Trump's Tariffs on Canadian Imports Affect Border State GOP Candidates and Automakers
Tariffs, Trust, and the Abuse of Prerogative
When rulers wield trade weapons at whim, harm property on a vast scale, and mock their partners as subordinates, they cease to govern by consent and begin to rule by force.
I begin not with abstractions, but with a figure that ought to make any sober magistrate pause: the automakers in North America, we are told, have paid something like $110 billion in tariffs and related costs in eighteen months, owing to a tariff war between the United States and Canada. We are further told that the United States executive has imposed fifty percent duties on some $20 billion of Canadian imports, that negotiations broke down at the last hour, that threats of “far worse” measures followed, and that Canada now prepares retaliatory tariffs in return. This is not a mere squabble about prices. It is the deliberate infliction of great material harm by public power.
In the Second Treatise I defined political power, in paraphrase, as the right to make and enforce laws for the regulating and preserving of property—by which I meant lives, liberties, and estates—only for the public good. That definition is not a flourish; it is a rule of measurement. Where power plainly destroys property on a massive scale, disquiets industrious people, and endangers their means of subsistence, it bears a heavy burden to show how such damage serves a common good, and not some private passion, factional advantage, or national vanity. Until that is shown, we do not have law properly so called, but only force dressed in legislative clothing.
Men are by nature free, equal, and independent; no one is born with a saddle on his back, nor another booted and spurred to ride him. When I say this, I do not deny that nations may, by mutual consent, bind themselves in treaties, and that their magistrates may levy imposts and regulate commerce for the benefit of their people. I insist only that all such arrangements must be intelligible as things that free and equal persons could reasonably assent to, were they consulted. A sudden fifty percent duty laid on a friendly neighbour’s goods, after years of peaceful trade, with the avowed purpose of bringing him to “fall in line,” is, on its face, hard to square with that idea of consent.
The law of nature—reason itself—teaches, as I have written elsewhere, that no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions. When a government’s acts produce vast and predictable losses—running into tens of billions—for merchants, workmen, and consumers on both sides of a border, we must ask whether that harm is a necessary incident of some greater protection, or an instrument chosen for its own coercive power. No one doubts that trade may sometimes be restricted to prevent invasion, famine, or the like. But in the facts before me I see chiefly a quarrel, broken negotiations, and an open declaration that economic pain is a price others “know they’re going to have to” pay. To sacrifice many men’s estates in order to display one nation’s will is not to govern; it is to gamble with other men’s property.
Some will reply that the executive must enjoy a large prerogative in matters of trade and war; that emergencies do not wait upon the slow forms of ordinary legislation; that harsh measures may be needed to obtain better terms from abroad. I conceded in the Second Treatise that prerogative—power to act for the public good, without a rule, and sometimes against it—must exist where laws cannot foresee every case. Yet I added, and I stress now, that such prerogative is held on trust, and is tolerable only while it manifestly tends to the good of the people and remains revocable. When one man may, by stroke and threat, menace entire industries, derange old commercial friendships, and then defend his conduct only by his own assertion that it will all prove wise, he makes himself judge in his own case. That is the very essence of arbitrary power.
The manner in which power is exercised here is not a light circumstance. We hear of a closest trading partner publicly spoken of as a mere “subsidiary,” its chief magistrate repeatedly addressed not as the equal head of a sovereign people, but as a governor of some imagined province; we hear of personal insults flung at other public officers, as if the object were not persuasion between equals but humiliation of inferiors. These may seem but words; yet they reveal an understanding. Trade between nations is a compact between free communities, each composed of men who, as the workmanship of one Maker, have an original right to order their own affairs. Treating a neighbour as a vassal proclaims an intention to command, not to cooperate.
What then of Canada’s threatened retaliatory tariffs? If a neighbour begins to seize your goods on the highway, you may justly bar your gate and withhold your provisions from him, even at some loss to yourself, until he returns to terms of equity. I do not praise every particular measure these two governments may adopt; my information is too scant to weigh them in detail. I say only this: when one state uses its superior power to extract submission by economic torment, another state’s defensive use of like instruments is not the first wrong, but a response to usurpation. Where a long train of abuses shows that appeals to reason will not be heard, men are driven, in the end, to an appeal to heaven.
The great mischief here is not a single tariff schedule, but the breach of trust upon which all legitimate government, and all durable commerce, depends. When rulers learn that they may, without clear public justification, play at trade war, talk of allies as subordinates, and boast that others must “sacrifice” to their designs, they are tempted to forget that they, too, are under law—the law of nature, and such civil law as their people have consented to. To remember that even the mightiest nation stands, in the sight of God and reason, on equal moral footing with its smallest neighbour, would be the first step back from the brink.
From the works cited
- Second Treatise of Government — Political power defined narrowly as the right to make laws, with penalties, only for the public good — anything beyond that definition must justify itself or stand condemned.
- Second Treatise of Government — The law of nature as analytic baseline: perfect freedom and equality under the law of nature, so that government must be shown to improve on that baseline for everyone who leaves it.
- Second Treatise of Government — Prerogative as revocable emergency discretion — legitimate exactly as long as the public visibly benefits and no longer.