Elections have consequences, and those consequences are dire for free market dogmatists in the Republican Party.
The tariff debate is over. President Trump won, and it is not even close. Americans overwhelmingly support efforts to punish countries like China for their unfair trade practices. Even President Biden, who ran blatantly misrepresenting the Trump economic record, has kept the Trump tariffs on steel and aluminum in place.
The propaganda blitz against President Donald Trump’s tariffs dominated traditional media outlets in the lead up to the election. According to the elitist spin, tariffs are a crippling sales tax, opposed vehemently by voters, devastating for the economy, harmful to the poor, and stock market poison.
Nominally conservative think tanks and libertarian ideologue Sen. Rand Paul even joined the Democrats in their demonization of Trump’s economic populism. Their criticism misses the forest for the trees. Tariffs are more than just an economic policy; they are the mechanism that can reconstitute the American system and bring an end to globalist hegemony.
Tariffs made America great once before. As noted by former Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchanan, the era of protectionism built America into an economic powerhouse and established the Middle Class. Gross domestic product quadrupled in the protectionist era, from 1869 to 1900. There were regular budget surpluses, the debt was virtually non-existent, and deflation ensured that working families could increasingly thrive.
Tariffs are built into the DNA of the American Republic. The Tariff Act of 1789 was America’s seminal legislative achievement, and even the staunchest free traders among the Founding Fathers, like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, realized the necessity of the tariff. Liberty and independence are high-minded and noble ideals, but they cannot sustain themselves without national policy supporting domestic industry from outside intervention.
Look at the state of American liberty and independence in the age of unincumbered free trade. The American Republic has become the inverse of what the Founding Fathers desired – a totalitarian super-state with no allegiance to anything but capital. National institutions have been perverted, and nothing is sacred except the right for monolithic corporations to pilfer unabated.
The interests served by Big Government, the mortal enemy of conservatives, prefer taxes that punish the wealthy and productive while incentivizing a weaker and more dependent American public. This is why income taxes, property taxes, and inflationary money printing are considered sacrosanct. These taxes fulfill the Marxist creed “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” as the political class robs from creators, subsidizes the indigent, and amasses prestige from those in its debt.
Conversely, tariffs serve a logical, practical purpose that results in fairer capitalism, increased domestic production, and shared national prosperity. These are taxes that do not exist to destroy wealth and enrich the political class, but rather, they serve specific objectives, objectives that cannot be measured by theory-obsessed economists crushing numbers in academia.
In a world where every individual was an economic unit acting purely on the merits of self-interest, there would be no need for any tariff. However, as was seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, relying on China to supply crucial goods and services can be a nightmare during a crisis – particularly when China caused that very crisis to begin with.
Tariffs are a national security priority as foreigners should never be able to hold the American people hostage, because pure economic efficiency has been made into a deity by free market zealots. Economics should not be a religion, and if the market must be disrupted to a limited extent for the betterment of society, so be it.
And let’s be honest, that market is clearly not “free” or “fair.” China, when subsidizing state-owned enterprises at a massive loss, is creating clear distortions that even the most dogmatic economists acknowledge must be addressed. Just look at their environmental standards: China allows their industries to pollute recklessly because they know it gives them an unfair advantage. Even libertarian demigod Milton Friedman acknowledged that pollution is the clearest example of a market failure that should be addressed. We should get smart, not just big, on tariffs to deal with these market failures. Trade policies that hold China accountable for their high-pollution products would level the playing field for American manufacturers and should be a high priority for Republicans. It’s already being championed by Trump’s US Trade Representative, so now all that is left is for the Republicans in Congress to get on board with the Trump tariff agenda.
President Trump has put tariffs back on the map, and these policies are at the heart of his MAGA revolution. The Harris campaign’s characterization of tariffs as a “national sales tax” fell flat on the campaign trail and was smartly rejected by the voters. As corporations find that policies of outsourcing hurt their bottom line, they inevitably come to the table and be willing to do business, as John Deere famously did because of Trump’s tough trade policies. Although China is nipping at America’s heels, the American markets still drive the world for the time being. Now is the time to use American market power to level the playing field while that leverage still exists. The tariff is the tool to achieve those noble ends.
The goal of MAGA conservatives, fueled by President Trump’s sweeping electoral mandate, should be permanent tariffs with a government limited enough to be funded by the revenue of tariffs. President Trump is flirting with this idea, doubling down on his proposals and stating that perhaps the income tax should be scrapped and replaced with tariffs. This is a development that should have even staunch free-market libertarians salivating. Tariffs are the only realistic and proven trade policy to shake up the current economic order. Those unwilling to make the shift and embrace Trump’s Tariff Party, a GOP that can actually conserve American prosperity and economic dominance on the world stage, ought to be ushered into the dustbin of history where they belong.