The federal government is going to tax millions of grocery shoppers to make tomato growers happier.

I wrote a post in September about a speech in the House of Lords by Daniel Hannan about U.K. tariffs on tomatoes. As anyone familiar with British weather could guess, the U.K. doesn’t grow anywhere near enough tomatoes to satisfy its people, and its largest source of imported tomatoes is Morocco. Yet the U.K. has tariffs and quotas on Moroccan tomatoes, raising costs for British grocery shoppers for no good reason. Hannan argued eloquently for repealing the trade barriers.

As I also noted in that post:

If Trump gets his way with a 10 or 20 percent tariff on all imports, “all” very much includes fruits, vegetables, and other natural resources that Americans import because they do not exist on this continent, or are not plentiful enough to satisfy Americans’ wants and needs.

Well, the 10 percent minimum tariff is here, and the Trump administration is raising taxes on Mexican tomatoes. The Department of Commerce has announced it is withdrawing from a 2019 agreement with Mexico to suspend tariffs on tomatoes, and it will begin taxing Mexican tomatoes at 20.91 percent beginning July 14.

These are antidumping tariffs, separate from the other tariffs the administration is levying on Mexican goods. Antidumping tariffs are to remedy the alleged problem of prices being too low. “This action will allow U.S. tomato growers to compete fairly in the marketplace,” the Department of Commerce says.

“The current agreement has failed to protect U.S. tomato growers from unfairly priced Mexican imports, as Commerce has been flooded with comments from them urging its termination,” the statement says. These comments are not from the millions of tomato buyers, of course, but from the handful of tomato growers who are sad they can’t charge higher prices. And the current agreement was negotiated during Trump’s first term, under the master dealmaker himself.

As economist Jeremy Horpedahl pointed out, tomatoes were one of the few food categories that has not seen a significant rise in price since 2020. The suspension of tariffs on tomatoes from Mexico, the largest foreign source, the year before is probably part of the reason why.

Now the government has come to save the day: You won’t be allowed to pay too low of a price for tomatoes anymore. The government is straightforwardly promising to take money from you and give it to U.S. tomato growers. And that’s before the government uses your tax money to bail out farmers in general, as it did during Trump’s first term and will likely do again in response to the losses caused by Trump’s trade wars.

Demanding tariffs on tomatoes for countries that don’t grow enough tomatoes is the kind of thing that ruins protectionists’ credibility when they want to make “strategic” arguments for tariffs. Tariffs on tomatoes for the U.S. and the U.K. just make grocery shoppers a little poorer by making tomatoes a little more expensive, yet it seems impossible to entirely get rid of them.

So long as governments have the power to tariff tomatoes, interest groups will rise up to demand them, and they will often win because the concentrated benefits they receive are more visible than the dispersed costs on everyone else. That’s how you get a government that, according to the Constitution, is supposed to work for the general welfare proudly proclaiming that it is going to tax millions of grocery shoppers to make tomato growers happier.