Tariffs are Immoral
As I write this post, President Trump has levied 30% tariffs on Chinese imports, a global 10% tariff on all goods, a 25% tariff on most Mexican and Canadian goods, and various other tariffs (Trump’s Tariffs on China, Canada and the U.K.: Here’s Where Things Stand - WSJ). Lots of articles have been written about the effectiveness or harm these tariffs have caused. Though I tend to prefer articles that come with various statistics and metrics to back up an author’s claims, I wanted to explain that even if tariffs “worked” they are an inherently immoral policy tool.
We live in an increasingly interconnected world. There are certainly downsides to that, but one of the benefits has been robust international trade that has improved the lives of billions of people. When the market for goods and services expands from local to global, we are exposed to goods and services that are of better quality, lower cost, and sometimes even both. Why does any government have the right to restrict us from participating in this global market?
Proponents of tariffs tend to use arguments centered around national security or the decline in the quality of life of formerly industrial towns. We should have sympathy for anyone who loses their job, but it is not the government’s job to protect you from competition. If anything, the government should foster competition since competitive markets tend to lead to higher quality goods and services with much less corruption.
Think about your life just in a local sense. What if the government said you could only shop for groceries at Whole Foods? What if the government said you could only buy clothes from Men’s Warehouse? We would be outraged at that. Now apply that on a global scale. If businesses in the United States prefer steel from China or oil from Venezuela, why should our government treat those products differently than any other good? There is no good moral case for this.
Situations where I could see tariffs having justification would be maybe if lumber from Canada came with an invasive species or an electronic product built in China came with some sort of secret monitoring. It must be said that these cases are very rare and most of the tariffs that are currently levied offer no moral justification.
If President Trump wanted to improve domestic industries, a better approach would be regulatory reform and simplifying the tax code (note that this does not mean reducing the income tax I mean cleaning up the code itself). These policies have a better moral case than tariffs and I believe they would be more effective as well in their stated goals.
