Markets are highly — ruthlessly — partial to producing goods and services where and how it is most profitable to do so.

Michael has written two pieces explaining why he’ll never be a free trader, partially in response to my May cover story for the magazine defending free trade and partially as something of a manifesto of his own views on the subject. He covers a lot of ground, but he twice said that his view on the subject can be summarized in the following concise way:

A global free market is necessarily indifferent to the distribution of goods, skills, technological capacities, and power among nations. Statesmen cannot be so indifferent.

Helpfully, this means I don’t have to go into the details of the rest, because nothing could be further from the truth. Markets are not indifferent to where and how goods and services are produced. They are highly — ruthlessly — partial to producing them where and how it is most profitable to do so.

The profit-loss system consolidates decentralized information from around the world into price signals. Those signals tell people where and how it makes the most sense to produce something. They often tell people things that are counterintuitive, such as that it is actually more efficient to have a piston cross national borders six times during its production. The signals also tell people things they would have no possible way of knowing otherwise, because prices are formed through the process of exchange. Prices “are continually being discovered and formed by entrepreneurs testing ideas about future consumer wants and resource constraints,” as Marian Tupy and Peter Boettke recently wrote. It’s a marvelous bottom-up system of packaging and transmitting information.

Affirming the justice of that system is not a neutral statement. It is an affirmation of property rights and the wisdom of individuals and businesses to make decisions for themselves. The prosperity it creates is good for lifting people from poverty and increasing their access to goods that make their lives better. I’m not indifferent to more goods at affordable prices, and neither are American workers who want to make the most of their paychecks.

Protectionists would replace that system for determining where and how to produce with one that says the government knows better. That is inescapable for protectionists. Michael is correct that statesmen cannot be indifferent. They are likely to ignore the solid information that comes from prices and be partial to their particular view on what is good for the country, which is of course influenced by what helps them get votes and campaign donations. That top-down method of decision-making is less likely to deliver prosperity.

And, perhaps fortunately, tariffs are no longer an abstract question. The U.S. currently has an avowedly protectionist administration, led by a protectionist president and staffed and advised by the country’s leading protectionists. And U.S. tariff policy doesn’t remotely resemble the statesmanlike ideal that Michael invokes. The president is running roughshod over the Constitution to impose tariffs on adversaries and allies alike, announcing and modifying them by social media post, making mutually contradictory claims about their purpose, all while bragging about the foreign investment that the supposedly evil trade deficit makes possible. I look forward to being told that true protectionism has never been tried.