Perhaps the main reason why Trump’s trade policy appeals to many Americans is because they believe the bluster that trade deficits are ruining us. That claim gets heads nodding and fists pumping among the MAGA crowd, but is it true?

In his latest Bastiat’s Window post, economist Bob Graboyes shows that it isn’t.

A slice:

The atavism is the lingering faith in mercantilism, whose medieval proponents loved the export of tangible goods and despised imports. Their economic ideal was to sell exports and accumulate idle hoards of gold. (Think of Scrooge McDuck diving into his swimming pool full of coins.) David Hume, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and others revealed the fatal flaws in this philosophy by showing how trade is mutually beneficial for both importing and exporting countries. Imported goods bring both satisfaction to consumers and inputs with which investors can generate future wealth. Because of this latter factor, there’s no limit to how long a nation can run a trade deficit.

American consumers don’t worry about their own “trade deficits” with businesses they deal with, but when politicians yammer about deficits foreign countries, clueless people get all riled up.

Graboyes also has a sharp observation about the ideological connection between the economic nationalists and socialists:

Mercantilists (a.k.a., Economic Nationalists), like Socialists, often presume that a voluntary financial transaction necessarily creates a winner and a loser. From the 1700s on, coherent economic analysis dispelled such nonsense by refining the concept of mutually beneficial trade and documenting its validity. In the deficit/surplus example above, followers of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders alike might well see an American company’s purchase of Danish furniture as “Americans lose, Danes win”—followed by demands to discourage such purchases by way of tariffs. By the same token, Economic Nationalists and Socialists in Europe might well see Europeans’ purchases of iPads as “Americans win, Europeans lose”—with equivalent demands for tariffs to raise the price of iPads for Europeans. But 250 years of theory and observation tell a very different story—tariffs and other trade barriers harm both sides of a transaction.

Read the whole thing.