It has always struck me as odd that the most thoughtful advocates of protectionism within the conservative movement also tend to be the fiercest advocates of non-interventionism. Patrick Buchanan famously embodied this synthesis for a while, and much of the New Right embodies it today, but the pairing of these ideas dates back to pre-Cold War conservatives like Robert Taft and the America Firsters.
On the face of it, protectionism and non-interventionism share a common foundational belief: America should have less to do with the world that surrounds it. But there is an inherent tension between the two.
The most intelligent protectionists do not see trade as inherently bad. Instead, they argue that the impersonal market forces that drive international trade patterns lack any regard for geopolitics. A policy of targeted protectionism via tariffs and other import restrictions, proponents argue, is needed to make the international distribution of trade and production better fit with America’s strategic interests. Critical industries can be brought home or shifted to allied nations, rather than left in the hands of adversaries. Bilateral economic relationships can be favorably rebalanced. Blocs can be formed to isolate bad actors. In short, the United States can utilize tariffs to make a dangerous world more hospitable.
This confidence in America’s ability to unilaterally rearrange the global economic order to its benefit is strange, then, coming from people who have no confidence in America’s ability to unilaterally rearrange the global security order to its benefit. Which is what foreign interventionism aims to do, relying upon a similarly blunt tool — military force — as protectionists have in tariffs.
Muscular interventionism, even when practiced by self-described conservatives, is born of a progressive ambition to remake the world. Woodrow Wilson believed that America could make the world “safe for democracy” by becoming its moral guide, turning autocratic countries into democratic ones. In the 21st century, interventionists have sought to reform the Middle East from the bottom up. It was not enough for the United States to contain, deter, and defeat its immediate enemies. “For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny,” George W. Bush proclaimed in his second inaugural address, “violence will gather, and multiply in destructive power, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat.” Therefore, to guard itself truly, America would have to “seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”
The non-interventionists told the interventionists then: You are not nearly adept enough to get this right. No one is. The world, made up of hundreds of nations — each with its own relationships, internal factions, political dynamics, and distinct characteristics — is far too complex to rearrange without mucking things up. Wilson’s comprehensive effort to make the world “safe for democracy” from his perch at Versailles failed in epic fashion. The arrogant map drawers were to be humbled by the vicious revisions of Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, and imperial Japan.
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The alternative to both protectionism and interventionism is an approach more in line with a conservative sensibility. It is to preserve the global security and economic orders that already exist, which, however imperfect, benefit America immensely. That means dealing with immediate threats to the security order as they materialize, such as fending off territorial aggression in Eastern Europe — or addressing acute economic vulnerabilities, as with rare earth minerals. It does not require a wholesale reconfiguration of the balance of power to preempt all conceivable hazards.
The post-WWII international orders are “rules-based,” in that they are undergirded by broadly applicable rules, not managed from above. Within those boundaries, innumerable diffuse decisions are made by countless sovereign actors.
This is how spontaneous order — or the “ordered liberty” that conservatives cherish — is achieved, and the free trading system that America helped build is a prime example. We should not try to fiddle with it, misguidedly assuming that we could arrange it better.
This letter in the Wall Street Journal by the Cato Institute’s Colin Grabow is great:
In her column “Alaska Considers Economic Suicide” (Potomac Watch, Oct. 16), Kimberley A. Strassel faults Democratic candidate Mary Peltola’s economic record but doesn’t discuss a policy position that disproportionately harms Alaska: Ms. Peltola’s support for the Jones Act. Addressing Alaska’s Legislature in February 2024, Ms. Peltola acknowledged that the law, which restricts domestic water transport to U.S.-built and flagged vessels, “creates extra challenges” for the state, yet said she backs it “because I support union workers.” Evidently, she weighs those union workers’ interests above Alaskans’ costs.
Unfortunately, Sen. Dan Sullivan, the alternative, is no better on this particular policy. In 2019 he joined five other senators at the White House to urge President Trump not to issue a Jones Act waiver for domestic liquefied natural gas shipments.
Alaska has borne this burden from the start. Seattle shipping interests lobbied for the 1920 law to shut off cheaper routes to Alaska through Canada. In 1984 Alaska voters approved a ballot initiative, now state law, directing the governor to press Congress for repeal. Their elected officials have largely ignored them.
Vast and remote, Alaska is heavily reliant on waterborne freight. Its voters, already facing the high prices Ms. Strassel describes, deserve a Senate candidate willing to stand up to the shipping lobby. Neither is.
Now United’s CEO, Scott Kirby, is in the news saying things I don’t like either. When the New York Times asked him this past weekend about the public’s falling trust in CEOs, he didn’t talk about running a better airline. He said instead that society is threatened by wealth inequality. He wants a national wealth tax, because a state version “won’t work” when “people will just move.” Because such soaking the rich apparently isn’t enough, Kirby also wants inheritance taxes “close to 100 percent at some level.”
In a recent post, [Gary] Leff gives some perspective on Kirby:
“I’ve compared Kirby to Captain Renault in Casablanca before. Under Biden, United leaned into diversity programs and pronouns, climate commitments, affirmative action and vaccine mandates. Under Trump, Kirby became a defender of the President’s tariff strategy and intentions. Now, speaking to the Times, he’s offering wealth redistribution. As Renault offered to Germany’s Major Strasser, ‘I have no conviction, if that’s what you mean. I blow with the wind, and the prevailing wind happens to be from Vichy.’”
Over at Fiscal Reality Check, Stanford’s Joshua Rauh offers several theories he had heard for why a man who sells a product built on charging more for a better seat would say such things. The one that stuck out to me is that Kirby may be pandering to the kind of government he expects to fund United’s next bailout. Once your business model includes a government rescue, keeping the rescuers happy becomes part of your job.
Mr. Kirby defended his company’s use of price differentiation in an interview this week with the New York Times. “The way to give everyone what they want is to charge for the services and products that those customers want,” he said. Fair enough.
Even if the extra charges are annoying, they effectively result in relatively more affluent and less price-sensitive customers subsidizing travel for everyone else. Without the add-ons, base fares would be higher. Some people simply wouldn’t be able to afford to take their family on vacation. The CEO seems to understand that letting markets determine prices is the best way to maximize public welfare.
But then he took a regrettable flight of left-wing fancy. Asked whether he has a responsibility for dispelling public distrust in CEOs, he replied: “Wealth inequality has become a danger to our society, and we need to address that.” By we, he means government.
He added: “We should have a national wealth tax—it won’t work by state because people will just move. And I think we should have inheritance taxes that get close to 100% at some level. I would pay them.” Well, no he wouldn’t. Inheritance taxes are levied on inheritors, so his kids or other heirs would pay the bill.
Or they might not, since death and inheritance taxes encourage tax avoidance. The same is true of wealth taxes. Washington state this year reversed its increase in its top marginal estate tax rate to 35% from 20% for this reason. United has its headquarters in Chicago, but Mr. Kirby lives in Texas, which has no state income tax. Does he pay income tax in Illinois?
There’s also nothing to stop Mr. Kirby from bequeathing his fortune, or donating his $32.3 million in compensation last year, to the feds. Even better, how about offering more leg room in all rows and eliminating middle seats as a gesture to the hoi polloi? We suspect he’d say that none of these suggestions would reduce inequality or the national debt. But the same goes for a wealth tax, which punishes successful entrepreneurs.
This isn’t Mr. Kirby’s first ride on the left-wing jet stream. During Woke 1.0, Mr. Kirby declared that two things “where we want to lead and make a difference” are “diversity and inclusion, and climate change.” Customer service apparently takes a back seat to reducing CO2 emissions.
George Will writes about “the cascading absurdities of a downward-spiraling presidency.” A slice:
Trump, however, is thinking about something more important to him than Europe’s largest war since the one that Munich presaged. He is after votes for Republicans, so he wants to shred another law, the one against buying energy from Russia.
He wants to buy diesel, which he weirdly thinks will arrive in time to lower the prices that have furious farmers blaming the Iran war for making it excruciating to fuel their combines. And long-haul truckers are incandescent about $1,000 fill-ups.
Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, 93, who has seen much but not learned enough in his 51 years on Capitol Hill, wants Trump to ban diesel exports. He approvingly cites President Richard M. Nixon’s 1973 ban of soybean exports. Herewith another tutorial about the Law of Unintended Consequences, which is: The unintended consequences of 10-thumbed government interventions in social complexities are often larger than, and contrary to, the intended ones.
The Financial Times’s Gillian Tett says Nixon’s measure did briefly suppress domestic soybean prices. But (per a University of Illinois scholar’s report) it also infuriated some U.S. customers. In 1974, Japan began investing heavily in Brazil’s soybean potential. By 2015, Brazil exported more soybeans than did U.S. farmers. In 2025, Brazilian soybean sales were almost double U.S. sales.
Dean Ball tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)
American chattering classes love to hate our country’s financial services sector, but mark my words: the depth and versatility of U.S. capital markets will be our mightiest weapon in the singularity. Anti-finance sentiment, still fashionable on both left and right, is low IQ.
GMU Econ alum Daniel Smith is correct: Today, “the road to serfdom runs through both parties.”
Casey Mulligan explains that “you pay when your state taxes hospitals.” A slice:
Medicaid’s financing gimmicks have raised costs for Americans with private health insurance. A new Department of Health and Human Services study estimates that between 2003 and 2019 state provider taxes, which at adoption ran up to 3.5% of hospitals’ net patient revenue, raised premiums for employer-sponsored single coverage by 1.5% to 1.7%.
Provider taxes are supposed to finance the nonfederal share of Medicaid payments. States obtain federal matching funds based on those proceeds, then return money to providers through supplemental payments. Hospitals can receive more than they paid in taxes, while states draw additional money from Washington. Little wonder that hospitals sometimes lobby to be taxed.
A common defense of this system is that additional Medicaid money enables hospitals to charge privately insured patients less. But medicine isn’t an accounting exercise with a set revenue requirement. It’s a service supplied by people who respond to compensation. Nurses, physicians and resources don’t become more abundant merely because Washington contributes more dollars.
An HHS report released in August quantified how medical markets respond to taxes, prices and payment incentives. A hospital tax raises the cost of serving an additional commercially insured patient, while higher Medicaid payments increase the return on resources used for Medicaid services, making them more expensive for other purchasers. Together, these forces drive a 1.4% change in non-Medicaid provider prices for each percentage-point change in the provider tax rate.
In our new study, my colleagues and I examined private-employer survey data and compared states that adopted hospital taxes with those that didn’t. Our estimated 1.5% to 1.7% increase in single-coverage premiums accounts for national trends and differences in state unemployment.
Reason‘s Billy Binion ponders Trump’s obsession with renaming things.
