Here are 5 articles that might diminish your enthusiasm for tariffs:
Tariffs and Industrial Policy Fail
High tariffs distorted resource allocation, favoring inefficient industries over more competitive sectors. This misallocation led to higher consumer prices and suppressed overall economic welfare.
Their study highlights how tariffs weakened competition in manufacturing by protecting inefficient firms, which inevitably inhibited productivity.
His analysis reveals that trade liberalization—not protectionism—is consistently associated with higher economic growth. By reducing barriers to trade, economies can reallocate resources to more productive sectors, enhance competition, and promote innovation. The evidence strongly suggests that countries embracing open trade policies experience faster and more sustainable economic progress than those that rely on tariffs to shield domestic industries.
The failures of tariffs and industrial policies in the United States, Japan, and China underscore the broader limitations of anti-market economic strategies. These policies often stem from the belief that governments can outmaneuver markets in allocating resources and driving innovation. Yet, as history repeatedly demonstrates, markets are better suited to these tasks.
Our History of Protectionist Tariff Train Wrecks
Protectionist tariffs are associated with a long history of economic and social calamities in America.
The only real difference between a lobbyist for protectionist tariffs and an armed robber is that the robber is armed.
Tariffs Are an Attack on Natural Rights
“Free Trade” means perfect freedom for every kind of industry; and it includes liberty to every man to employ his money or his labour in the way that he himself thinks most advantageous, and to buy and sell wherever he can do so with the greatest profit.
Bright asserted that the freedom to exchange the produce of one’s labor for that of his fellows anywhere in the world was the most fundamental of rights. Bright argued that there was no liberty without this liberty, which was simply the liberty to live.
Tariffs Are Taxes on Americans
Protectionism remains popular. But, as Henry Hazlitt put it, voter support for raising tariffs is ”the result of looking only at the immediate effects of a single tariff rate on one group of producers, and forgetting the long-run effects both on consumers as a whole and on all other producers.” Those who are incapable or unwilling to examine policies beyond their most short-term effects are easy targets for protectionist rhetoric.
Tariffs have inspired a profusion of economic speculation and argument. The arguments for tariffs have one thing in common: they all attempt to prove that the consumers of the protected area are not exploited by the tariff. These attempts are all in vain.
The Immorality of Protectionism
Politicians who support these taxes and regulations like to frame it all like it’s some kind of public service to the community. These arguments generally employ some sort of feel-good language like “tariffs level the playing field for Americans workers.”
In reality, of course, calls to raise or maintain tariffs are nothing more than a call to raise taxes on Americans. Describing these taxes as a burden only for foreign workers or foreign importers requires either dishonesty or impressive levels of ignorance about how trade barriers work.
Protectionism means Americans who are already taxed and regulated to the skies via income, sales, and property taxes must endure additional levels of taxation and regulation to get their hands on foreign goods. All these additional costs and taxes imposed at the import stage naturally filter down to the entrepreneurs, small business owners, and ordinary people who benefit from access to less expensive foreign goods.
There’s no moral high ground here for the protectionists, just unfounded self-righteousness. Of course, if protectionists don’t want foreign goods in their country, they are welcome to avoid purchasing such goods. Protectionists are also welcome to try to convince other people to not purchase those goods. One could also advocate against domestic regulations that drive up the cost of domestic production.
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