You Can’t Outsource a Country
Turns out, importing everything has a downside.
Everyone loves to cosplay as a free-market purist until their job gets shipped overseas and their kid’s sippy cup comes with a side of lead. I’m here to say the quiet part loud: tariffs are good. Not in a “rah-rah nationalism” way, but in a “maybe gutting our own industries for cheaper blenders was a dumb idea” kind of way.
For decades, we’ve been worshipping at the altar of free trade while the altar’s been selling us out.
During the campaign, Donald Trump pointed how the world rips off U.S. with predatory tariffs. His call for “reciprocity” in trade is less a wild-eyed populist outburst and more a slap across the face of an elite consensus that had grown flabby, smug, and dangerously out of touch.
You don’t have to love Trump to recognize the moment. I don’t. It’s that unsettling feeling when the guy you normally dismiss as a carnival barker points to the burning building and says, “Hey, is that smoke?”—and you realize he’s not wrong.
Welcome to the unraveling of the Church of Unilateral Free Trade.
The Religion of Free Trade—and Its Apostasy
For decades, the U.S. economic establishment treated free trade as something akin to revealed truth.
It didn’t matter what other countries did—dump steel, subsidize EVs, steal IP—the U.S. was supposed to keep its markets open. Why? Because, said the models, we’d be richer for it. It was elegant. It was efficient. It was… spectacularly wrong.
The idea, popularized by Milton Friedman and cheered on by Paul Krugman et al., was that exports are a cost and imports a benefit. By that logic, we should aim for the maximum number of imports in exchange for the fewest possible exports. A nation of consumers, not producers. Never mind that this runs counter to what Adam Smith, David Ricardo, or even basic intuition would tell you.
Trade was supposed to be mutual exchange—“some part of the produce of our own industry” for theirs. But instead, we sent Treasury bonds and ownership of our companies abroad while they sent us flat-screen TVs and cheap solar panels. The dream was comparative advantage. The reality was deindustrialization and a trillion-dollar trade deficit.
From Theoretical Utopia to Strategic Disadvantage
It’s not just that the theory was wrong. It’s that it was dangerously wrong in a world where trade is not conducted among textbook actors but between nations with wildly divergent goals, systems, and ideologies.
Consider China. The consensus among elites was to welcome them into the WTO, open our markets, and assume capitalism would liberalize them.
Instead, we got a state-directed, mercantilist powerhouse whose entire trade regime is a weapon. If economics is war by other means, we brought a spreadsheet to a gunfight.
This is what Trump intuitively grasped and economists will only now, through gritted teeth, admit: Reciprocity matters. Because power matters. Because sovereignty matters. Because letting your industrial base atrophy while handing over strategic leverage to authoritarian rivals is not a clever optimization—it’s suicide.
The Weaponization of Balance Sheets
Trump’s rhetorical brilliance is not in his ability to out-argue economists, but in reducing their convoluted logic to a common-sense punchline: “Why are we the only country that plays fair?” This framing exposes the absurdity of the elite position—that it’s better to suffer unfair treatment for the sake of abstract efficiency than to fight for balanced trade.
And make no mistake, this isn’t just about tariffs. The core issue is the terms of global economic engagement. Tariffs are merely the lever by which to correct imbalances that are the result of regulatory games, subsidies, currency manipulation, and the weaponization of supply chains.
What Trump’s team is proposing—reciprocal tariffs, strategic retaliation, and even bloc-based trade alignment—is not crazy. It’s how every other major economy already thinks. The U.S. has been the sucker at the table for decades, addicted to cheap goods, while other nations play the long game of production, employment, and national strength.
The Collapse of the Expert Class
What’s truly stunning is not just the failure of free-trade ideology but the collapse of elite self-confidence. Krugman, once the intellectual Terminator of free-trade orthodoxy, now admits he was “naïve.”
The defense of the orthodoxy increasingly sounds like a cargo cult: “Just keep the ports open and the prosperity will come.” But the data, the politics, and the people say otherwise. Post-industrial communities hollowed out by globalization are not statistical errors—they’re the human cost of bad policy dressed up in good intentions.
Strategic Protectionism Isn’t a Sin—It’s Statecraft
Trump’s model isn’t about turning America into a fortress. It’s about ending the farce of unilateral trade disarmament. I hope that’s the end goal.
It’s about restoring leverage. It’s about saying that access to the U.S. market—a market everyone wants—comes with strings attached.
You want to sell here? Buy from us. Open your markets. Play fair. Otherwise, pay a toll.
Reciprocity as strategy, not dogma.
The reciprocal tariff model even has the benefit of geopolitical coherence.
It can lead to trade blocs—groups of allied nations committed to fair, balanced trade internally while walling off predatory, non-market economies. It’s the economic version of NATO for the 21st century: collective defense through coordinated commerce.
Free Trade vs. Smart Trade
The false dichotomy isn’t between free trade and protectionism. It’s between blind ideology and strategic realism.
Free trade, in theory, is beautiful. In practice, it assumes good faith from partners who long ago chose advantage over fairness. That model is collapsing not because of Trump, but because reality has rendered it obsolete. He’s merely the vessel for its public rejection.
The real question now is whether policymakers can craft a trade regime that retains the benefits of openness while restoring the balance of power to the nation-state. Trump’s call for reciprocity may not be perfect. It may even be messy. But it’s not wrong.
And in a world where the experts have been mostly wrong, that’s a pretty good place to start.
If Milton Friedman thought the goal was maximum imports and minimal exports, then the logical endpoint is this: America becomes the world’s customer service center—no factories, just call centers, debt, and thank-you notes. At some point, someone had to flip the script. Trump, in his bull-in-the-China-shop way, just did.
That’s the point.