The duty is a tool, not a policy

The BBC reports that the United States has hit dozens of countries with a new round of tariffs, citing forced-labor concerns as the justification, after the Supreme Court struck down an earlier broad levy in February. I find myself compelled by this story — not because I am opposed to duties, but precisely because I am not, and I know how easily a sound instrument becomes a blunt weapon.

In my Report on the Subject of Manufactures, I argued plainly that protective duties, rightly levied, can nurture an infant industry into a self-sustaining national asset. The logic is not complicated: if a foreign producer uses unfree labor — labor stripped of its wages by coercion — then the good it ships carries a hidden subsidy that no honest American manufacturer can match. A corrective tariff in that case is not protectionism; it is the restoration of a level field. On that narrow ground, I am with the administration.

But here is the ledger entry that must also be posted. A tariff imposed broadly across dozens of nations, as the BBC describes — not surgically aimed at specific industries in specific countries where the labor abuse is documented, but spread wide — risks becoming a revenue measure dressed in moral clothing. I knew that temptation in my own century. A government that needs income will reach for a duty before it reaches for a harder conversation with its own taxpayers. The question every trade action demands is: what, precisely, are we protecting, and to what productive end?

There is also the matter of public credit and the terms of commerce. I will speak with humility on the precise modern mechanics — the supply-chain architectures, the currency hedges, the payment rails — for these are beyond my direct knowledge. But the durable principle I can state with confidence: a nation seen swinging its tariff schedule unpredictably, substituting one global duty for another after a court defeat, signals to the world's merchants and creditors that its commercial rules are contingent on its mood. That signal costs money. It is priced into every contract, every bond, every letter of credit issued in American dollars. Public credit, once stained by the appearance of caprice, is expensive to restore.

My recommendation is specific. Retain the duties where the forced-labor case is documented and prosecuted with evidence. Couple them with an affirmative industrial program — support for the manufactures, the semiconductor fabs, the supply chains — that gives the tariff a destination rather than merely a grievance. And put the legal architecture on ground firm enough that no court need strike it down a second time. A policy that cannot survive judicial scrutiny is a policy half-built. Build the whole thing, or explain honestly why you have not.