Protective Tariffs Are Punitive Taxes Imposed by Governments on Their Own Citizens
Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal.
Editor:
About the new U.S.-U.K. trade agreement, you write that the U.K. “will now be spared higher industry-specific tariffs on steel (25%) and cars (27.5%)” (“Trump States a Trade-War Retreat,” May 9). This wording is unfortunate, as it masks the ultimate benefit of freer trade – namely, greater access of the people in the home country to goods and services from abroad. You’d have been more accurate to write that the people who will now be spared higher industry-specific tariffs on steel and cars are us Americans, for it’s us who now will not be compelled to pay those higher, tariff-induced prices.
It’s lovely that British producers of steel and automobiles will sell more of their outputs in the U.S. But it’s even lovelier that we Americans will be spared having to pay punitive taxes imposed by our own government on our purchases of these outputs.
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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