In his Law & Liberty review of Robert Lighthizer’s recent book advocating tariffs, Samuel Gregg emphasizes the public-choice critique of protectionism. Though he doesn’t use the phrase “public choice,” Gregg’s description of Lighthizer’s shortcomings aligns perfectly with the school of economics pioneered by the economist James Buchanan and others, summarized as “politics without romance.”

Public choice is the application of economic reasoning to politics. It allows us to speak of “political markets” or the “market for government intervention.” It says that when people enter public office, they don’t lose their self-interest and they remain responsive to incentives.

Economists have always admitted exceptions to free trade. As Don Boudreaux wrote in July’s Adam Smith 300 essay for Capital Matters, Adam Smith outlined four exceptions to his presumption in favor of free trade. But economists don’t design trade policy. Politicians do. And they aren’t carefully studying economic models to narrowly apply tariffs in accordance with textbook theory. They’re listening to lobbyists and businesses in their districts that would benefit from tariffs at the expense of everyone else.

Gregg writes:

If we know anything about policies designed to protect particular forms of production from domestic and international competition, it is that these are not devised by benevolent statesmen. That is why Adam Smith observed in a 1783 letter that “every extraordinary, either encouragement or discouragement that is given to the trade of any country more than to that of another may, I think, be demonstrated to be in every case a complete piece of dupery, by which the interest of the state and the nation is constantly sacrificed to that of some particular class of traders.”

Whether it is F. W. Taussig’s monumental study of post-Civil War American protectionism, or Douglas A. Irwin’s analysis of the Smoot-Hawley Act, we know that the question of who gets what form and scale of protection is largely determined by which businesses and economic sectors have the most political pull with legislators and public officials.

Not only does this lead to serious resource allocation errors; it steadily corrupts the body politic. In that regard, it is revealing that the words “crony” and “cronyism” appear nowhere in Lighthizer’s book. Nor, incidentally, does the word “liberty.”

Note here that Gregg is relying on history, not theory. Public-choice economics is not a matter of opinion. It’s a description of how politics works. It’s not the only description, nor is it a complete description. But its purpose is to describe the world as it really is, not as politicians or commentators wish it to be.

The conceit of the prospective economic planner is to believe that if only he were in charge, things would work out better. This is ordinarily a hypothetical exercise, but not in Lighthizer’s case. He was U.S. trade representative for all four years of the Trump administration, serving under a president who was sympathetic to his views. The trade war happened, with Trump unilaterally raising tariffs to counteract so-called unbalanced trade. And what was the result? Gregg records it: “The overall US merchandise trade deficit during his tenure actually grew from $792.3 billion in 2017 to $904.4 billion in 2020.” Even by the protectionists’ own misguided metric, the Trump administration’s trade policy failed.

Protectionism has worked out well for Lighthizer personally, as his decades-long lobbying career has made him a multi-millionaire. His career is an illustration of the public-choice problems with trade policy, and he’s not someone conservatives should admire.