Free Trade - A very short Quick Hit

It's not rocket science

Mar 10, 2025

Share this with your friends. We need to educate America…and the world.

I have said repeatedly that to understand economics, read Sowell, Smith or Hazlitt. Hazlitt is the easiest and most concise. In his book Economics In One Lesson, Chapter 11, Hazlitt lays out the case against tariffs.

Here’s how free trade works. If you want my shit, you don’t tariff it. If I want yours, I don’t tariff it. If you lay on tariffs, we don’t sell ANYTHING to you and you don’t sell ANYTHING here. THAT’S FREE TRADE.

And yes, for a few months we would hurt our bottom line - and theirs. Then we all start trading again.

I kind of…sort of…get the idea of tariffs as a threat to get people to the table. But it is a self-defeating action if you carry out the threat. Tariffs ONLY help the governing class and their cronies. They NEVER help YOU. And tariff WARS hurt everybody. There are never any winners.

Tariff wars are the economic equivalent of Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. When the smoke clears we are back to exactly where we were, or worse, than before the nonsense started.

The world still needs our coal, oil, food and countless other quality goods. New rule, drop all tariffs or you don’t trade with the US, in either direction. We only pay tariffs right now because our government has been stupid and weak on the issue. The answer to the problem is truly free trade. Tariff wars are just more stupidity.

But watch out sugar industry, EV’s, Big Oil, and many other sectors. Because once we settle the tariff lunacy, we smash subsidies. All of them! Theirs and ours! Of course all the above assumes we have a brain cell and a gonad in all of Washington DC. I am not sanguine.