The right to trade is a fundamental individual right. Through your efforts in your work, you quite literally spend your soul.
With your body and mind, you generate the income the hopefully free market delivers you. Trade is giving of yourself, in the pursuit of self-interest and survival, in exchange with another who’s giving of himself, for the same reason.
Trade even occurs in personal relationships, where the “exchange” (often subconscious) consists of personal attributes rather than goods and services, although typically we think of trade only in economic terms.
Whether you’re on Wall Street or in the most entry-level of jobs, you’re spending the products of your self-generated activity in exchange for the products of someone else’s self-generated activity. Your trading practices are sacred, profound and important. That’s precisely why government should leave them the hell alone.
Nobody has a right to step in and decide whether you may trade, or on what terms you may trade. It’s up to you, and the other person involved in the trade. It’s not an issue for the government at all — not unless or until there’s some evidence or proof of fraud, at which point you can appeal to a government body through due process of hopefully rational laws.
The government has no more right to interfere in your profoundly important choices to trade with a business, employer or customer than it has to interfere with your choice of friends, associations or whom to marry. If the government opened a Bureau to determine who our friends or spouses would be, we’d rightly decry it as some kind of Communism. Yet when government seeks to manipulate, control and “manage” every last aspect of our commercial and business affairs, most of us think nothing of it. Ridiculous!
In all the discussion over trade, we forget what trade is. We talk about it, as we talk about so many other things, as if trade is something we’re permitted to do, under certain conditions. That’s not how it is. We don’t operate at the consent of the government. Government operates at our consent — otherwise, we shut it down.
In this context, tariffs are obviously, hugely morally wrong. Tariffs are an attempt by third parties to dictate the terms we trade with others — through adding on costs designed to manipulate our behavior.
Donald Trump is the first President, at least in my lifetime, to explicitly put out there that there should be no tariffs at all. He’s right about that. I was delighted when he said this.
Some have said President Trump is a protectionist. They unfavorably contrast him — incredibly, to me — with people like Barack Obama, as if Barack Obama were a free trader. Whatever motivates Donald Trump to correctly say there should be no tariffs at all, you can be sure that Barack Obama was not motivated by free trade in anything he did. The man who told innovators and producers, “You didn’t build that” has no more moral respect for the products of man’s mind than a savage dictator. President Trump is correct that Obama was a weak negotiator. But Obama’s problem was not a lack of skill so much as a malicious intention. Ditto for so many others (dominant in both parties) who seek to follow in Obama’s footsteps.
Obama likes and agrees with the socialism so prevalent in nations likes Germany and, to a greater extent, China. China is a state-run pseudo-market economy. Germany and Britain are so socialistic they verge on the state-run. Obama wants America to become a mostly state-run economy too. That’s why he bent to their will as much as he did.
Obama didn’t care at all about the moral and political right of the individual to trade. Does Donald Trump? I don’t know all his motives and everything in his mind. But his strategies and end goals are a hell of a lot closer to the ideal of free trade for all than anything we have seen for quite awhile in the USA. For now, I’ll take it.
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