Do You Speak Tariff?
The last time I gave a thought to tariffs, it was in my middle school history class on European mercantilism. Our textbook gave it about half a paragraph in the midst of talking about the birth of capitalism. It feels as distant as the bubonic plague, although that’s probably more current after our experience with COVID. All epidemics have economic consequences, and the black death probably upended everything. If you’re still alive, I bet that sounds familiar.
It turns out that tariffs are really stupid (and the word itself is really hard to spell). If your goal is to export more than you import, then it might be tempting to slap a tax on imports. That was the deal with European mercantilism—in fact the entire goal of international trade.
The problem is that it is irritating to others, and if they’re in any position to do so, they’ll slap the same tax on your exports to them. Who gets the advantage then? Anyone with a spouse who supports a different party knows the phenomenon of cancelling each other out. If you’re paying as much to place your goods in another country as they are paying to get their goods to you, you might as well go back to the beginning, when no one was paying any tariffs at all. You might be able to punish Sri Lanka, but bigger trading partners won’t accept your terms.
Some people say that a tariff might help if you are trying to restore a moribund industry. Let’s say your country used to manufacture shoes, but you’ve been flooded with inexpensive shoes from abroad. You might get some time to reconfigure your shoe industry if you temporarily cripple imports with a nice stiff tariff. But industries don’t actually revive that quickly, and there are probably good reasons not to make shoes in the first place.
That’s what makes our president so strange. He behaves as if no one would retaliate against us when the recent history of tariffs points to the opposite. China and Canada have refused to be pistol-whipped and neither will agree to lay down and die. Canada, in fact, has said the opposite, and it has never sounded this assertive before. Have you ever heard a Canadian threaten you? It’s just not in the national DNA, but Trump has accomplished a genetic transplant.
I’ve been looking for an analogue to Trump/Sauron’s behavior and the first thing I’ll admit is that he is no Sauron. Sauron was one of those whip-smart demons. He seems to have read the chapter on mercantilism and decided that it’s not a good bet for his dominions.
Trump is more like my infant grandson. He hasn’t quite mastered a theory of consequences and all he really wants is for people to look at him. Except for nap time and cheese, that’s all he cares about, that we look at his antics all the time. He puts the dominoes in their wooden box, then dumps the dominoes onto the floor. Then he puts the dominoes into the box and dumps them out onto the floor again.
Baby Jonas can count on our attention. In fact he could monopolize it with less effort overall. Not so, the bigger baby in the White House. When the price of avocados hits five dollars apiece, all of us are going to lose patience with this game. In the meantime, I’m trying to learn fluent Tariff. It’s a stupid language, but we’ll have to speak it to kill it.