Debate goes on over who suffers from U.S. tariffs. Biden and Trump, for example, think U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods hurt China, not Americans. This is nonsense. Even if they hurt Chinese producers (who can sell their goods elsewhere), the tariffs still hurt Americans. Whatever the Chinese do, prices in America for the relevant consumer and producer goods, imported and domestic, will rise—that’s the point of the tariff—and choice will shrink. Here’s what Henry George had to say in Protection or Free Trade:
If Americans did not want to buy foreign goods, foreign goods could not be sold here even if there were no tariff. The efficient cause of the trade which our tariff aims to prevent is the desire of Americans to buy foreign goods, not the desire of foreign producers to sell them…. It is not from foreigners that protection preserves and defends us; it is from ourselves.
He also wrote:
Free trade consists simply in letting people buy and sell as they want to buy and sell. It is protection that requires force, for it consists in preventing people from doing what they want to do. Protective tariffs are as much applications of force as are blockading squadrons, and their object is the same—to prevent trade. The difference between the two is that blockading squadrons are a means whereby nations seek to prevent their enemies from trading; protective tariffs are a means whereby nations attempt to prevent their own people from trading. What protection teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war. [Emphasis added.]
