When we look back on 2025 in 2030, rest assured that we’ll have forgotten or moved beyond what had us so scared in 2025. While what will happen next week is nearly impossible to predict, it’s much easier to predict that in March of 2030 the U.S. will be exponentially more advanced and richer than it presently is.
Keep this in mind as Treasury secretary Scott Bessent talks about the importance of “leveling the playing field such that the international trading system begins to reward ingenuity, security, rule of law and stability – not wage suppression, currency manipulation, intellectual property theft – and draconian regulations.”
Rather than spend lots of time rebutting Bessent’s implied defense of tariffs, rather than saying trade by its very name is a leveling concept as both sides improve one another, and rather than spending time pointing out that the globalized division of labor between men, women, and machines is the surest, fastest path to ingenuity and soaring wages, it will simply be said that Bessent already knows the previously expressed truths to be true. He’s not just an economic historian, he’s also a macro trader of substantial renown such that he in no way requires lecturing about the powerful genius of free trade.
Despite this, the critical commentary continues. The great Don Boudreaux recently published at Café Hayek a post titled “Trump Is Hopelessly Confused On Trade,” while at RealClearMarkets (which I edit) Walter Block recently ran a piece titled “President Trump, Please Reconsider Your Views on Tariffs” in which he rather articulately took “the logical extension of tariffs” to their horrifying endpoint: “complete self-sufficiency down to the individual level” whereby “99% of the world’s population would surely and literally die.”
Strident commentary aside, it’s not an unreasonable bet that both Boudreaux and Block would agree that we’ll never come anywhere close to where Trump at least rhetorically wants to take us exactly because the “the logical extension” of autarky is so awful, and yes, lethal. Which is the point, or should be.
If Trump ever acted on or brought life to even a fraction of his rhetoric, readers can rest assured that stock markets more powerful than any nuclear weapon would correct in a fashion that would make 1929, 1987, and 2008 appear positively meek by comparison. And in concert with market signals smacking Trump back to reality, it’s no reach to speculate that if the “Trump tariffs” ever live up to the rhetoric backing them, Congress will rediscover its power over the purse and taxing power much more quickly than you can say stock-market crash.
How do we know this? Because as Block wrote last week, as Boudreaux has surely articulated, and as most reasonably wise people (including Bessent) know, “the logical extension” of tariffs is once again horrid self-sufficiency that would reveal its ugly self in the form of globalized death on a scale not yet experienced by humanity. Applying reality to Trump, watch what he does, not what he says.
Without defending tariffs or anything about them, those most bothered by Trump’s rhetoric borne of ignorance, gamesmanship, or a little of both would do best to simply turn the TV and WiFi off, all the while canceling newspaper subscriptions. Otherwise, much will be written and said about the allegedly terrifying present that will have little to do with the brilliant American future that awaits.
