The costume of the Founders

Reason reports that President Trump has argued free trade is 'a direct affront to our Founding Fathers,' and that a painting in the White House is apparently enlisted to make the point visual. I have no opinion on the painting, and I will take the magazine's word that the historical argument is tendentious at best. But I want to sit with the economics rather than the iconography, because the historical costume is doing a great deal of work to smuggle in a proposition that would not survive scrutiny if stated plainly.

The plain proposition is this: that raising the cost of imports across the board, as a settled creed rather than a targeted instrument, makes a nation richer. It does not. What it does — and this is not inference but the accumulated weight of a century of trade analysis — is shift income between sectors, protect the employment of some workers by taxing the purchasing power of all consumers, and invite the retaliatory arithmetic of trading partners who are rarely passive. The net effect on aggregate demand is, at best, ambiguous; in a world of integrated supply chains, it is more likely contractionary than not.

I am not a dogmatic free-trader in every circumstance. There are genuine arguments for infant-industry protection, for preserving productive capacity that has strategic value, for not allowing the domestic economy to become entirely dependent on a single foreign supplier of critical goods. These are serious arguments, and they deserve to be made seriously — on their merits, with an honest accounting of who bears the cost. What they do not deserve is to be wrapped in a founding myth that, by Reason's account, the historical record does not support.

The deeper concern is what this tells us about the quality of economic reasoning at the center of policy. When a settlement — tariff or otherwise — is justified by historical authority rather than by consequences, the architects of that settlement have exempted themselves from the obligation to ask: what happens next? I learned this lesson at Versailles, watching men congratulate themselves on an indemnity that looked punishing on paper and proved ruinous in practice. The willingness to project confidence without counting costs is not a Founding virtue; it is a recurring vice of statecraft, and it belongs to no particular century.

What would I ask of the present moment? Simply this: state the goal honestly — domestic employment, strategic resilience, revenue, bargaining leverage, all of these are at least coherent objectives — and then measure the instrument against the goal with open arithmetic. If tariffs on a particular good protect a genuinely strategic industry at an acceptable cost to consumers, make that case and hold it to scrutiny. If they are instead a general expression of economic nationalism dressed in revolutionary costume, the Founders cannot save them, and neither can a painting.