People need to be careful when acting as if history started recently.
The US has had a number of protectionist regimes through its history, and many of them were far more potent than anything we're seeing out of Trump's Whitehouse.
In 1807, The Embargo Act effectively banned trade with Britain altogether. Considering that they were the biggest trader on earth at the time and the largest manufacturer, that would be like totally banning trade with China. This was done to pressure England and France to respect American neutrality during the Napoleonic wars. The embargos ultimately led to tensions which culminated in the war of 1812.
In 1828, very high tariffs between 45 and 50% were implemented to protect American manufacturing. This was called the "tariffs of abomination" and had major negative effects on the south, who relied both on European imports and exports, and faced reciprocal tariffs. The South eventually sought to nullify the tariffs in an early example of the tension between the north and the south which would ultimately lead to the civil war.
In 1832, those tariffs were dropped to about 35%. That was considered a compromise, but they were still considered quite high.
It wasn't until 1846 that tariffs dropped somewhat, and even then they weren't lower than Trump's across the board tariffs today.
Some of these embargo or tariff regimes did in fact have recessionary effects, and tariffs were the cause of some recessions not attributable to the debt cycle.
Reality is that tariff based protectionism is complicated. On one hand, global trade does tend to result in higher overall growth, so low tariffs are good in that regard. On the other hand, it can also result in markets that are somewhat exploitative and extractive -- if we extract materials such as metals or agricultural output and ship it elsewhere for value added processing, you almost end up with primary producers as colonial economies, only existing to enrich stockholders who are likely not even from this country (and in fact this practice of economies shipping out raw materials and shipping in finished goods has been called neocolonialism). It isn't a new idea -- Alexander Hamilton proposed a protectionist industrial policy in his Report on Manufactures as early as 1791, which recommended protectionist measures to protect against cheaper and more advanced British exports.
With tariffs being complicated, it's true that a lot of the instances above caused pain for Americans. The embargo act really hurt the US more than Europe. Industrial tariffs harmed the southern US and was likely one of the pressures behind the civil war, and the high tariffs in that period did absolutely cause a recession, as I've noted. However, it's also true that there were benefits for at least some Americans, with the US industrial base being reliant on early tariffs to compete with cheaper and more advanced British goods.
"Free trade" as a dogmatic mantra in the United States is relatively new in concept, and was practical in part because in the post-war period the United States dominated value added industries like manufacturing because most of the rest of the world had been bombed into dust in two world wars.
People who think Trump's protectionist tariffs make no sense simply don't know about a big chunk of America. If you replace a union factory with a strip mall, it's cold comfort to say "the global GDP went up. You should be happy." -- workers don't get paid in GDP, only the state does, and shareholders also benefit to an extent, but at the cost of local communities. Perhaps cotton is grown in America, processed in China, clothing is manufactured in Bangladesh, packaged in Singapore, then shipped back to the United States -- and that's fine for global GDP and share prices, but no local communities benefit.
Like it or not, extractive versions of free trade are considered neocolonialism, and even when it results in regions that are wealthy for a while, eventually it sends the wealth elsewhere and someone else capitalizes on that wealth. For an example, North America was focused on building value added industries early on, but South America was considerably more extractive. At first South America was considered wealthier since they were better capitalizing on natural resources, but today even a hollowed out America is still a more attractive place to live despite the fact that geographically, South America is still a place more suited to human florishing for the most part, given how much of the US is desert or swamp, and how much of South America is dense and green.
The bottom line here is that history didn't start in 1901, and there are a lot of examples of protectionist tariffs in the United States. Compared to those eras, the current tariffs by Donald Trump would even be considered relatively low. The post war situation of free trade between the United States and other countries was an aberration caused in part by extremely favorable conditions to the United States, but as the global economic system is normalized those assumptions may no longer be an important. That doesn't mean that tariffs are a entirely net good, or that they are entirely good for the entire country or entirely bad for the entire country, historically different economic blocs within the county had different opinions on the topic. All that being said, however, it should be obvious that the truth is more nuanced than protective tariffs simply being a stupid idea brought up by an idiot.
The US has had a number of protectionist regimes through its history, and many of them were far more potent than anything we're seeing out of Trump's Whitehouse.
In 1807, The Embargo Act effectively banned trade with Britain altogether. Considering that they were the biggest trader on earth at the time and the largest manufacturer, that would be like totally banning trade with China. This was done to pressure England and France to respect American neutrality during the Napoleonic wars. The embargos ultimately led to tensions which culminated in the war of 1812.
In 1828, very high tariffs between 45 and 50% were implemented to protect American manufacturing. This was called the "tariffs of abomination" and had major negative effects on the south, who relied both on European imports and exports, and faced reciprocal tariffs. The South eventually sought to nullify the tariffs in an early example of the tension between the north and the south which would ultimately lead to the civil war.
In 1832, those tariffs were dropped to about 35%. That was considered a compromise, but they were still considered quite high.
It wasn't until 1846 that tariffs dropped somewhat, and even then they weren't lower than Trump's across the board tariffs today.
Some of these embargo or tariff regimes did in fact have recessionary effects, and tariffs were the cause of some recessions not attributable to the debt cycle.
Reality is that tariff based protectionism is complicated. On one hand, global trade does tend to result in higher overall growth, so low tariffs are good in that regard. On the other hand, it can also result in markets that are somewhat exploitative and extractive -- if we extract materials such as metals or agricultural output and ship it elsewhere for value added processing, you almost end up with primary producers as colonial economies, only existing to enrich stockholders who are likely not even from this country (and in fact this practice of economies shipping out raw materials and shipping in finished goods has been called neocolonialism). It isn't a new idea -- Alexander Hamilton proposed a protectionist industrial policy in his Report on Manufactures as early as 1791, which recommended protectionist measures to protect against cheaper and more advanced British exports.
With tariffs being complicated, it's true that a lot of the instances above caused pain for Americans. The embargo act really hurt the US more than Europe. Industrial tariffs harmed the southern US and was likely one of the pressures behind the civil war, and the high tariffs in that period did absolutely cause a recession, as I've noted. However, it's also true that there were benefits for at least some Americans, with the US industrial base being reliant on early tariffs to compete with cheaper and more advanced British goods.
"Free trade" as a dogmatic mantra in the United States is relatively new in concept, and was practical in part because in the post-war period the United States dominated value added industries like manufacturing because most of the rest of the world had been bombed into dust in two world wars.
People who think Trump's protectionist tariffs make no sense simply don't know about a big chunk of America. If you replace a union factory with a strip mall, it's cold comfort to say "the global GDP went up. You should be happy." -- workers don't get paid in GDP, only the state does, and shareholders also benefit to an extent, but at the cost of local communities. Perhaps cotton is grown in America, processed in China, clothing is manufactured in Bangladesh, packaged in Singapore, then shipped back to the United States -- and that's fine for global GDP and share prices, but no local communities benefit.
Like it or not, extractive versions of free trade are considered neocolonialism, and even when it results in regions that are wealthy for a while, eventually it sends the wealth elsewhere and someone else capitalizes on that wealth. For an example, North America was focused on building value added industries early on, but South America was considerably more extractive. At first South America was considered wealthier since they were better capitalizing on natural resources, but today even a hollowed out America is still a more attractive place to live despite the fact that geographically, South America is still a place more suited to human florishing for the most part, given how much of the US is desert or swamp, and how much of South America is dense and green.
The bottom line here is that history didn't start in 1901, and there are a lot of examples of protectionist tariffs in the United States. Compared to those eras, the current tariffs by Donald Trump would even be considered relatively low. The post war situation of free trade between the United States and other countries was an aberration caused in part by extremely favorable conditions to the United States, but as the global economic system is normalized those assumptions may no longer be an important. That doesn't mean that tariffs are a entirely net good, or that they are entirely good for the entire country or entirely bad for the entire country, historically different economic blocs within the county had different opinions on the topic. All that being said, however, it should be obvious that the truth is more nuanced than protective tariffs simply being a stupid idea brought up by an idiot.
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