You shouldn’t expect populist conspiracy theorists to learn economics—or, God forbid, blame themselves—if their favorite president causes a global economic downturn. The April 5 headline on Alex Jones’ site, reacting to the widespread fear of the effects of Trump’s tariffs, was more their speed: “Bombshell Alert! The Elites Are Panicking as Trump’s Tariff Triumph Exposes The Globalist’s [sic] Treasonous Plot to Sabotage America!”
So, are pro-trade, capitalist people like me merely saboteurs and traitors, or do I at least get to proclaim my membership in the elite now? Naturally, the site also suggests Ben Shapiro’s rejection of tariffs, for example, is just special pleading for his cronies in the diamond industry (hint, hint, get it?). Who paid off Adam Smith, I wonder?
But as the new tariffs, like all taxes on commerce, do damage to global markets, we hear the most diehard Trumpers spouting all sorts of diversions to avoid criticizing their favorite guy.
It’s just a short-term negotiating tactic, they say (even though Trump says it isn’t)!
Tariffs aren’t the worst kind of tax (and having your legs broken isn’t the worst kind of beating, but that’s hardly a recommendation)!
The tariffs could replace other more onerous taxes, such as income tax (though in the past, new government measures have nearly always ended up just layered on top of the old ones for added misery, as some of Trump’s more libertarian-leaning supporters seemed to understand back when they were criticizing presidential candidate Gary Johnson for pushing a VAT tax)!
Trump is “restructuring the global trading order” (sure, so would a massive asteroid impact, but that’s not even close to a good thing)!
And the whole idea this will blow over is dangerous. How often is government-induced pain of any kind temporary? Have we gotten rid of all those past welfare-state taxes and expenditures yet?
The average Trump supporter isn’t literally a fascist and shouldn’t be dismissed as one, but there’s a visceral pugnacity to their thinking—and even more so to Trump’s own—that’s intense enough to undermine the cool rationality necessary for sound economic thinking, to put it politely. Add to that Trump’s Orwellian willingness to b.s. the world by, for instance, calling the day he imposed numerous harsh fines for buying and selling things “Liberation Day,” and you’ve got a formula for unimpeded, unreflective authoritarianism.
Law and negotiations professor David Honig of Indiana University wisely observed that Trump treats each encounter he has not as if it’s part of the ongoing work of commerce and civilization but as if it’s the last/only encounter—and so Trump knows only that there’s a “winner” and “loser” of this primitive, standalone round, with no thought to future interactions. That is, there’s in Trump’s model of the world no Mutually Beneficial Exchange. No reciprocity. No long term. No simultaneous gains to each side from trade, despite all his trade-created money. He’s a juvenile psychopath—and thus zero-sum-thinking-oriented to the core of his angry brain. He’s gonna score some points if it kills us and benefits no one at all, like an angry playground bully willing to be arrested so long as he proves he can steal others’ lunch money.
He has purportedly told world leaders he’d drop all tariffs if they do, which would of course be fantastic. But if things don’t work out that way, and they probably won’t, rest assured he’ll egomaniacally deny responsibility, then in all likelihood propagandize and browbeat us all about how he’s the cure for the ensuing poverty and only granting him vast new authoritarian powers will enable him to really get things right. If so, he may at long last go from being the new Hawley to being the new Hitler. I mean Rep. William C. Hawley of 1930 tariff infamy, of course, not current Sen. Josh Hawley, though the latter holds some comparably absurd ideas about markets, and for populist reasons not so unlike Trump’s.
And what will Trump’s fans, perhaps especially the smarter and more ideological ones, do if he ushers in a New Great Depression, arguably the third to be caused by tariffs in our nation’s history? I suspect they’ll just start chanting “Make America a Great Depression Again”—MAGDA, if you will—and claim it’s somehow good for us anyway. I can easily imagine some Catholic, paleoconservative, isolationist, or natalist writers warming to the feminine-sounding MAGDA acronym and expounding upon the virtues of the new poverty—a wholesome remedy, they may say, for overheated, money-grubbing times. Now, let us till the land together like good peasants. Such appeals have been common enough on the left for a couple of centuries, after all, and there’s no reason to think the right is immune.
But the truth is, all government restrictions on voluntary, non-violent trade are immoral, right down to attacks on each and every swap between two individuals, regardless of which borders they’re within or near or crossing. A real “liberation day” would end all such restrictions whether the restrictions are labeled taxes, regulations, tariffs, petty theft, or just plain vandalism. Henry David Thoreau, hardly a crass Las Vegas-style wealth-idolator, wrote back in the mid-19th century that there are few fiends lower than the sorts of trade-hating saboteurs who blockade or derail trains to impede business. He was right.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey.
