In the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center – a wonderful museum in northern Virginia near Dulles Airport – there is displayed one of the first aircraft used by FedEx. It’s pictured here, along with the plaque that accompanies it. This aircraft and more than 30 others of the same kind were purchased and used more than 50 years ago by that revolutionary upstart overnight delivery company. These aircraft were all made in France. They are Dessault Falcon 20 jets. These airplanes were 
imports – and these imports, like most imports today, were inputs used by American producers to enhance the efficiencies of their operations.
Three questions for protectionists:
(1) If Fred W. Smith, the entrepreneur who founded FedEx, were unable to buy foreign-made aircraft early in FedEx’s existence, are you sure that FedEx would have nevertheless become the success that it became?
(2) Are you confident that Trump’s tariffs punitive taxes on Americans’ purchases of imports and of import-competing products will not raise the costs today of some inputs to such heights that entrepreneurial American firms that would otherwise have successfully launched and become global industry leaders will, instead, be still-born, killed in economic utero by Trump’s punitive tariffs?
(3) If your answer to one or both of the above two questions is “yes,” what’s your reasoning and evidence?
