A few bucks more for a doll might sound trivial to a billionaire with golden escalators, but for a family living paycheck to paycheck, every dollar matters.

The first degrowth president  of the United States, President Trump, recently defended his tariffs with this gem: “They have ships that are loaded with stuff we do not need” and “Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally.” Meanwhile, his commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, former CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, lamented: “We invent the iPhone, which is awesome. Why do we let everyone else build it? Why can’t we build it here? . . . We need hundreds of thousands of Americans who work in those factories.”

It’s hard to overstate how economically ignorant, politically tone-deaf, and philosophically tyrannical these statements are.

Let’s start with Trump. Telling Americans what we need or don’t need and telling American parents that their children should be happy with fewer toys sold at higher prices because he has decided that’s how it should be. It is a master class in elite detachment. It also makes him sound like Bernie Sanders, as Reason‘s Eric Boehm reminds us:

Did Americans accidentally elect Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), who once railed against the wide variety of sneakers and deodorant?

Like Sanders, Trump is wildly out of touch here. “Suck it up and make do with less” is the sort of message you’d expect from a Soviet commissar or a Venezuelan dictator, not an American president whose whole identity is built around being wealthy.

Tariffs are consumption taxes. And like all consumption taxes, they’re regressive. They hit hardest the poor and middle class. A few bucks more for a doll might sound trivial to a billionaire with golden escalators, but for a family living paycheck to paycheck — or even for a middle-class family on a middle-class income — every dollar matters.

Besides, who knew the road to working-class prosperity was paved with fewer birthday or Christmas presents? If it were only dolls, though. However, the reality is grimmer. When prices rise whether for toys or groceries or clothes or medicines because of tariffs, families don’t just shrug these misfortunes off; they cut back elsewhere. They must do so. Maybe less meat, fewer fruits. Maybe no summer camp. Maybe Mom skips a dental appointment again. Maybe Dad tries to squeeze another 2,500 miles out of those worn tires. The notion that tariffs affect only spoiled children with too many toys is not only false but also out of touch.

Then there’s Lutnick, pining for a world where Americans flood back into massive factories to assemble iPhones. This is nostalgic industrial cosplay masquerading as economic strategy. Yes, iPhones aren’t assembled by Americans. But this isn’t a failure; it’s a feature of smart economic specialization. We design the iPhone here. That’s the high-value, high-margin part. The sophisticated chips, software, architecture, and intellectual property are all created in the U.S. The marketing is done here, too. That’s most of the value of the iPhone. The lower-value labor-intensive assembly work is done abroad because those tasks are more efficiently performed abroad. No serious person who has thought about it a little is confused about this.

Here are the only realistic options that exist for producing the iPhone here: Either Americans will have to agree (or be forced) to leave relatively well-paid jobs to do jobs that will be lower-paid iPhone assembly jobs, or the government will have to mandate that these low-productivity jobs be paid at American-level wages and then watch as no factories stay in business trying to sell an iPhone that now costs thousands of dollars. (Oh wait! I can hear our dear president saying, “You Americans don’t need no stinking iPhones anyway. A dial phone hooked to the wall is good enough. After all, that’s what we had back in the day when manufacturing jobs were more numerous!”)

The Department of Commerce might best be described as the Department of Cronyism. It is the one handing out subsidies and tariff exemptions to friends in the swamp. So maybe I shouldn’t be surprised when trade illiteracy comes from there. But Lutnick is a financier with a platform and a microphone; one might expect him to better inform himself before confidently opining in public on global supply chains — almost daily — and getting it wrong each time.

What’s worse is the assumption baked into all of this: that Americans should go back to working in low-productivity and physically taxing factory jobs. Not because we have such a high unemployment rate in the U.S. that workers are desperate for any old job, nor because the workers themselves want to do these jobs or because it’s the best use of their skills, but because someone in power, or in the comfort of his think tank office or Oval Office fancies such an outcome. In reality, most Americans prefer higher-productivity, higher-paid service jobs. And they don’t want to be told that their kids should settle for fewer toys. Nor do they wish to be told where to work. They want opportunity, not sacrifice imposed from above.

These tariff-loving central planners aren’t just wrong on economics; they’re pushing a deeply paternalistic vision of America. One in which the government decides how many dolls your kid deserves. One in which bureaucrats steer your career path for “strategic” reasons. One in which elites in Washington (billionaires, really, who I am sure have spoiled their kids and wives), think they know better than you what you should buy, where you should work, and how much your choices should cost, and they’re itching to impose their “vision” on you by constraining your freedom to trade.

No thank you.

We don’t need a government that limits choice, raises prices (and not just on iPhones, since at the minimum we will be stuck with a 10 percent across-the-board tariff), and picks jobs for us as if it’s handing out ration cards. We need policies that trust us to make our own decisions, whether it’s buying 30 dolls or designing the next iPhone.