By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, March 17,
2025
I would like to send Peter Navarro or some other daffy
representative of the Trump administration back in time to sit down with
Augustus or Henry VIII and try to explain U.S. trade problems:
Navarro: “Well, Augie (or Hank), here’s the thing. We’re
pretty much the richest country in the world—the richest big one, anyway—and,
as a consequence of that, everybody wants to sell stuff in our market, because
it is a big marketplace full of rich people. And the world in our time is
incredibly rich compared to your time, so the quantity and quality of stuff
being produced is just mind-boggling. I mean, if an American family tried to
raise its children in material conditions similar to what you typically see in
the households of your aristocracy, the government would come in and take their
children away because of neglect. True fact. Crazy rich world. And so,
all of the best and most prolific producers of goods from around the world—from
wine to books to silver to … I’m trying to keep it to things you’ll understand
… but, anyway, it’s all the best stuff, from every corner of the world. And
what happens is, the people who produce all that stuff bring it to our shores,
at their own expense, and lay it down at the feet of our people. And the
problem we’re trying to solve is that the prices aren’t high enough.”
Augie (or Hank): “Bro, do you even empire?”
Henry VIII founded the British navy in 1546 to protect
trade routes—and he also reduced tariffs on imported goods and negotiated trade
agreements with such occasionally hostile forces as Spain and France. But he
was a newcomer to that game: Egyptian reliefs document a royal trade mission to
Punt (probably in the neighborhood of what is now Somalia) in the 15th
century—B.C.
From time immemorial, kings, princes, sultans, pharaohs,
and emperors have built armies and—especially—navies to keep trade routes open.
They built roads to enable the movement of goods into their capital cities. The
pharaoh Hatshepsut herself led a trade delegation to Punt, an event considered
consequential enough to be memorialized in her temple, and she also built a
fleet to carry out trade on the Red Sea. By land and by water, the Egyptians
traded bitumen, copper, naphtha, manufactured goods, ebony, incense, and
cattle, among other products. That is what great leaders of antiquity did:
Rome’s interests in Egypt, Carthage, and Sicily were trade-driven: Even though
Rome was surrounded by plantations, it was an essentially urban power that
could not hope to feed its teeming population without importing food. Henry
VIII wasn’t doing anything new. In the novel Wolf Hall, the king
receives some counsel from Thomas Cromwell regarding his envy for his French
counterpart: “Take no lessons from King François. He likes war too much, and
trade too little.” It is excellent advice and, if the historical Henry VIII
ever received similar counsel, he did well to heed it.
Donald Trump has a good deal in common with Henry VIII
(“Hyperion to a satyr,” you say? Trump
is only halfway to matching the lusty monarch on the wife count!) but his
retinue is far inferior: The Tudor court had Thomas Cromwell, Thomas More, and
Cardinal Wolsey—with Thomas
Tallis providing the soundtrack. Trump has J.D. Vance, Dr. Oz, and
various Christian leaders who make the worldly Wolsey look like
Polycarp—with a soundtrack by Kid Rock. (The great artist of the Tudor world
was Hans Holbein the Younger—the great artist of Trump’s world is that guy who
made the picture of Trump
riding a T-rex.) Trump does not have a More or a Cromwell (pledge your
allegiance: A Man for All Seasons or Wolf Hall) to advise him
about what he should cherish. There’s a wondrous irony in that: Trump cares
more than anything else in the world about being rich, but he has absolutely no
understanding of how the country that made him rich got rich in the first
place.
That’s why Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s threat to put a 25
percent surcharge on electricity exports to the United States was so amusing.
“You want tariffs? Fine—we’ll put our own tariff on our own exports. You don’t
have to do it—we’ll do the work for you. And maybe that will help you idiots
understand why these tariffs are such a dumb idea.” It almost worked—for a
second. Trump got very pissy over the fact that the Canadians were planning to
put a 25 percent tax on exports from Canada to the United States instead of
waiting for the Trump administration to put a 25 percent tax (enabled by … no
particular law) on exports from Canada to the United States. Trump is like a
toddler who refuses to eat a chicken nugget that a parent tries to give him—but
as soon as somebody else tries to eat his chicken nugget, he suddenly wants it
and will have nothing else. From a purely protectionist point of view, there’s
no difference between a Canadian tax on Canadian exports and a U.S. tax on
imported Canadian goods, but as soon as Doug Ford lifts a finger, Donald Trump
wants tariff-free trade. It is daft and imbecilic and utterly predictable.
These are, as I keep repeating, a flock of
extraordinarily odd ducks. Trump is, of course, a pure ignoramus, and Peter
Navarro somehow managed to get a doctorate in economics from Harvard
without knowing what GDP is, but J.D. Vance is not stupid—Cleetus the
Gap-Toothed Twitter Troll is just a character he plays. Ted Cruz isn’t dumb—servile,
yes, but not dumb, and neither is his fellow Princeton-to-Harvard chum Pete
Hegseth. Somebody could probably explain this stuff to Trump, assuming the
removal of two insurmountable barriers: 1. Nobody wants to tell Trump anything
he doesn’t want to hear; 2. Trump doesn’t want to hear anything. He is the
textbook case of the guy who doesn’t know what he doesn’t know–and likes it
that way.
One of the most misunderstood concepts in the discussion
of trade is comparative advantage. Comparative advantage is not a
question of what Bubba is good at compared to Scooter; it is a question of what
Bubba is good at compared to Bubba. Comparative advantage doesn’t
require you to have a real advantage over any other competitor in anything—it
is only a question of what you are relatively good at, or, to put it
pessimistically (these are pessimistic times) what you are least bad at. If you
are part of an economy with 100 workers and you are the No. 1 fisherman but the
No. 88 basket weaver, you make your living as a fisherman; and if you are the
No. 98 fisherman and the No. 99 basket weaver, you still choose fishing between
those two occupations. You may not be a very good fisherman or a very good
basket weaver, but you are a relatively good fisherman—meaning good relative to
your performance as a basket weaver. Comparative advantage is not about getting
a leg up over the other guy—it is about how members of a community grow
collectively better off by putting resources to their most profitable use. Free
exchange—between individuals in the same village or across a dozen time
zones—enables economic cooperation that liberates us to put resources to their
most productive use.
Forgive the simplification here, but this is basically
how it works: If you can spend your time fishing (your top skill) instead of
weaving baskets (your weaker skill) and trade some fish for baskets when you
need them, then the basket weaver can concentrate on his top skill and not
waste time on his weaker skill—because even if he is a better fisherman in
absolute terms, he still will be better off doing the thing he does best and
trading instead of investing time and resources in less-productive activities.
If you have a large and complex economic community, with lots of different
kinds of productive activities, then people have lots of different ways to
contribute, and they can (to paraphrase F. A. Hayek) experiment in order to
find the most valuable ways to serve one another—which, as Adam Smith noted, is
the real genius of the competitive market system, because the best way to make
a living is also, perforce, the best way to provide other people with what they
need. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker
that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” As
Say’s Law instructs us, we produce in order to consume.
The story of increasing human prosperity is a story of
ever-increasing, ever more complex division of labor and specialization. We see
this in international economic relations, we see this inside factories and
firms, and we even see it in nature, in the division of labor within bodies and
within cells. It is easy to get too poetic about that, but there is something
at work there that is a little bit more than an analogy. Trade enables the
widespread division of labor and specialization, which means that we can muster
a great deal of intelligence to throw at specific material problems facing our
communities: We have the modern internet in part because Tim Berners-Lee and
Marc Andreessen and Vint Cerf and a bunch of other people didn’t have to spend
all day growing their own tomatoes, raising chickens, digging wells or
purifying their own water, generating their own electricity, grinding up their
own pharmaceuticals with little stone mortars and pestles, etc. We got more
Saul Bellow novels than we would have if he had had to manufacture his own
typewriter ink or launder his own shirts. Henry Ford’s housekeeper probably did
a fair bit for the development of the automobile without ever thinking about
it, and so did the guy who sold him his eggs. Henry Ford did a lot for the
housekeeping business and the egg business when they could start using trucks
and vans instead of horse-drawn carts or wearing out their shoes. Prosperity is
a group project that doesn’t need anybody—even
Ezra Klein!—to organize it.
Comparative advantage works in different ways for
individuals than it does for firms or countries. That is, in fact, one of the
reasons we had to invent
the firm—individuals can’t be liquidated (in the civilized world) and
countries don’t go out of business (though goodness knows Argentina keeps
trying). The corporation exists as a vehicle for holding capital (money and
knowledge and people) together long enough to do something useful and
then serves as a kind of platform for exit when the business doesn’t make
economic sense anymore (all businesses fail eventually, and average corporate
lifespans have been declining for decades), at which time the money and the
knowledge and the people can be dispersed to find new useful things to do.
(People who complain about “corporate personhood”—and when they do so, they
usually do so ignorantly—rarely consider what the alternatives are. Do you know
what preceded the limited-liability corporation? Debtors’
prisons.) Individuals can modify their economic capabilities by means of
education, training, experience, the acquisition of equipment or other capital,
etc. Firms can and do modify their capabilities in much the same way, though it
is easier for a business to acquire knowledge than it is for individuals: An
individual has to read some books and go to some classes or learn on a job,
whereas a company can just write a check to an individual who already has done
the work.
Countries can change the economic facts on their own
ground, too, and that happens all the time: There’s a pretty solid argument
that the economic history of India is a lot more complicated than
the political history of the United States—from cinnamon to fintech is
quite a story. There’s an equally solid argument that the economic history of
India since the 1990s is a lot more complicated than the political history of
the United States since the 1990s. Hong Kong—the free-trading, free-enterprise
Hong Kong of old—went from being one of the poorest places on Earth to one of
the richest and most economically sophisticated in a shockingly brief period of
time. When Ayn Rand published Atlas Shrugged in 1957, she wasn’t entirely
bananas to assume that railroads were still going to be a central part of the
economic conversation in the sci-fi future. Railroads were a big, big thing for
a long time, and they’re still a big thing, and maybe a big, big thing, but not as big (not as big
big?) as they were not all that long ago.
Free exchange—between individuals, between individuals
and firms, or across borders in the form of international trade—is a big part
of how that works. Prices and business failures are how the world tells
producers what is working and what isn’t, and a big part of how we liberate
capital—including human capital—to find its best use. And all this J.D. Vance
and
Michael Brendan Dougherty horseshit about deindustrialization amounts to
very little more than neurotic resentment and nostalgia in defiance of the
facts—including the fact that there has been no deindustrialization:
Manufacturing output in the United States today is two-thirds more than it was in
the 1980s; industrial production in the United States is seven-and-a-half times
what it was in 1950. Some people point to the decline in the prominence of
manufacturing jobs as a sign that something has gone terribly wrong. I will
pass lightly over the fact that Vance is a Yale-trained lawyer married to a
Yale-trained lawyer and not Joe Sixpack married to Rosie the Riveter while none
of Trump’s ghastly spawn works in a carbon black plant
in Borger, Texas, and never will, and I will instead emphasize two points:
1. Service sector
jobs pay on average more than manufacturing jobs do, and are generally
safer and more pleasant, too, which is why so many people choose them; 2. The
fact that we’re building so much more stuff with fewer workers is a sign of success,
not a sign of failure—more output with fewer inputs is how you get richer.
Policies that inhibit gains in efficiency in order to maximize employment make
everybody—including the employees in those make-work jobs—poorer. That’s
why we dig the foundations for skyscrapers with big machines and not
spoons.
People working on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley run a
trade deficit of right around 100 percent with the world’s banana producers,
and do you know what they do not want to invest their marginal unit of labor
doing? Trying to grow
bananas in Manhattan or San Francisco, even if Mr. Tally Man is stealing
Americans’ good-paying banana-quant jobs.
It may be true that money cannot buy happiness—but
poverty is misery. We have good economic solutions to economic problems, and,
while economic problems are not the only kind of problem, economic problems
have economic solutions. One of those solutions—and even Ezra Klein has
stumbled on this!—is abundance. More is more. And the way you get more
is by letting people do more—by doing what they’re best at, or at least what
they’re least-worst at. All kinds of people: People who work with their hands
and their backs, people who manipulate symbols, people who juggle or walk dogs
or manage databases—even Canadians!
In the same way that one has to be very expensively
educated to believe the dumb things you’ll hear said on the campus of Columbia
University, you have to be very, very rich to forget the basic facts of
economics understood hundreds and even thousands of years ago. What
Donald Trump and the rest of the anti-trade clowns propose to do is to, in
effect, blockade our own ports. It would be an act of war if we did it
to another country—do it to your own country and it’s “economic nationalism” or
“economic patriotism”
or whatever. But trade wars are like the regular kind of war in that they have
similar if less dramatic consequences: They destroy wealth and immiserate
populations.
Words About Words
These people cannot figure out why they keep losing
intellectual and political market share. From the (non-pornographic) advice
columns over at Slate:
I am a teacher. Several very
racist teachers work in my school. Last year, two white teachers used the
N-word while speaking with students, another teacher had the N-word written on
their door during Black History Month (purposefully). We have a history teacher
who thinks (and has said to students!) that Black people need to “get over”
slavery. We have Trump supporters who hang signs about the importance of
borders in their classrooms. My administration will do nothing about this. They
coddle the racists and keep their heads down.
That isn’t even particularly clever sand-bagging. But you
see this form of argument all the time. Using racial slurs while speaking with
students? Probably racist, though one can imagine circumstances in which it
wouldn’t be, e.g., a discussion of the controversies surrounding the use of
such words in the works of Mark Twain. Writing racial slurs on a teacher’s
door? Sounds like a firing offense to me. Being a Trump supporter who wants our
immigration laws enforced and says so? Not racist. Not in and of itself. There
are people who are racists who believe that and people who are not racists who
believe that. Being a Trump yahoo doesn’t necessarily make you a racist—it just
makes you a Trump yahoo. Trying to lump all that stuff together is dishonest
and ought to be treated as intellectually contemptible.
And then what follows is another letter along the same
lines, arguing that “professionalism is a bigot’s complaint.”
I cannot stand a lot of the rules
of “professionalism.” They all seem so arbitrary! Why does one expensive
t-shirt count as business casual and another, cheaper one doesn’t when the only
difference is fabric, which isn’t even visually obvious? Why do you have to
pretend to want a job for anything other than a paycheck? Why does it matter
whether or not I have tattoos, piercings, or dyed hair? How do I navigate the
work world when every time someone says the word “professional” I want to
scream about how discriminatory against women, POC, queer, poor, and disabled
people these arbitrary rules are?
This person apparently works in an office with a dress
code that feels cumbrous and capricious, and it very well may be that—but is it
inherently racist, anti-gay, anti-poor, anti-disabled, etc.? I do not think
that very many sane people take such claims very seriously.
The phrase “selling wolf tickets,” first attested to in
African American vernacular, means to oversell a claim and calls to mind (and
possibly comes from) the story of the boy who cried “Wolf!” There is plenty of
racism and other kinds of bigotry in this world and in these United States.
There also is a lot of nonsense being sold as evidence of racism. The right has
its own version of this lately, too, with “communism.” Some doofus over at
RedStateAR15PutinJesusAmericaBurger.com will denounce some bog-standard
Democrat as a “communist,” and your thinking-type person will be tempted to
ask: “Really? Mark Kelly wants to institute collective ownership of the means
of production and a dictatorship of the proletariat?” “No, it’s worse than
that! He once went to a mandatory DEI session at NASA!” “Cultural Marxism” is
the Republican answer to Democrats’ “racism”—it means: “This person disagrees
with me, and I hate him.”
So, office dress codes are racist?
True story: When I first went to work for the Lubbock
Avalanche-Journal many years ago, I got my first paycheck and took it to
the bank. If memory serves, I needed to open a new account, having recently
moved and not having a local one. It was summer in Texas, and Lubbock is a
college town on top of that, and so I was directed to a cheerful young man
wearing khaki shorts and a polo shirt. And I said: “I’m sorry, this is my
paycheck, and it is all the money I have. I’m going to need to talk to somebody
wearing pants.” Racist? No, that young man was white and also a Texas Tech student
or recent graduate, I assume, which is a very white kind of white
person. Classist? Not really—we had our lights turned off too many times when I
was a kid for me to pretend to be of a different class than the one I’m from.
I’m not particularly uptight about dress, though I probably own more ascots than,
say, Jonah Goldberg does. (I’m guessing Jonah’s ascot inventory consists of
0.00 ascots.) And
I kind of like dress codes: The only golf course I’ve ever played on (I’m
not much of a golfer, especially for an Eisenhower man) insists on collared
shirts and forbids shorts, and I endorse that. Men who show up at black-tie
events in blue blazers are disappointing.
And maybe I do live in a slightly rarefied world, but the
notion that dress codes are racist and anti-gay kind of runs up against my
(admittedly nonrepresentative) personal lived experience, which is that the
black guys and the gay guys in my world are a lot better dressed than
your median American straight white guy.
Yeah, I know, it’s a stereotype—that doesn’t mean it
isn’t true.
In Closing
Speaking of Sen. Mark Kelly, Shadow President Elon Musk,
a totally normal guy who doesn’t have a super-obvious drug problem or 14
children with four different mothers, denounced him as a “traitor.”
Sen. Kelly’s politics are not my politics. And Elon Musk’s politics are not my
politics. But, between the two of them, maybe the astronaut with the Legion of
Merit and the three dozen combat missions on his résumé is the one who deserves
the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the question of where his allegiances
are to be found.
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