The point of Trump’s tariffs is to get rid of all tariffs. I can feel the blank stares of my ideological and indoctrinated friends who are hyperventilating about a blip in stock prices and loses for billionaires.
I get it, Libertarians, you really do not want the government to do anything and Thomas Sowell said stuff about tariffs being bad, so in unison you bleat: “Tariffs are taxes!”
But your sloganeering is not argumentation and—while I generally believe less is more in the case of government—I’m stuck here in the real world with Trump.
Economic theory has it’s place, as do ideals, and yet this isn’t a matter of Sowell said it, I believe it, that settles it.
Marxists also believe their man’s theory will work if properly applied. Ideological people can’t accept when their theory doesn’t work in reality, they will always insist “that wasn’t true [insert ideology here]” and continue on their merry way muttering that next time it will work—if they could just brainwash more children and eliminate more enemies of the revolution. There’s never a reevaluation in light of the actual evidence.
So, without further ado, let’s dive into where free trade fails and Thomas Sowell after we do that…
Can Hell Be Made Worse?
After the devastating earthquake of 2010, I joined a group of young people on a trip to Haiti. It was a Christian mission and hosted by a Haitian pastor. This grandfatherly man had, at one point, been in business and ran a factory manufacturing clothes.
While I’m not going to make a case against charity or giving, there is often a cost that is unseen and a greater dependency created in the end. The Haitian pastor was forced to shutter his operation and lay off all of his employees after the combination of cheap imports and donations made it impossible to compete in the marketplace.
But the even sadder story was in a place in the country called “little Africa” where rice farmers tried to make ends meet. No, they were never rich. However, they had scraped a living out of cultivation up until Bill Clinton started to dump subsidized American rice on the Haitian market. These people were desperate. They mobbed our delivery of a bit of relief and aid.
I know, I know, this isn’t real free trade. But it is the kind of situation we are in. Putting our favorite theories and fandom aside, and ideals that could possibly work if all abided by the same rules or assumptions, we don’t live in that fantasy land. In the real world, it is like Haiti where subsidized products are exported and some will disproportionately suffer consequences.
Yes, in theory, Haiti still benefits, as a whole, from importing cheap or free stuff. But we can also make the argument that this kind of unfair trade has undermined a situation that was already fragile. A government that would protect Haitian industries would not let subsidized products be dumped without something stabilizing in return.
Thomas Sowell vs Donald Trump
Sowell is a great economist and provides a good answer to ‘progressive’ theories. His being a guest on the Rush Limbaugh show has made him a favorite of conservatives—wanting validation for their free market and small government views.
As an academic, Sowell’s work dealt mostly with economic theory and to argue against all tariffs he uses abstraction “protectionism hurts market efficiency” and that they don’t solve issues like wealth gap, that they favor special interests, and retaliation against tariffs hurts exports, and they lead to long-term stagnation. And he may be right if we lived in a vacuum sealed petri dish.
Trump, by contrast, lives in the very messy world of politics and negotiations. He runs on instincts and intuition, not by intellectual exercises or writing papers or creating a set of principles. He comes in with the big ask, the threat or the bluff, trying to disrupt and even create a bit of anxiety in the other side, before eventually bringing this process to a resolution that makes all parties leave with a feeling like they’ve won.
This is how we got from the “fire and fury” rhetoric—with the political class and corporate media hyperventilating about this being a path to war—to Trump being the first US President to set foot in North Korea and then shaking hand of Kim Jong Un. It is just his method of changing the conversation or moving the Overton window. You can’t get from point A to point B without shaking up the old status quo a bit.
Trump isn’t ideological, like Sowell, or trying to live off a written in stone economic code of conduct. No, when he has leverage, or sees an opportunity, he uses it. There are many countries tariffing US goods. And our trade deficit is enormous. So why is it so out of line for our President to cry foul or use the threat of reciprocal tariffs in other to back these countries down and then get a better deal for his country?
Surely Sowell isn’t against pushing for the elimination of tariffs—which likely is the end game. And, furthermore, Trump’s brazen actions are far more likely to get results than the fine professor’s best lecture on economics. Already other countries are lining up to start talks about removing their unfair tariffs against the US. It is a game of musical chairs and you don’t want to be the last one looking for a seat.
Power, Principles, and Persuasion
Marxism is about the application of power, Libertarians are about strict adherence to a set of principles, but Trump is different. He is about persuasion.
Marxism is a hammer—raw power of the mob, trying to smashing the old order to hand control to the workers, or so it claims. In reality, it’s a machine for centralization: seize the levers, dictate terms, and dress it up as justice. Think Soviet bread lines or Mao’s famines—equality morphing into control. Libertarians, by contrast, wield a rulebook, not a fist. Their creed—liberty, markets, entirely hands off—is sacred, rigid as stone. Tariffs? Sacrilege. Sowell represents this. Marxism a power grab, and libertarianism a fortress of unattainable ideals—both are better to be left as theory rather than an approach to real world negotiations.
Marxism would’ve sparked a trade war, not talks; libertarianism would’ve let markets bleed out. Trump’s different—he’s making countries dance. China grumbles but hints at softening; the EU’s haggling too. Stocks have dipped, and Sowell’s costs loom, but the moves are now undeniable: Vietnam’s concessions, India’s play, Japan’s hustle. It’s not a system winning—it’s Trump, raw and loud, proving persuasion trumps power or principle. He’s bending the world his way, one bluff at a time. He is about persuasion—messy, unscripted, a vibe that bends the room.
Tariffs are the threat, but trade that is truly free and fair is the actual goal. And Trump is further along in achieving this simply for his boldness alone. Maybe he’s not doing it the ‘right’ way or by conventional means, yet who says that we can’t try a new approach to get some better results than we’ve been getting? The people who have been leaving the American worker behind tot decades now? As my 13-year-old son would say: Let him cook!
Irregular Ideation 