Since Donald Trump’s rise in 2016, the Make America Great Again movement has been clear about its economic goals. We want greater self-reliance: more goods made in our own country, by American hands. We want to protect working families, rebuild our productive power, reduce dependence on foreign countries, and make American industries more competitive on the global stage. These are admirable goals, and I share them. But too little attention has been paid to how the policies pursued in their name could produce undesirable results when untethered from conservative principles that some Republicans have begun to treat as mere obstacles to policymaking.
What few people know is that these same promises were made by Francisco Franco in Spain in the middle of the 20th century. Franco ruled Spain from 1939 until his death in 1975. For roughly the first two decades of his dictatorship, his regime pursued autarky, an economic policy aimed at making the country self-sufficient by sharply restricting trade and replacing imports with domestic production. The ambition was straightforward, and eerily familiar: use Spanish resources and Spanish labor to produce what Spain needed, protect Spanish workers from foreign competition, and rebuild national strength by ending dependence on other countries.
“Spain is a privileged country which can be completely self-reliant," Franco said in 1938. "We have everything necessary to live and our production is sufficiently abundant to ensure our subsistence. We have no need to import anything.”
Of course Franco was a dictator, but he used the state to direct industrial development and protect domestic producers from foreign competition. The promise was national strength and independence. The result was anything but.
Franco’s pursuit of autarky replaced Spain's free market with state control. The government tightly restricted imports, prioritizing raw materials Spain could not supply itself, and used tariffs and quotas to protect domestic industry. In 1941, Franco established the Instituto Nacional de Industria, which used public funds to develop industries considered essential to national defense and self-sufficiency, including steel, shipbuilding, chemicals, and energy. State-led monopolies extended into aviation and automobiles.
The government also controlled agricultural prices to keep food affordable. But official prices were often too low for farmers to earn a living. Those controls discouraged production and pushed farmers to conceal harvests or sell on the black market rather than through state-controlled channels. Instead of making food more affordable, the controls made it harder to find at legal prices. Real wages fell, the economy stagnated, and shortages became a defining feature of daily life in Spain.
The result was a period remembered as the “Years of Hunger.” Even government forced rationing failed to provide enough food, while black-market prices put basic necessities beyond the reach of many working families. Historians estimate that around 200,000 Spaniards died from hunger or malnutrition-related illnesses.
As of today, MAGA shares Franco’s ambitions. We can rebuild American industry, protect working families, and reduce our dependence on foreign countries. But we risk undermining those goals if we turn to the same economic controls Franco used while dismissing the principles that warn against them.
Just yesterday, I wrote an article criticizing claims that oil companies have been price-gouging Americans. Some readers proposed forcing producers to sell fuel at a fixed price domestically and earn their profits through exports. But if you believe we can force prices down at home and make up the difference by charging more abroad, consider where that could lead. Other countries could turn to cheaper suppliers, including China, leaving American producers with controlled prices at home and fewer buyers abroad. That risks taking us toward the very problem Spain created. Spain’s experience should make us question that reasoning, not embrace it under an American banner.
This thinking is not confined to a few readers either. Less than two months ago, the Trump administration considered restricting diesel exports to increase domestic supply and lower prices. It has also taken stake in more than 40 private companies in strategic sectors, sought to shield domestic industries from foreign competition, and echoed the call that we should produce everything in the United States.
This is not to say the Trump administration is headed in the direction of Franco's, just a warning that success is not guaranteed on a good idea if we are content to forget tried and true economic principles along the way.
It is also an argument against pursuing autarky at all. The idea that the United States can be entirely self-sufficient, that it needs no one else, is a nationalistic pipe dream. Buying goods from other countries allows Americans to devote more resources to what we are good at doing: producing groundbreaking technology, medical research, and world changing scientific discovery. Anyone proposing to abandon that exchange needs to explain how their alternative would deliver greater prosperity, not simply declare it more patriotic. The theory of comparative advantage which has remained dominant for 200 years does not disappear because someone believes it to be “globalist.”
We can rejuvenate the American economy and reclaim industries critical to national security. We can empower the American worker and American industry, and we can level the playing field of global trade. But how we achieve those goals matters just as much as the goals themselves. So far, the administration has relied heavily on executive power and government intervention, just as Franco did, and increasingly things once considered untouchable by a conservative, are now fair game.
We should pursue MAGA’s goals through economic freedom, making the United States a freer market and encouraging our allies to do the same. We cannot afford to treat the principles that made America prosperous, the very principles conservatives claim to defend, as obstacles to Making America Great Again.
