Here’s another letter to a relatively new, and quite insistent, correspondent.
Mr. C__:
There must be something in the air. Over the past few days I’ve encountered several people who insist, as you do in your note of this morning, that those of us who oppose Trump’s protectionism are guilty, in your words, “of only looking at the shortterm, neglecting the huge benefits of these [tariffs], which will take time to materialize.”
With respect, you’re mistaken. Protectionism by its very nature restricts the access that the people of a ‘protected’ country have to the world’s supply of consumer goods, producer inputs, and capital. The protectionist dogma holds that by artificially increasing scarcity today in this way, a protectionist government decreases scarcity tomorrow. If you swallow this bizarre belief, you must also believe that we Americans would eventually be made even richer if the U.S. government, in addition to restricting our access to imports, were to outlaw the sale and purchase of used cars, to arbitrarily shut down several oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico, to declare that 25 percent of the most fertile U.S. farmland must never again be farmed, and to dynamite into smithereens several American machine-tool factories and lumber mills.
Are these policies ones that you would also support? If not, why not?
By offering your protectionist apology for Trump’s tariffs you, in short, make no more sense than you would were you to argue that, while today 10 minus 2 equals 8, tomorrow it will equal 15.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
