His tariff call may be ill-advised, but his nationalist instinct is sound.
His tariff call may be ill-advised, but his nationalist instinct is sound.
D onald Trump’s new proposal to levy a 10 percent tariff on all imported goods is rightly being panned. That doesn’t mean conservatives can’t learn something useful from the idea.
Conservatives have been ardent free traders for decades. The movement is now divided on many topics, but few gain such robust and near-uniform approval among conservative intellectuals as free trade. For them it is a given that getting government out of the way automatically produces economic gains for all sides in the transaction. Questioning free trade among conservative economists is akin to doubting Jesus’s divinity at an Evangelical gathering.
Trump’s idea hearkens back to the pre–New Deal Republican consensus that touted a protective tariff as the cure for all economic ills. That Republicanism was robustly nationalist in its focus, and its candidates openly campaigned on the idea that the tariff lifted wages for the average working man. They were no less religious in their devotion to protectionism than today’s conservatives are in their devotion to free trade, a factor that led to the poor decision to hike already-high tariffs during the Great Depression in a vain hope to force American consumers to buy American goods.
Returning to that old consensus, as Trump proposes, would be a bad idea because the world has changed. Back then, industrial growth automatically added productivity to a largely unmechanized economy. Subsistence farmers would abandon their horse-plowed fields to use machines, something that always multiplies labor’s yield. Protection may not have caused the dramatic move from farm to factory that typified the post–Civil War era, but it certainly did not inhibit it.
Today’s modern developed economies, however, already have distributed machines to almost every worker. Farmers use advanced software to plan crop yields; knowledge workers earn money on laptops; even retail sales associates often use hand-held machines to manage inventory. Productivity gains today are incremental and therefore as reliant on innovation as on simple population movements.
This does not mean, however, that free trade is a panacea. The United States is a free-ish market, but first and foremost it is a democratic republic. It is also not the only powerful nation in the world. If free trade creates concentrated social disruption, the aggrieved will turn to the ballot box for redress. And if free trade empowers the rise of powerful adversaries, it could be the cause of its own demise.
That’s where Trump’s tariff idea has value. It entails the belief that tariffs, and by extension other trade barriers or subsidies, are just another tool conservatives need to think about when deciding how to achieve the national interest. Given the rise of China’s techno-totalitarian state and the anger rapid deindustrialization caused throughout old factory towns, thinking about what types of trade are in America’s interest is something all conservatives should support.
The instinct of the modern American conservative is to recoil at this suggestion because it involves government action. But taken to its logical conclusion, that core conviction makes conservatism indistinguishable from economic libertarianism. Virtually everything government does is a market intervention to achieve an overriding social goal, whether that is the safety of its citizens (police, courts, prisons) or the acquisition of knowledge and skills via publicly subsidized education. Why is the safety of the nation or the prevention of mass social breakdown any less important a goal than these worthy endeavors?
These considerations should push conservatives to think about how trade policy, like tax or regulatory policy, can be tweaked to advance the national interest. That’s obvious now in the case of investment and dealings with Communist China. But national-security and social-cohesion goals require other adjustments that would make international trade beneficial for the nation, not just the few.
Favorable treatment of imported goods from Central America, for example, could address both our strategic exposure to China and our border crisis. Levying tariffs on nations like Vietnam that are within close range of China’s military would force companies disengaging from Beijing to look elsewhere. Locating those businesses in the cheap-wage nations of Central America would give potential migrants what they really want — good jobs close to their homes — and make our economy less susceptible to Chinese manipulation.
Favorable treatment for important allies is also crucial. This is one place where Trump is wrong. Leaders should prepare for war even as they don’t seek it, and modern warfare is primarily an economic matter. The fact that roughly 60 percent of the world’s GDP is found in nations within our web of alliances is a source of strength. Levying tariffs on those nations would be penny-wise and pound-foolish.
Trump’s protection may be ill-advised, but his nationalist instinct is sound. Conservatives should outgrow their devotion to the free-trade faith and craft a new, pro-American trade policy. It’s time, to quote Barry Goldwater, to grow up.