The oldest trick of power: a tax without that name

Reason reports that the current administration's tariff regime will extract roughly $900 from each American household in 2026, constituting, by its reckoning, the largest tax increase since 1993. I ask the reader to hold that figure in mind not as an abstraction, but as a week's groceries, a month's utility bill, a child's school supplies — real goods abstracted from real families by the hand of the state.

I have always held that a tax is a tax, whatever costume it wears at the door. A duty levied at the port is not paid by the foreign merchant; it is paid by the citizen at the counter. The merchant simply adjusts his price, pockets his margin, and moves on. The household at the end of that chain has no such adjustment to make. This is not a contested point of modern economics — it is the plain arithmetic of commerce, and it was plain in my own century as well.

Protectionism has always dressed itself in the language of strength: we are defending the worker, the manufacturer, the nation. I will grant that a republic may, in narrow and well-reasoned cases, choose to foster an infant industry. But that is a deliberate policy made in the open, debated in the legislature, and weighed against its cost. What Reason describes — and I take its account at face value, marking as inference anything beyond what it reports — looks less like a surgical instrument than a broad tariff wall whose costs are diffuse, chronic, and borne disproportionately by those with the least margin to absorb them.

The concentration of executive power over trade is itself a civic concern distinct from the economic one. When a single office can reset the price of goods for three hundred million citizens by decree — without the deliberate vote of their representatives — the republican principle of consent is strained. The legislature holds the power to lay and collect taxes; that power was not placed there by accident. It was placed there so that the people's representatives, answerable to the people, would feel the full weight of every burden they imposed. Executive tariffs, however lawfully structured, circumvent that accountability.

I am not an enemy of commerce, nor of manufacture, nor of the laboring citizen who works in either. I am an enemy of arrangements that concentrate benefit among the few and disperse cost among the many while calling the result protection. A republic that taxes its own households to shield connected industries from competition has not protected its citizens — it has conscripted them into service for interests not their own. The citizen deserves to hear that plainly, and the press that speaks it plainly — as Reason has done here — performs the function I have always said a free press must perform: it makes the cost of power visible to those who pay it.