Steel tariffs need a re-think.

If tariffs on foreign steel companies are designed to raise the price of steel so domestic producers can stay in business, doesn’t that hurt domestic manufacturers who use steel in their production machines as well as hurting consumers who purchase products made of/with/by steel? Why would we hurt all of our own people to protect one industry?

On the flip side, everyone benefits from lower prices on steel. So, in essence, the Chinese government is subsidising the world’s consumers and manufacturers by subsidising their steel companies. Why should we demand they stop?

You might say the reason is that it is vital to maintain a domestic steel industry for national defence, and with that I would agree, but how much of that do we really need?

Furthermore, you might say that protecting our steel industry by hurting everyone else in our economy is a good idea because it guards against the Chinese cornering the market and then gouging us by spiking prices. To that I would say that our enterprises and labor market could rebuild from scratch the steel industry almost instantaneously. Think of how fast we rebuilt the arsenal of democracy in World War 2 without the advanced innovation and equipment we have now, and we did it with unskilled workers. Far more complex than steel plants are the plants which use the steel to make machines which make things out of steel. These aren’t going anywhere. They don’t really care where the steel comes from, they just want it cheaply.

(At some point I should mention that most of this argument is academic at best and ridiculous at worst because a handful of domestic steel companies still annually produce over seventy percent of our national steel consumption. Even people who advocate for the tariff assert, not without a lot of irony, that the suggested tariff is minuscule and would not be felt by either manufacturers or consumers, and would only save a couple thousand jobs at most.)

So if we step back from this just a little bit we can see that we are not only telling the Chinese to stop shooting themselves in the foot by subsidising their steel industry or else we too will shoot ourselves in the foot by applying a protectionist tariff, we are telling them to stop subsidising the American manufacturer and consumer or else we will punish the American consumer and manufacturer by placing a tax upon them and thereby raise the price of almost everything they buy.

Where is the sense in that? If this is a trade war, Trump’s tariff should be seen as treasonous because although it is not giving aid and comfort to the enemy, it is sabotaging our own economy.