Now it sounds as though Trump may decree 10 percent tariffs across the board on all nations except China, who get slapped with 125 percent. That second part will no doubt make Trump feel like a tough guy, until someone explains to him how much the “rare earth” metals that China now refuses to export will be needed for things like Trump’s (or Biden’s or Harris’, had one of them won the election instead) big-government computer-subsidies program, Project Stargate.
But it should be remembered, without for a moment intending this as a vindication of Trump, that pretty much every major political faction is incompetent—destructive—on the topic of international trade. Trump didn’t invent tariffs, of which the U.S. had plenty before he came along, often cheered in particular by the Democrats and their labor union buddies.
Most political people tend to think “trade deficits” are bad and that “imbalances” in trade should be reduced to zero somehow. Meanwhile, to add a dash of hypocrisy and corruption to the economic illiteracy, it appears Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and others knew the real (negative) effects likely to happen in the wake of tariffs and bought stock accordingly before Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff hikes were announced. That’s just the latest twist in the decades-long practice of politicians recouping from the markets they assault.
Luckily, Trump’s being assailed on the tariff issue from all sides, so rather than repeat the basic libertarian argument against tariffs, let’s step back to remind ourselves there’s no good reason to expect that the Trump right is aiming for a world of free markets or libertarian individualism in the end and just taking a scary detour to get there. Trump probably isn’t planning to liberate the economy from tariffs after a short dose of what he sees as harsh but effective “medicine.”
He doesn’t simply want other countries to reduce their tariffs but to end our trade deficits with them, which is to say, to stop selling us so much stuff unless they buy an equal amount from us—regardless of which customers want what from whom, apparently. It’s a pity Trump isn’t as opposed to (real) federal budget deficits as he is to (basically imaginary) trade deficits, the former more his and Congress’ assigned area but one about which they’re doing nothing. Trade deficits are just a function of billions of individual buyers and sellers doing their own thing, and it’s none of the President’s business how that plays out so long as each individual seller got paid.
Trump also sounds increasingly eager to tax the rich and to wage some wars, even as the U.S. is reportedly creating a new nuke 24 times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb. In short, he’s never been truly averse to police-state mechanisms so long as the state’s loyal to him for a change (which is also more or less the attitude of new FBI director Kash Patel, blurring the line between corruption and mere disloyalty in much of his rhetoric). RFK playing along with this stuff seemed sort of nice in a bridges-building way at first, but I wonder if Trump’s favorite thing about the Kennedys all along was JFK jawboning steel manufacturers into lowering prices, precisely the kind of iron-fisted behavior non-communists should eschew in a leader.
Trump’s behavior on the economics front has been erratic and authoritarian enough that some of the people who voted for him are surely feeling buyer’s remorse (politicians not one of the things blocked from domestic markets by tariffs).
I doubt Trump’s own party, now in control of Congress, will become so irked at his economic mismanagement (or war on Greenland) as to concoct a Democrat-style impeachment push against him, but it’s worth contemplating what would happen if they did. Specifically, would we be better off elevating to the Oval Office now-Vice President JD Vance, who’s roughly a faux-paleoconservative with Bush-like tendencies, whereas Trump is basically a faux-populist with mild fascist tendencies?
If Trump exits early one way or another (preferably before he seeks a third term, even if you like his first two), let’s hope Vance understands economics better than his hillbilly-subsidizing rhetoric might suggest. You can love the boonies and your rural roots all you like, but stop taxing and punishing people for engaging in globe-spanning trade—a distinction Vance likely understands after all the time he’s spent working among Wall Streeters, even if it doesn’t currently suit his brand to say so.
But don’t doubt that the paleoconservative impulse, like the establishment’s left-liberalism or Trump’s enemy-smashing populism, can be a menace to commerce. I recall a post in an online thread full of comments from people in the orbit of the paleo-friendly Mises Institute in which the commenter said he likes strict borders and hates cosmopolitanism so much that he wouldn’t be fazed if Alabama were cut off from the rest of the world. That guy would be in for a rude awakening if the tariff-lovers really went hog-wild and shredded the web of connections making up international trade and keeping us all fed, housed, and clothed, though. Call me a snooty New Yorker, but I think Alabama is better off having contact with the rest of the planet.
But if the Trumpers or Vancers, whatever their precise philosophical rationale, foster economic isolation, do they even care about whether it’ll create greater poverty amongst the commoners they claim to represent? Or will they say the poverty serves a “higher” purpose such as “national sovereignty” or the imagined independence of full “autarky”?
Even without intending to go that far, perhaps the right will gradually expand government’s control of the economy—in much the same way that socialists often start out trying to regulate one thing or control prices in one area, only to learn the hard way that there are always ripple effects when you try outmaneuvering the market.
Despite all the right-wing anger at inflation lately, for instance, I’m reminded of conservative pundit Kurt Schlichter’s talk online a few years ago of being willing to bite the bullet and accept lower agricultural productivity and higher food prices, even if the law had to decree native-born workers henceforth be paid “an American wage” to offset businesses’ loss of access to cheap migrant labor and cheap imported food ingredients. Even before Trumpers spread ideas like that, the 1990s-style religious right, though usually opposed to socialism, seemed to be warming to the idea of minimum wage laws once Christian activist Ralph Reed merely rechristened such government dictates a “family wage.”
The right isn’t alone in being stupid on this front. Obviously, it’d be simplicity itself to get the left to sign off on a “diversity wage” or “equality price controls” or “pro-union tariffs” that had the same destructive results as any more novel right-wing impositions. Humanity’s goal should instead be to produce everything where it can be done most efficiently, at the lowest cost, by the people best positioned to do so in the eyes of the markets, as determined by customers rather than ignorant politicians.
That’s how humanity avoids wasting immense manufacturing effort and becomes maximally prosperous. We don’t want to end our days carrying grains of sand back and forth across a beach for no good reason simply because “Labor is good” or “This is an American beach, by gum” or “You can’t trust foreign sand.”
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey