Now that the tariff issues are headed to the Supreme Court, it is time to rip off the pretenses about U.S. trade policy.
For decades, the American “free trade” chorus has proclaimed that they are pursuing “free trade.” That is a deliberate lie.
Instead, the so-called “free traders” have been busy establishing a world in which other countries have tariffs averaging 40 percent on U.S.-made goods, versus only 1 to 2 percent in the U.S. on foreign goods, along with imposing a withering array of non-tariff barriers (NTBs), versus very few in America. And that doesn’t include foreign nations’ significant border taxes imposed on top of their tariffs, while the U.S. has none.
Image created using AI.
Yes, the self-declared “free traders” have created, not just some protectionism, but rather a whole world of it!
This foreign protectionism has created massive harm to America, including 1) the hollowing out of large swathes of U.S. manufacturing, 2) the loss of American assets to foreign ownership (we buy their T-shirts and with the proceeds they buy our T-bills, as well as our farm land, real estate, companies and other U.S. assets), and 3) many other consequent societal ills.
They did this because they wanted to use cheap and loosely regulated foreign platforms to manufacture their products, which they then could bring back into the U.S. as frictionlessly as possible. Jack Welch even famously said the best place for a factory was on a barge so that it could be moved as labor costs and regulations shifted from one country to another.
This is naked protectionism, practiced worldwide. Yet note what is actually being protected. It is foreign labor, not American workers. It is a foreign industry, not American.
The Trump tariffs are designed to reverse this pattern of global protectionism. Faced with a dose of their own medicine, many of these protectionist countries may be induced to reduce their trade barriers. Some are already doing it. America may then respond in kind, and eventually the world will become much closer to true free trade than the massive global foreign protectionism that currently exists.
Yet there are still some in the American “free trade” chorus who insist that the tariffs be disallowed because the damage America is suffering has existed for so long and that there is supposedly no national “emergency.” Obviously, that argument is specious. The analogy would be a house thief whose defense is that he should not be stopped because he has been getting away with it for years without being caught!
The fact that the unmitigated disaster of foreign protectionism has been causing massive damage to America for so long means that its correction is much more, not less, critical, pressing, and necessary.