Immediately after launching his trade war, President Trump surrendered to the “enemy.” Well, okay, it wasn’t a complete surrender. Let’s call it a partial surrender in the form of a unilateral 90-day cease fire.
That’s good news, of course, to everyone in the world, including Americans. Well, except for the Chinese people, against whom Trump has decided to continue waging his trade war with tremendous, angry ferocity.
But Trump’s immediate capitulation to all the other trade-war “enemies” is not the best news to come out of the tariff/protectionism-versus-free-trade chaos that has ensued ever since Trump resumed the presidency. The best news is the fact that the dominant sentiment in America is clearly in favor of free trade and against economic protectionism, tariffs, and trade wars.
This phenomenon has blown me away. It might well be the first time since I discovered libertarianism that a libertarian principle has gained such overwhelming favor and support from the American people. For the past few months, the mainstream press has been filled with editorials, commentaries, and op-eds favoring free trade.
In fact, it is phenomenal that the only people who are on the fringe on this issue are Trump and his loyal band of Trumpsters, who, like members of a cult, will support anything Trump does and come up with all sorts of arguments, no matter how inane and fallacious, to blindly support his statist policies and positions.
There certainly wasn’t this big pro-free-trade tsunami in 1995, when The Future of Freedom Foundation published The Case for Free Trade and Open Immigration or when FFF policy advisor Jim Board published his The Fair Trade Fraud in 1992. Thus, for us libertarians who have been supporting free trade for a very long time, this is a time of exultation and celebration, no matter what Trump decides to do 90 days from now or what he continues to do to the people of China and, of course, the United States.
It goes to show the power of ideas on liberty. When they enter into people’s hearts and minds, one never knows what the impact is going to be. That is precisely why we libertarians must continue pounding away with the principled case for liberty. If Americans can see the virtues of free trade, they can also see that libertarianism holds the key to resolving the chaos and crises that arise from other statist programs, such as immigration controls, the drug war, the welfare state, the warfare state, and the regulated/managed economy.
In making the case for free trade, most people naturally focus on the utilitarian case — that free trade improves people’s standard of living. That’s because when people trade, both sides benefit because they are both giving up something they value less for something they value more.
Much more important, however, is the moral case for free trade — the case for liberty. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, everyone, Americans and foreign citizens alike — has been endowed with the natural, God-given right of liberty. Freedom is not a privilege that comes from government. It preexists government. Government’s job is to protect this natural, God-given right, not destroy, control, regulate, or manage it.
Thus, people have the fundamental, natural, God-given right to do whatever they want with their own money. They have to right to spend it wherever they want, including by visiting Cuba, Iran, China, Russia, or wherever without fear of being criminally prosecuted by their own government for doing so. They have the right to use it to buy things from anyone anywhere in the world. They have the right to sell whatever they want to anyone in the world who is willing to buy it. This is partly what economic freedom is all about.
No government, including the U.S. government, wields the legitimate authority to control, manage, regulate, or destroy this fundamental, God-given right. To wield and exercise such illegitimate power is the essence of tyranny. As Jefferson also pointed out, whenever any government — any government — becomes destructive of the rights and liberties of the people, it is the right of the people to alter or even abolish that government and install new government whose purpose is the protection, not the destruction, of liberty.
