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US President Donald Trump
US President Donald Trump
I am a regular reader of your articles published on LewRockwell.com, and most of the time I agree with you. I consider myself a "conservative" Libertarian. That is, I believe in the capitalist and free market system, small government, less regulation and less government intrusion into our private lives -- the same as a classic Libertarian. Where I part ways with your thinking is over the issue of tariffs. Tariffs are anathema, of course, to classical Libertarians, because tariffs violate their commitment to "free trade." The problem with that position is that we don't have free trade. Our manufacturers are required by government regulation to pay a minimum wage, to provide medical coverage, to limit the work day to 8 hours, to provide a myriad of other costly benefits to workers, and to permit unions to extort even more costly benefits out of the hapless factory owner, all of which drive prices up. Then, if Libertarians have their way, these put upon factory owners are required to try to sell their goods in the ostensible "free market" in competition with, say, Chinese factory owners, who pay their workers $10 per day, provide no benefits and require their workers to work 12 hour shifts. That's not a "free market!" The only way to rectify this and bring manufacturing back to our shores is to impose a tariff so that it costs just as much to make a product in China as in the United States.
But that would result in higher prices, you might say. Yes, it would. But we've paid a terrible price for the "low prices" we find at Walmart. We've ruined our own
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