The tariff is a tax, and the citizen pays it

Reason reports that the current administration's tariffs will impose a cost of approximately $900 on each American household in 2026 — a burden the publication characterizes as the largest tax increase since 1993. I was not alive to witness the commerce of this century, and I will not pretend to reconstruct every element of modern supply chains. But the civic shape of this question is perfectly familiar: when a government places a levy at the border, it is not the foreign manufacturer who feels the bite first. It is the citizen who walks into a shop and finds the price has risen.

I was no friend to the great merchant houses of my day, nor to the financiers who proposed to grow rich by standing between the producer and the market. Yet I was equally wary of the government that claimed to protect the laborer by taxing the goods he needed. Protection dressed as patriotism is still a tax. The name on the garment does not change the weight of the cloth.

The stated purpose of these tariffs, as I infer from the reporting, is to restore domestic manufacture and to discipline trading partners who have not played fair. These are not trivial concerns. A republic ought not to be wholly dependent on foreign powers for the tools of its survival. But the instrument chosen matters enormously. A tax spread broadly across every household — the modest family no less than the wealthy one — to fund a theory of industrial revival is a question that deserves full and open deliberation, not executive decree. The Congress holds the power of the purse for exactly this reason: so that the people's representatives, not a single hand, decide what the people shall pay.

I believed, and I continue to believe on inference from every principle I held, that public burdens should be visible, debated, and consented to. The tariff in its modern form evades that visibility. It does not appear as a line on a tax return; it appears as a quietly elevated price on a shelf. That invisibility serves power, not liberty. An educated citizenry cannot consent to what it cannot see, and cannot see what has been folded into the ordinary commerce of daily life.

I will add this caution, which the historical record of my own Republic ought to supply freely: concentrated executive power over the terms of trade has never, in the long run, flowed back to the people who surrendered it. It compounds. It finds new justifications. The same authority that raises a tariff to protect a factory can, in the next season, raise one to punish a critic or reward a friend. The remedy is not merely to debate this particular rate, but to insist — loudly, through every representative available — that the commerce power belong to the legislature where the Constitution placed it, and not migrate by habit into the executive hand.

The citizen who pays $900 more in 2026 than he paid in 2025 deserves to know plainly that he has been taxed, by whom, and by what authority. That is not a partisan complaint. It is the minimum condition of self-government.