We are hearing more and more protectionist rhetoric from both Democrats and Republicans this year. It seems as though Biden and Trump are striving to outdo one another in pandering for votes by promising to “get tough” on that bogeyman, the balance of trade.

In this AIER article, G. Patrick Lynch observes that we’re seeing an instance of the “Bootleggers and Baptists” game. He takes aim at the new book by Robert Lighthizer, Trump’s former guru on trade. Lynch writes:

Now Lighthizer, former United States Trade Representative for President Trump, has written a political book, and it must be analyzed as such. Fortunately, economics has provided useful tools to help us understand both the author’s motivations for writing it and the consequences of pursuing the policies for which he advocates. The field of economics that can do this is public choice. Public choice economics is an area of study that assumes politicians are essentially self-interested in their actions. It also assumes that such self-interested individuals make “trades” in public goods to gain their goals. In the case of office-holders the main goal is re-election. Once we assume politicians are self-interested in their attempts to win elections, and are not trying to achieve some idealistic vision of the public good, we can see this book for what it is.

Lighthizer, Trump, and a large cohort of “right-wing” interventionists want the feds to ramp up tariffs in order to save jobs in politically important states.

Even if you believe that government should impose some tariffs to “balance” trade and make things “fair” for American producers, why think that the political process will get you just the right tariff on just the right goods? There is an infinite number of possible protectionist policies, and once we open up the can of worms of trade meddling, we will certainly wind up with lots of harmful tariffs that go “too far” in the interventionist calculus, creating huge gains for the interest groups with the most political pull, damaging everyone else.

Lynch continues, “As taxes go, tariffs are hidden and unavoidable, which makes them dangerous to liberty and property. History is littered with trade wars that don’t end well. And even if a government could, in lieu of a tariff, offer consumers a choice to ‘tip’ the business that produced domestically manufactured goods at a higher cost, that might be one way to handle the obvious imposition of an unfair and economically inefficient policy onto all Americans.”

I’d like to add that protectionist policies are not really made to improve the economy, any more than gun-control measures are offered to prevent violence. In both cases, we have political rhetoric aimed at uninformed voters in search of their support in the next election.