While economists generally oppose trade restrictions, because they reduce efficiency and limit growth, they typically accept the following as legitimate reasons for them:
- NATIONAL SECURITY: You can’t expect nations to sell weapons, raw materials, and technology with military uses to countries which present an economic and military threat to them. Becoming dependent on technology from those countries is a bad idea, too.
- LEVERAGE: Tariffs have been used historically as a lever to open markets elsewhere, not as measures that are desirable in and of themselves.
- PROTECTION OF INFANT INDUSTRIES WITH GREAT POTENTIAL AGAINST UNFAIR, SOMETIMES SUBSIDIZED COMPETITION: This one speaks for itself.
- The Biden-Harris trade restrictions meet #1 and #3. The proposed Trump universal tariffs don’t meet any of them; they are intended either to revive dying industries from a bygone age or to create a slush fund of taxpayer money for Trump to use to turn his friends into wards of the state. That’s why they are so objectionable.