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Mises Wire
Ryan McMaken
04/18/2024
During the 2016 and 2020 campaigns, Trump's opponents in the Democratic party (and elsewhere) often pointed out that Trump's protectionism hobbles private markets and the economy overall. Yet, the allegedly anti-protectionist Biden administration has done virtually nothing to end Trump's protectionists policies put in place from 2017 to 2020. The motivation is unclear, but it is possible that the Biden administration realized that protectionism is a useful political tool. These policies offer a way of punishing opponents, rewarding allies, and pandering to voters.
Now that it's election season, the pandering side of the equation is in full swing. Biden this week called for "sharply higher U.S. tariffs on Chinese metal products." Appropriately, Biden included this new spate of protectionism in what Reuters calls "a package of policies aimed at pleasing steelworkers in the swing state of Pennsylvania."
Biden's pandering will likely bear some fruit, politically speaking. Protectionism remains popular. But, as Henry Hazlitt put it, voter support for raising tariffs is "the result of looking only at the immediate effects of a single tariff rate on one group of producers, and forgetting the long-run effects both on consumers as a whole and on all other producers." Those who are incapable or unwilling to examine policies beyond their most short-term effects are easy targets for protectionist rhetoric.
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