By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, March 24,
2025
In seeking to justify his imbecilic trade war against
Canada, Donald Trump complained
on March 7 that “Canada has been ripping us off for years on tariffs for
lumber.” You will not be surprised to learn that this claim is, like most of
what comes out of the presidential mouth, untrue, and that, until very
recently, there were no Canadian tariffs on U.S. lumber at all. The Canadian
tariffs on U.S. lumber that have been imposed since they were first considered
in 2017 are retaliation for increases in U.S. tariffs on Canadian lumber. As
usual, Trump either doesn’t know what he is talking about or doesn’t care. A
bit of both, I suspect.
The U.S.-Canada dispute over trade in softwood lumber is
roughly the same age I am, old enough to have been “solved” at least two times
in the past, producing the inevitable crop of initialisms: the SLA (Softwood
Lumber Agreement), which is to be administered by the LCIA (London Court of
International Arbitration), and CUSFTA (Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement) which
begat NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) which begat USMCA (United
States-Mexico-Canada Agreement). The first substantial bilateral work on the
issue began in the early 1980s.
Trump has had plenty of time to do his homework on the
issue. Of course, he hasn’t. He is lazy and ignorant, he always has been lazy
and ignorant, and he prefers to remain lazy and ignorant.
When I was a newspaper editor, I habitually began job
interviews for would-be reporters with the same question: “What is millage?”
(Youngsters with Ivy League educations almost never knew; but their parents,
and older applicants with mortgages, almost always did: Millage is the amount
of tax per $1,000 in valuation imposed on homeowners.) If you want to know if
somebody knows what they are talking about vis-à-vis U.S.-Canada trade, ask
them about stumpage. Most of them—including our Canuckophobic
president—will be stumped.
Stumpage is the fee charged to harvest trees for wood on
public lands. U.S. timber producers insist that Canada does not charge a high
enough fee for trees cut on public land, which is the source of most Canadian
timber. Stumpage is not much of an issue in the United States, where most of
the timber is harvested on privately owned land, which enables the existence of
a competitive marketplace and real market prices. In Canada, most of the wood
is on Crown lands, meaning public lands, mostly under the control of the
various provinces (though some is under the direct control of the federal
government).
Because these lands are government-owned, the process for
determining stumpage fees is political rather than market-driven. If that
sounds like wicked evil socialism to you, keep in mind that this is pretty much
how we do things in the United States when it comes to oil, gas, and coal
extracted from public lands. Environmentalists have long complained that
federal royalty rates charged to petroleum and coal producers were
too low, and they cited discrepancies between relatively low federal rates
and the rates charged by western states on state-owned land, which tended to be
a few points higher. (The conversation has shifted a bit in recent years, from
price to prohibition.)
And while the critics might have had a point about the federal royalties (or
not; I’m agnostic), the argument was always obviously pretextual:
Environmentalists want to reduce oil and gas consumption (or stop it outright),
and they will do anything they can do to make it more difficult and expensive
to produce petroleum fuels. U.S. timber producers are not bothering about
stumpage on Crown lands in Canada because they all read Milton Friedman and
care passionately about free markets—they want to raise their prices, and the
presence of relatively inexpensive Canadian wood in the market prevents their
doing so.
Almost all attempts at what is known as “industrial
policy”—which is what you call corporate welfare when it is implemented by
people who went to Harvard—rely on the same strategy: Artificially reducing
standards of living for the general public in order to fortify the economic
position of politically favored firms or industries. The U.S. government has
long maintained “price support” programs for farmers, which is a nice way of
saying that the vast majority of Americans who are not farmers pay taxes to support
programs that are designed to make their grocery bills higher. In
Beijing, one strategy (among many) has been to artificially
weaken the currency, at least at times, reducing the real incomes of
workers in order to make Chinese exports cheaper on world markets. (It’s
“currency manipulation” when the other guys do it; when your guys do it, it is
“monetary policy.”)
Assuming, arguendo, that the critics of Canadian
policy are right, what Canada is doing is artificially lowering the standard of
living of Canadians who are not in the lumber-exporting business in order to
increase the profitability and competitiveness of lumber exporters, in effect
transferring part of a tax liability (the uncollected portion of the higher
“correct” stumpage fee) from politically connected business owners to the
general taxpaying public. That is something to complain about—for Canadian
taxpayers.
Should Americans be complaining about it? Well …
it depends on whom you’re asking. The ratio of Americans who consume wood-based
products to the number of Americans who work in timber-producing jobs is something
like 6,800 to 1. The Canadians stand accused of subsidizing the 6,800 to
the disadvantage of that one other guy. If there is government-subsidized
unfair competition, then that’s not great for the firms that have to compete
with subsidized rivals, but it’s still, overall, a tax on Canadians taxpayers
that ultimately benefits American consumers.
That said, I’m not convinced by the U.S. timber lobby’s
complaints here: If you’ve ever traveled through Canada, then you’ll appreciate
that competing with Canada in wood is like competing with the Sahara in
sand—the place is just full of the stuff. And U.S. businesses enjoy all sorts
of advantages—some of them matters of government policy—that overseas
competitors do not. Canadian timber-cutters may have it easy relative to the
guys in Oregon, but U.S. automakers are able to pay their workers a lot less than
their German counterparts do; U.S. businesses typically pay higher taxes than
their Swiss
counterparts but lower taxes than their Mexican
competitors. And some of this stuff is pretty hard to sort out: German
industrial unions are, as a rule, a lot more powerful than their U.S.
counterparts, but they also are better, more responsible partners for firms and
industries. There are lots of countries with no statutory minimum wage, but you
wouldn’t relocate to many of them—Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Norway,
Switzerland—in search of cheap labor. Different countries are … different!
And that’s a good thing. Comparative advantage means
specialization and a more productive division of labor which—if there is
reasonably free trade—makes everybody richer.
But, I know: You’ve heard me give that sermon before.
There are some real live trade issues with Canada,
including its 19th-century-style protectionist policies touching the
dairy industry. But here’s the thing I keep thinking about: Canada’s stumpage
and dairy and much else are roughly the same today as they were when Washington
insisted on renegotiating NAFTA, which, with a few revisions and updates,
became USMCA. Donald Trump was president when those negotiations happened.
Trump insisted
that USMCA was—of course—the greatest, biggest, most significant,
superlative this, super-superlative that, “most balanced trade agreement in
history.” It left Canadian timber and dairy practices largely (though not
entirely) untouched. We’ve already torn up one North American trade pact and
replaced it with another negotiated by Trump and his team, and now Trump and
his team think our North American trade pact is no good. If this half-organized
bouquet of numbskulls couldn’t get it right last time around, why should we
think they’re going to get it right this time around?
To ask the question gives up too much. The fact is, Trump
et al. don’t really care about U.S.-Canada trade very much. Some of them are
stupid enough to believe that U.S. economic problems are the result of
(snigger, snigger) ruthless Canadian predation, but even the workaday
goons in this Rotten Apple Dumpling Gang aren’t, for the most part, quite that
dumb. So why does Trump suck up to Russia and China and North Korea while
pissing on Canada and the European Union? Because he knows Canada and … Belgium
or whoever … won’t fight back because they can’t fight back.
Just apply the same principles to trade that any
intelligent person would use to understand Trump’s foreign policy, which is
explained only to a minor degree by idiocy and incompetence but to a major
degree by the fact that Trump is on
the Russians’ side. Putin and Xi exemplify the kind of leader he would
like to be, and their autocratic regimes exemplify the sort of power he thinks
he should have. Trump doesn’t appear to be doing Moscow’s work because his
administration is feeble and incompetent—it is feeble and incompetent, but if
it were more robust and more competent it would simply be advancing Moscow’s
interests more effectively.
If there is a less outrageous reading of that, it is that
Trump believes that the Kremlin’s interests and Washington’s interests are
aligned—though it probably would be more accurate to say that he believes that
Putin’s interests and his own are aligned. Trump is trying to wreck Canada
because he thinks Canada ought to be wrecked, and that if Putin is going to
have his Ukraine then Trump must have his Canada, or his Greenland, or his
Panama. Trump is trying to reduce Canada to the status of a colony for the same
reason Putin is trying to make a serf state of Ukraine: because he thinks that
is what it should be.
Trump thinks he should hand out rewards to powerful
business interests because they are powerful business interests, and, if these
rewards to the powerful come at the expense of the less powerful—the
unorganized general American taxpaying and mortgage-paying public—then, in his
mind, that is exactly how things should go. This much should be plain:
Trump applies the same might-makes-right ethos to Americans as he applies to
Canadians and Belgians.
In the narrowest sense, sure, this is about stumpage. But
in the broader and more significant sense, it is about anything but that—it is
about creeds and codes and what sort of nation it is that we are to be.
(And a Little More) Economics for English Majors
Oh, Wall
Street Journal:
Nasdaq Falls 4% After Trump
Doesn’t Rule Out Recession
I cannot tell you how much I hate to read the Wall
Street Journal writing as though a recession were something the president
had the power to simply “rule out.” But one encounters that kind of
presidential idolatry everywhere now. It’s repugnant.
Words About Words
Writing in the Australian (quoted at length by
David Ignatius in
the Washington Post, which is where I saw it), defense
expert David Kilcullen observes:
We partner with Washington not
for sentimental reasons but because we need an ally powerful enough to
stabilize the global system. But what if Washington were simultaneously
declining in relative military strength, lacking in national will to secure the
global system, moving out of alignment with our values, damaging our trade,
bullying its partners and becoming unreliable as an ally?
…
In such a hypothetical scenario,
where our traditional nuclear-armed ally was no longer reliable, Australia
might need its own sovereign nuclear deterrent, or at least an extremely
capable array of long-range, nonnuclear strike assets.
Kilcullen, a noted thinker about security issues, is
being cute with that hypothetical, there, intending to communicate that
the situation is anything but hypothetical. In classical rhetoric, this is
called antiphrasis: “Brutus is an honourable man; so are they all, all
honourable men,” Mark Antony says when heaping shame upon the Romans who
assassinated Julius Caesar. (Brutus was an honorable man; Caesar was a
tyrant; Mark Antony was a dissipated sycophant, the Rudy Giuliani of his time.)
Ain’t nuthin’ hypothetical
afoot at this particular Circle-K.
Hypothetical there feels a little like a
distancing technique to me, too—like the guy doesn’t want to have the argument.
Which is fair enough. But it reminds me of a particular bit of journalese that
I find endlessly annoying: allegedly. Our world is full of reporters and
columnists and editors, all of whom should know better, who believe that the
word allegedly somehow saves your bacon if there should be a libel
complaint or another legal dispute arising from your copy. I have some bad news
for you, Sunshine: Allegedly don’t do nothing of the kind.
The catch is in who is doing the alleging. If I hear from
some random guy who thinks he’s Cleopatra and lives under a bridge that
Politician X is an embezzler, and then I write that Politician X is an alleged
embezzler, I’m still on the hook for the accusation. If, on the other hand,
Politician X has been indicted for embezzling, then I’m pretty safe calling him
an alleged embezzler—an allegation in an indictment is a pretty serious thing
and carries with it a certain degree of credibility, even if it turns out to be
untrue or unproveable. If I’m just doing the alleging myself, then alleged
doesn’t help.
If I just went out and found the first person I could to
make some outrageous claim—and a reasonably good reporter can find somebody
to say almost anything—that doesn’t really help, either: That’s one way
to run up against that “reckless disregard for the truth” business. We have
rules that privilege things said in Congress or government meetings or in
court, so that if Sen. Snout calls Sen. Spleen a thief or a pervert or
something, or if a witness in court claims Sen. Snout is evil, in league with Satan,
etc., then reporters can report the fact, and commentators can comment on it,
without fear of legal exposure.
A particularly weaselly variation on this is credibly
accused, a formulation favored by knee-walking moral and
intellectual cowards everywhere. If you hear or read the words credibly
accused, you can normally dismiss what comes after. People who hate Brett
Kavanaugh will say he was “credibly accused” of some kind of weird sexual
misconduct, when that is, from any reasonable point of view, not true:
Kavanaugh was non-credibly accused, including by people who later
admitted that they were making things up. But the smear lives on. That’s
one reason why we should work out accusations of criminal wrongdoing in
court—where there are rules and standards of evidence and penalties for
perjury—rather than decades after the supposed episode in confirmation hearings
or on social media or whatever.
Allegedly doesn’t do much. But some bits of
funny-seeming journalese serve a real function: If you’ve ever read a police
report identifying a criminal suspect as “108-year-old Johann McFarland Singh
Jr. of the 2400 block of Smith Street in Shelbyville,” or something like that,
you might wonder why infamous criminals always have three names and why
newspapers give their approximate addresses, exact ages, etc. The problem is
that there are lots of names that belong to more than one person. (Those poor other
Kevin Williamsons! Well, not
poor, but, you know what I mean.) So you use Kevin Daniel Williamson so you
know you aren’t talking about Kevin Meade Williamson; but there is more than
one Kevin Daniel Williamson in the world, too, so you might identify a
malefactor as “Kevin Daniel Williamson of Avenue Claude Nobs 2” or “Kevin
Daniel Williamson of 15 Pl. Vendôme” or “Kevin Daniel Williamson of Brook
Street, Mayfair,” or whatever it is.
Hypothetically.
I know of at least two cases in which college newspapers
got into big trouble after wrongly assuming that an unusual name encountered in
a police report indicated one person when it actually indicated another. One of
those cases was that of a man who worked in a university dormitory who woke up
one morning to read in the paper that he had been charged with a sexual crime,
when no such thing had happened—he had a name that was unusual in the United
States but not that unusual in his home country. Another guy in the same city
with the same name had indeed been charged with the crime, and someone had
tipped off the school paper that this alleged miscreant worked in a women’s
dormitory, and the newspaper ran with the story: right name, wrong guy. I am
told the lawyer’s advice was, “If he asks for anything less than a million
dollars, write him a check.” But think about what that poor guy’s day was like!
That story was related to me by the late Mike Quinn, a
University of Texas professor and Dallas Morning News veteran who
advised the school paper about law and ethics. Quinn was a character, one of
those guys who had been to a lot of places and seen a lot of things. When he
was a young reporter at the Morning News, there was a visit by the
president, and Quinn had hoped to be assigned to the press conference, where
he’d get to ask the president a question. But, being relatively junior, he was
given the less glamorous assignment of covering the motorcade. And
nothing ever happens there.
In Other Wordiness
I enjoyed (and recommend) David Von Drehle’s Washington
Post column about the renovation of LaGuardia Airport in New York. But
I did take issue with one bit:
To have aging infrastructure, a
nation must have infrastructure to begin with. China looks shiny new because it
is: from Third World to first in a scant two generations.
I think it is time to retire phrases such as “from Third
World to first.” As I’m sure most of you know, “Third World” does not denote a ranking
behind a notional First and Second World but speaks to a Cold War distinction
between the liberal democracies (the “free world”), the Communist bloc, and the
“Third World” of unaligned developing countries. (It’s a translation of a
French term, tier monde.) In any case, I’m also not convinced that
China, with a GDP per capita still behind Mexico’s and Kazakhstan’s as the World
Bank figures it, is in the same “first” category as the United States or
Switzerland or Norway, though it is a very important country for all kinds of
obvious reasons.
It sounds impolite to write about first-rate countries,
second-rate countries, third-rate countries, etc. (The original
usage of “first-rate,” “second-rate,” etc., referred to the classification
of ships by the British navy.) I’m sure there is a nicer way to write it: first-tier,
second-tier, third-tier, or something along those lines. Share your
suggestions or preferred usages in the comments, if you like.
In Closing
People sometimes wonder why I care so much about free
trade, regulation, investment, and all that economic stuff. It is because I
care about human flourishing and because I want to live in a peaceful,
contented republic where people can go about their business and live their
lives in the way that seems best to them. Everything gets easier the richer we
are, and everything gets harder the poorer we are. Making Americans
artificially poor for no good reason is one of the most unpatriotic, immoral,
and—maybe worst of all—stupid things an administration can do. We should not
sit by and accept it or keep mum because we’re worried about being criticized
as “out of touch” with blue-collar workers or farmers or struggling
communities.
I’m not out of touch with any of those. I know the world
of struggling, low-income America a lot better than most people in Washington
do. And what I know about Americans is that we are not weaklings, that we do
not require protection by Big Daddy Government, that we can compete with even
the most vicious … Canadians … and come out of it just fine. Anybody who tells
you differently either doesn’t know this country or is trying to sell you a
wagonload of horsepucky for his own benefit.
Americans can’t handle the modern global economy? We
built it. We dreamt it up and invented it. Americans will do just fine, and
maybe those hardworking blue-collar Americans the politicians are always going
on about don’t need a lot of oversight and input from people who’ve never
lifted anything heavier than money.
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