The Fog of Tariffs

Nothing About This Stupid Will Raise Workers' Incomes

No one can divine the logic of a man who has no idea how to competently run anything (reminder: he’s a spectacularly failed businessman, inheriting a real estate operation from daddy, saddling countless bond holders with the bill for his multiple bankruptcies and, as we know from the New York City trial, committing multiple felonies to hide accounting fraud).

This blithering foolishness about tariffs (hell, even The Wall Street Journal is upset!) does evoke the Fog of War—the unavoidable uncertainty when bullets start flying—but the chaos of on-again, off-again tariffs does give us our topic of the day: tariffs will not, magically, create good-paying jobs for millions of people who are in despair.

Let’s get into it first by going back in our time machine to the 1990s and the debate over the original North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Back then, the people who opposed NAFTA and tried to defeat it (your scribe here raises his hand) were often vilified as “protectionists” or p…