and the ratcheting escalates toward economic paralysis. People get rich by buying and selling as they please, and when you penalize them for doing so, guess what, they get poorer.
In roughly the 1980s and 90s, conservatives and libertarians alike understood that. Those aren’t the ascendent factions now, though. Instead, both the stubborn, math-averse paleos echoing the early-20th-century Old Right and the young, low-empathy ignoramuses of the 21st-century New Right claim to look to the past and find periods of tariffs correlated with prosperity. They show no serious interest, though, in explaining or understanding whether the tariffs caused the prosperity or whether the tariffs simply did damage during otherwise prosperous times, a bit like Paul Krugman praising high taxes of the comfortable 1950s without showing they caused the boom times.
If politics on the left was reduced over the past few years to the formula “Trump bad,” politics on the right has been reduced to “Trump good,” effectively snuffing out whatever tiny embers of interest in economic analysis may have existed on the right. When you find your ostensible political allies arguing in favor of any policy by saying in effect, “Well, it hasn’t destroyed us yet, so it must be OK!” it is time to abandon those allies. They’re fools.
Among the numerous bits of wisdom the right has forgotten since the 1980s, or in the case of the young perhaps never knew in the first place, is the observation that when a politician or party foists a bundle of policies on the country, some of them libertarian (reducing the size and scope of government so individuals can live their own lives) and some of them pro-government (new taxes, new regulations, new wars, new police powers), it’s virtually always the government-growing policies that linger, not the pro-liberty policies.
Promote new tariffs (or for that matter a VAT tax, as nominal Libertarian Gary Johnson unwisely suggested during his presidential campaigns) with the faint praise that the new policies could replace the even more burdensome IRS, and the odds are you’ll just end up with tariffs (or a VAT tax) added without the income tax abolition ever coming about. New miseries added, no reduction in the old ones.
Even Trump admits his new tariffs may cause Americans some “pain,” but he vaguely assures us some sort of offsetting “greatness” will occur. You could make that subjective assertion about any policy you wanted to impose since the days of the pyramids, though, couldn’t you?
Compromise with evil to get a few good things and, contrary to what many “sober, experienced” (read: cynical, opportunistic) experts would have you believe, you’ll probably end up getting only the evil parts. The government ratchet, as historian Robert Higgs might say, moves in only one direction (albeit in fits and starts): more government.
Or as the young might say these days if they weren’t all ineducable socialists and fascists: government, not even once.
I’m reminded of a video interview someone did with Alex Jones years ago in which he expressed some vague nationalist belief in the “buy American” principle (which is inefficient and thus no help in the long run to either Americans or non-Americans) but was observed to be selling merchandise manufactured in China. His lame explanation, uttered with uncharacteristic shyness and a hushed tone? Well, if we made it all here, it’d be more expensive. Bingo! That’s why you don’t impose needless additional manufacturing costs and higher prices on Americans, be they factory owners or ordinary customers—or for that matter non-Americans, who last time I checked were also human beings who’d benefit from good deals.
But the cabal of podcasting sycophants who now exist to protect the likes of Trump and Jones, a dimwitted circle-jerk of pseudo-manliness, probably think they can dispense with economics by proving they can bench-press more than Adam Smith did, the dumb nazi fucks. Any argument will do when defending your cult against rationality. Pity they aren’t as interested in defending the human race against government.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey