President Trump, Please Reconsider Your Views on Tariffs

President Trump once stated: “‘tariffs’ is the most beautiful word in the English language.” I was a fervent supporter of the recent candidacy of my fellow New Yorker (he hails from Queens, I’m from next door Brooklyn), but I beg to differ with him on this issue. It is not even close. There are many candidates which beat out tariffs in the beautiful word sweepstakes: love, beauty, justice, truth, charity, civilization, prosperity; anyone can add to this list.

I would also add specialization and the division of labor, for that is one of the very well-springs of economic life itself. If we all tried to be jacks of all trades and masters of none, and we take this to its ultimate tariff conclusion, virtually all of us would starve to death. What does this have to do with interferences with international trade? That is the direction in which this philosophy leads us.

Mr. Trump wants to make America great again. That is a given. With his victory in the last election, he is well on his way to that goal. All men of good will wish him well. But he also should want to make many other countries great again, foremost among them Israel and Argentina. Does he really want to ruin the economies of his friends Benjamin Netanyahu and Javier Milei, by imposing tariffs against imports from them, to say nothing of dozens of other nations friendly to him? Hopefully not. Does he really want to ruin the economy of North Korea? Why pick a gratuitous fight with China, Russia and other such countries?

Truth be told, our next president, in his heart of hearts, really wants to make many other countries great again. For example, Canada, Mexico, Chile, Norway, Australia, etc. Imposing tariffs on them will have the very opposite effect, especially when they retaliate with their own tariffs, quotas and other interferences with U.S. exports. And they will indeed do so if historical experience has anything to guide us about this. The Smoot – Hawley tariff is a case in point; it plunged the entire world into greater economic doldrums than otherwise would have been the case.

There are two men in a rowboat. One of them shoots a hole in the bottom of the craft. Water starts seeping in. Should the other passenger put a second hole in the bottom of the vessel, to protest, to get even with, the first? That is a good approximation of retaliatory tariffs that will almost inevitably follow Mr. Trump’s tariff plan.

If tariffs are such a great idea, if they are so “beautiful,” if they can bring about prosperity for America, why should there be free trade within our own country? Why should there be free trade between my home state of Louisiana and California? Those sneaky underhanded Californians keep exporting their wine to us. If we placed a big fat tariff on that product of theirs, we could then have a thriving grape industry here at home. But wait. I live in New Orleans. Those people up the Mississippi river from us in Baton Rouge, are equally guilty of exporting goods and services to us (don’t ask which ones, I’m too lazy to look it up). Whatever they are, we New Orleanians should slap a big tariff on them, so that we could have a better shot at producing them ourselves, whatever they are. Ditto for neighborhoods in New Orleans. I hail from Uptown, Those folks in Downtown, in the Garden District in Mid-City, they are a bunch of rascals. A tariff on what they export to us would be just what they deserve. What nerve they have! Who do they think they are, ruining our domestic industry with their exports to us?

You see where I am going with this. The logical extension of tariffs is the end of trade and complete self-sufficiency down to the individual level. Then, 99% of the world’s population would surely and literally die.

No, Donald, you want not only to make the U.S. government more efficient, why else would you throw in your lot with Elon Musk; au contraire, you want to make the entire country Great Again. Tariffs are the direct opposite of the technique to accomplish this task. The lower they are, the better.

Before the advent of the railroads, land transport took place on the basis of the horse and buggy. There would be no other way for much trade to take place between Oregon and Florida, between Maine and Minnesota, or between Chicago and Boston. When trains supplanted horses and buggies, all of this became more possible. Specialization and the division of labor could become more thorough, bringing about prosperity impossible to even contemplate under the previous transportation system.

Tariffs turn back the clock on railroads vis-a-vis horses and buggies. A tariff between any two cites, or states, or countries for that matter, is to obviate the advantages of this improved transportation system. It is in effect to move us back in time to the horse and buggy stage. It is to negate the advantages of railroads, and now, airplanes. Pardon the pun, but this is no way to run a railroad. Nor an economy.

Please Mr. Trump, if you really want to MAGA, let alone make all the world’s peoples better off, jettison this idea of yours about the beauty of tariffs. You are a big enough man to climb down from one of your very few mistaken positions in political economy.


Originally published here.