Liberated From Economic Growth and Freedom
He assures me that he’s still a “proud MAGA man.”
Mr. McKinney:
I’m now in no mood to play whack-a-mole with you and your ever-shifting attempts to justify Trump’s chaotic and destructive tariffs. In the course of a few weeks, with a crescendo yesterday afternoon, one man tore down nearly 80 years of an American-led, carefully constructed rules-based system of global trade – a system that ensured that the standard of living of all Americans is today higher than it would have otherwise been, and that also helped pull billions of our fellow human beings around the world out of poverty and desperation. Congress is supine, and hordes of economically ignorant pundits are on the prowl peddling asinine explanations of how Trump’s tariffs will usher in a golden age of prosperity.
It won’t.
So I’ll not humor you by answering your many “questions” (all of which, by the way, have been answered several times in the past). I’ll point out merely that your claim that “we’ll have to wait to see what the president’s bold policy will produce” is mistaken: We can see now it’s rotten fruits. Look at the stock market: At 10:15am EDT, the DJIA is down 3.6%, the NASDAQ is down 4.8%, and the S&P 500 is down 3.9%. Being forward looking, financial markets give us as good a glimpse as is humanly possible of our economic future: it’s not a happy one.
Our economy won’t collapse. Americans won’t starve. I don’t even believe that we’ll fall, because of these tariffs, into a formal recession. But our children and grandchildren will be poorer than they would otherwise have been. Worse, the world will be more dangerous, as trade reduces belligerence – and protectionism increases it.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
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