I want to talk about tariffs. If you know, everybody’s noticed the hysteria that happened the last five or six days, that Donald Trump is going to, haphazardly in shotgun fashion, level asymmetrical tariffs, or blanket tariffs. The stock market panic.
But my question to all of us is, “Were they tariffs at all?” Traditionally, a tariff, remember, is a policy that a government uses to prop up an anemic industry, at least an industry that can’t compete globally or versus—vis-à-vis a trading partner. And traditional economists say this is terrible because what happens is that if you don’t have free global trade, then the consumer is paying more for a product that is inefficient because it’s shielded from competition.
But is Donald Trump really doing that? Is he saying our tobacco industry or our shoe industry is weak and I have to prop it up? He’s not really….
