Trade, tariffs, and how the world is less safe

The United States is getting ripped off. Or so the Trumpists from their Führer on down tell us. Other countries have high tariffs that protect their domestic industries, while we are expected to engage in free trade. Other countries enjoy a free ride in terms of security while the U.S. acts as a global police force. When we attempt to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, we are only adding burdens to our economic activity that China, et al., do not place on themselves.

And on and on. Somehow, the U.S.—one of the richest countries today and in human history, especially if considered in per capital terms—is an economic dupe, and the guy who ran how many casini into the ground is the only one who can restore our T (for Treasury) levels.

All of this is nonsense, of course, but the Trumpists depend on the fact that refuting them takes time and a bit of reading, a resource and a skill that are increasingly rare, thanks to the fact that more and more of our riches are being concentrated into the hands of the few, rather than being spent on education and the promotion of economic opportunity for the masses.

Take as an illustration of this the claim that I see regarding why we cannot afford universal healthcare. I am informed that the rest of the developed world can guarantee healthcare for their citizens because the U.S. spends our money to protect them with our military. This sounds correct, presuming that we do no investigation of the claim. After all, modern medicine is expensive, and there is only so much pie to divide.

Now if the Trumpists would like to arrange a deal with Denmark to exchange healthcare for residence under our nuclear umbrella, I promise to attempt not to laugh at their ignorance, but the facts are not on their side. What they claim would have some credibility if we were spending little to provide doctors and drugs for our people. If I have a thousand dollars in my checking account, I might want to buy a shiny new range toy, but I would have to pay for rent and groceries first, leaving me in the Hi-Point price range for entertainment.

But let us inquire after reality for a minute. The U.S. spends the most—in absolute terms, yes, but also by individual patient, i.e., per capita—to provide medical care to our people. And we get the worst care among the rich nations. We can argue endlessly about who around the globe are the fattest of them all or who smoke more heavily, but if we were to enact Medicare for All or some similar universal care system, we would spread the risk pool across a population of more than 330,000,000 and would remove the urge that providers and pharmaceutical companies feel to advertise and a good measure of the money spent on billing departments. The system that would benefit us all would also free up funds for buying other things—be those more fighter jets or schools, since many on the left are equally wrong in blaming military expenditures for our lack of universal care.

Regarding the web of trade and tariffs around the planet, we need to engage in similar contextual thinking. If Country A has protectionist tariffs on goods or services that go in, but expects us to take the same from them without barriers, that may sound unfair to the sort of toddler mentality that inhabits the executive branch these days, but I would ask the Trumpists to consider two points. First, who would fill similar jobs here in the U.S. and for what salary? Which is to say, as is being pointed out on social media, will doctors and accountants and astrophysicists be willing to make underwear and dig for lithium? How much would we have to pay them for a “yes” answer?

But more importantly, what will the people of Country A do after their current jobs go away? We may dream about a future in which robots do all the drudge work, while humans write poetry and investigate the stars, but to get there, we will need a lot more inventors and innovators, and lifting poor countries up the economic ladder increases the odds of getting there. If we crash their economies in some nineteenth century fantasy of factory jobs here, we will leave potentially billions of people around the world with nothing to do but employ Kalashnikov’s export product.

We may quibble about the scope and accuracy of the Golden Arches Theory, the claim of Thomas Friedman that no two nations with McDonald’s restaurants have gone to war with each other, but it is a good general observation that nations that both enjoy and can afford cheap and perhaps not-so-cheap consumer goods dislike it when their governments want to kill each other—at least if the people have enough freedom to express themselves on the subject. This is similar to the argument that I make to people whose children go to private schools, leaving them to wonder why they must pay for public education: If you like your stuff, it is best to have an educated population. This is by no means a perfect solution, but it greatly reduces the rate of street-level theft and associated violence. It is similar also to my personal pleasure in owning firearms, but in preferring to live somewhere that I do not have to use them as a quotidian practice. And then there is the question of how much we want to see a powerful German military, for example, sitting in the middle of Europe.

For all of these reasons, I have to say that no, we are not getting ripped off. We are in fact buying security on the cheap, and we could greatly lower that cost if we would increase the much disparaged aid money that we send to other nations—especially if those funds went to education and other development programs instead of providing more weapons to those countries.

An integrated world is a safer world, and what Trump is doing will only put us at greater risk.