By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, April 21, 2025
What’s the actual problem Donald Trump is trying
to solve with tariffs?
It isn’t that the United States is being victimized by an
imbalanced global tariff regime, because that isn’t happening; it isn’t that
the post–Cold War liberal trading order has seen other countries romp while the
United States stagnates, because that hasn’t happened, either; it isn’t
“deindustrialization,” which hasn’t happened in the United States, or even a
radical collapse in the availability of factory work, which hasn’t happened,
either.
Let’s look at these supposed problems one by one.
1. What
about those unequal tariffs?
One of the very stupid claims one hears from time to time
is that Trump is engaged in a far-eyed Machiavellian scheme to lower worldwide
tariffs, using access to the U.S. market as a cudgel to beat our trading
partners into accepting a low-tariff settlement. The most obvious problem with
that line of thinking—besides the ridiculous fantasy involved in believing that
Trump thinks more than a news cycle ahead—is that we already had low worldwide
tariffs before Trump started mucking around with things.
In 2014, Barack Obama was in the White House and Donald
Trump was still a game-show host nobody took seriously as a presidential
candidate. What did the tariff situation look like worldwide? North American
trade was very close to tariff-free, with no tariffs at all on most goods under
NAFTA. China imposed an average
tariff of 4.74 percent when weighted for trade (meaning the average on the
value of goods actually imported rather than the average on-paper rate across
categories), with about a quarter of goods entering the country duty-free.
Germany’s trade-weighted average tariff was 2
percent, with a majority of goods (54 percent) entering the country
duty-free. Mexico’s trade-weighted average tariff was 1
percent, with almost all goods (83 percent) coming in duty-free. Canada’s
trade-weighted average tariff was 1.43 percent, with 68.8 percent of goods
entering duty-free. The United States maintained a trade-weighted tariff
averaging 1.69
percent, with about half of goods (51 percent) entering duty-free.
The notion that the United States spent the post-Cold War
era (the era of robust globalization) with very low tariff barriers while the
rest of the world fortified its domestic industries with high trade barriers is
a fiction.
That is why so much of the trade diplomacy of those years
was directed at reducing non-tariff barriers to trade, which result in part
from the fact that different countries have different environmental and safety
standards, different labor practices, different tax rates, different kinds of
financial regulation, different government-contracting procedures, etc. That’s
what things like the World Trade Organization and free-trade pacts are meant to
address—and did address quite successfully in the case of NAFTA.
2. But
isn’t the United States losing out?
Another intensely stupid claim is that Trump is trying to
stop the United States from getting “ripped off” by the American-led liberal
economic order (under which U.S. economic growth has outpaced that of most of
our major peer competitors).
The historical record tells a different story.
In the 1980s, when what we now call “globalization”
really started to take off, 27.1 percent of all economic growth in the world
came from the U.S. economy—and Donald Trump was at the time going around
talking about how we were getting hosed by the second-place performer, Japan,
which came in at … 6.3 percent. Germany—still “West Germany” back then—was No.
3 at 5.8 percent. The United States had about three times the population of
West Germany but accounted for five times the economic growth. That was a pretty
good decade.
But the 1990s were bananas. In that decade, the United
States accounted for 41.6 percent of worldwide economic growth, roughly what
was enjoyed by No. 2 Japan, the entire European Union, China, and the United
Kingdom—combined. That wasn’t because the United States was cowering behind
high tariff walls and practicing nationalist-populist welfare chauvinism—Bill
Clinton was out there negotiating free-trade deals and complaining about how he
was serving Dwight Eisenhower’s third term and kowtowing to the bond market,
and the budget was moving in the direction of balance. The United States was
extraordinarily engaged and outward-looking in those years. We didn’t thrive
because we were practicing Trump-style porno-gilded game-show Juche—we were thriving
because we invented the digital economy and invested tons—literal tons and tons
and tons, if you stacked up $100 bills on pallets—of money in new businesses
and new products.
The next decade is when China really shows up. From 2000
to 2010, China and the United States each accounted for just under 15 percent
of worldwide economic growth. For China, that meant collecting the long-delayed
fruits of industrialization at gunpoint and a sustained growth spurt that has
left the country as rich as … Mexico, almost: The World Bank has China’s
GDP/capita at $12,614 as of 2023, a bit behind Mexico’s $13,826 and a bit ahead
of Serbia at $12,282.
That’s about 15 percent of U.S. GDP/capita ($82,769). If
U.S. GDP/capita were your bill at a restaurant, you’d tip more than China’s
GDP/capita.
So, no, the United States didn’t get “ripped off” by
trade liberalization or by the transformation of a few emerging economies (many
of them following what was known as “the Washington Consensus”) from states of
desperate poverty to lower-middle income countries. The United States did
really, really well in those years. But now there are more Indians with potbellies
and fewer Chinese people cooking over open flames in single-room huts, so, woe
is us.
3. What
about deindustrialization?
One of my least favorite items in the great litany of
stupidity. U.S. industrial production today is right around five times what
it was in the supposed golden age of the 1950s. Manufacturing output today
is half-again as much as it
was in 1990. When your factory workers are producing more than 50 percent
more value than they were a couple of decades ago, you aren’t suffering from
“deindustrialization.”
4. But
what about those factory jobs?
When Eisenhower was elected in 1952, there were just under 16 million
Americans employed in manufacturing. Now there are just under 13 million—a
decline, yes, but not an especially dramatic one, though the population is
bigger. That manufacturing decline adds up to around 3 million jobs in an
economy with 160
million to 170 million employed people, or less than half the number
of job openings there were in February.
Losing your job can be very hard. Selena
Zito writes movingly about the disruptions that are being caused by the
closure of a glass factory in Charleroi, Pennsylvania where the jobs are being
shipped off to faraway … Ohio.
During the first Trump administration, U.S. glass manufacturers complained to
the U.S. International Trade Commission that they were being victimized by
Chinese “dumping,” and the USITC disagreed,
finding, among other things, that there wasn’t any convincing correlation
between low-priced imports and the financial difficulties of the U.S. glass
industry:
Subject imports did not
significantly undersell the domestic like product and did not have significant
adverse price effects on the domestic industry’s prices during the POI. In
addition, there appears to be a lack of correlation between the performance of
the domestic industry and subject imports. As subject imports declined in 2019,
domestic producers’ production and shipments continued to decline and by
greater amounts than from the prior year. Indeed, the domestic industry’s worst
financial performance was experienced in 2019, when subject import volumes were
at their lowest point.
My friend Selena wants this to be a story about
hardworking Americans being victimized by the commies in Beijing, but this is a
case of some private-equity guys in Midtown Manhattan who owned a glass
business in Pennsylvania and another one down the road in Ohio and who decided,
as private-equity guys are wont to do, that they could get more overall value
out of a single plant with fewer workers.
And if you read news accounts of the pain-in-the-ass
union goons the private-equity guys are dealing with in Pennsylvania, you might
sympathize a little. “We are fighting an evil empire,” the local union boss
said, “in these money groups and capital investors that only care about their
pockets and not ours.” It is true that investors care about their own
pockets—in many cases, management has a legal obligation (“fiduciary duty”) to
do precisely that first and foremost. The point of a glass factory is to manufacture
glass products, not to manufacture jobs. The point of an investment fund is to
produce returns for investors. Call them “evil” if you like–nobody is stopping
these guys from investing their own capital in a glass factory. But it’s the
same old stupid 20th-century labor politics.
You can’t fix that kind of thing with tariffs, either.
Trade has made the United States richer. A liberal global
economic order that allows for low-friction trade has made the United States
both richer and more powerful. And pissing that away because Donald Trump
doesn’t like foreigners and Selena Zito’s pet yinzers think they are entitled
to jobs for life down at the glass factory is indefensible stupidity rooted in
fear and ignorance and wishful thinking.
Tariffs are not the solution to that. If anything,
tariffs are likely to make the underlying economic reality worse as it becomes
more expensive for U.S. firms to rely on global supply chains, more difficult
for U.S. firms to access export markets, and easier for badly run companies to
keep capital and labor locked up in their underperforming but protected
businesses by a government that wants to treat makework factory jobs as a
social welfare program.
Words About Words
So, what’s a gerund? It’s good to know!
Like a lot of formal English grammar, gerunds—verbs made
into nouns—in our language first were described by analogy to Latin, and there
are still a few Latin gerunds commonly used by English speakers, e.g., modus
operandi and modus vivendi, a “way of working” and a “way of
living,” respectively. English gerunds take the present participle form,
meaning that they end in –ing: The Importance of Being Earnest, “Breaking Up Is Hard To Do,”
“Pimpin’ Ain’t Easy.”
As in Latin, English gerunds act grammatically as nouns, which means that they
are modified by adjectives, often possessives: I was annoyed by his being
late all the time. If I remember correctly, gerunds are pretty much always
singular in Latin, but they can be plural in English: “There are many good
livings to be had from trade.” Sometimes, things that look a lot like gerunds
just stick around long enough and travel far enough that they end up being more
or less ordinary nouns, as in human being or boxing.
Gerunds look like participles but are different in that
gerunds are nouns while participles are used in verbs. Participle: I have
been thinking about you. Gerund: Thinking about you makes me happy.
Participles also are used in adjectives: “Bring on the Dancing Horses.”
In Closing
In 1970, William F. Buckley Jr. gave an interview to Playboy
magazine, for which he wrote from time to time. (I wrote for Playboy once
upon a time; the magazine later purged my work from its archive as too
controversial, which I think is pretty funny.) You’ll have heard that Buckley
laughingly explained that he wrote for the magazine, whose “Playboy philosophy”
he criticized, on the grounds that he wanted to write something he could be
sure his son would see. In the interview, Buckley insisted that some truths
really are eternal, and that this will stand the test of time. But isn’t it the
nature of dogmas to fall apart? “Most, but not all,” he said. And he was
confident in some of his own. “How can you be so sure?” the interviewer asked.
“I know that my Redeemer liveth,” Buckley answered. The biblically literate
among you (an increasingly small elite!) know that is from the Book of Job,
which is not the happiest book in the Bible. But our task—our job—is a lot like
Job’s: to endure, to wait out hard temporary things in the knowledge that there
are permanent things, some of them hard, some of them sublime.
Not long ago, I was in a conversation (one that didn’t
end well) in which the other party asked about some little professional
disappointment I’d once had, and I told him, truthfully, that it didn’t bother
me that much. “You’re very strong,” he said. But that isn’t it. As I have told
my friends from time to time, I have a skewed perspective on the world because
nothing really bad has ever happened to me. I’ve had a few rough spots, of
course, and I know how to take a punch. But when I think about some of the
perfectly ordinary things people close to me have endured—losing a young wife
to cancer with a small child at home, having a beloved 16-year-old daughter
killed by a drunk driver, having a loved one shoot himself in the bathroom,
just on the other side of the door—I know: Nothing really bad has ever happened
to me. Not like that.
I have a lot more to lose than I did a few years ago,
including four precious little boys, the oldest of whom just went on his first
Easter Egg hunt over the weekend. A very nice gentleman at the church related
to the gathered children the story of Jesus’s death and revivification, which
must have gone entirely over my little man’s head, inasmuch as I think (and I
certainly hope) that he does not know what death is and, hence, what
resurrection might mean. But he did gather up some eggs and enjoy the candy. My
sons are all named after Old Testament figures, none of whom—the Old Testament
being the Old Testament—had an entirely happy life, all of whom endured
disappointment and suffering that, in some cases, were not relieved before the
end.
When Jesus came into the coasts of
Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, saying, Whom do men say that I, the
Son of man, am?
And they said, Some say that thou
art John the Baptist: some, Elias; and others, Jeremias, or one of the
prophets.
He saith unto them, But whom say ye
that I am?
And Simon Peter answered and said,
Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.
And Jesus answered and said unto
him, Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it
unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.
And I say also unto thee, That thou
art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell
shall not prevail against it.
In the end, though, it is precisely “flesh and blood”
that “hath revealed it unto” us. Stoicism may get you through some hard times,
and Deism will help you avoid a lot of arguments, but without the flesh and
blood—without the Resurrection—all is lost. Without the Resurrection, Nietzsche
has the better case, because Christian ethics and morality are, shorn of the
Resurrection, something worse than a farce—something very close to the insult
to human nature Nietzsche and his imitators believed them to be, and maybe even
something worse.
When Paul told the Philippians to “work out your own
salvation with fear and trembling,” he knew what he was writing. I might have
read that passage 200 times before I appreciated how much fear and trembling
there is in the thing, how deep into the fear love will, in love’s merciless
way, lead us.
I hear people say; “I never knew what love was until I
had children,” which is sentimental claptrap and also maybe something you
shouldn’t say in front of your wife or husband or parents or friends.
But fear?
I will show you something different
from either
Your shadow at morning striding
behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to
meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful
of dust.
Flesh and blood, dust to dust. Immortal
diamond. You can’t think your way out of the conundrum. You can’t fight
your way out of it. You can’t vote your way out of it or spend your way out of
it or read your way out of it. You cannot hold the ones you love close enough
to change the facts of the case, only one of which matters in the final
account.
I know that my Redeemer liveth.
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