Renaming a Lake, Taxing a Neighbor, and Impoverishing Both

To order that Lake Ontario shall, for one nation’s official purposes, be called “Lake America” has the air of a jest, and indeed one provincial ruler has already likened it to a comedy sketch. Yet the jest is armed with an executive order, backed by a quarrel over trade, and echoed in similar renamings of the neighboring gulf. The maps in one country now show one name, the maps in another retain the old, and the rest of the world is invited to contemplate both at once. What might seem at first a piece of theatrical patriotism is thus transformed into a small but significant experiment in how to disunite what geography and commerce have joined together.

The lake in question lies between a state of the American union and the Canadian shore; its waters do not stop at the customs-house, and its fisheries, ports, and carriage of goods are plainly of common concern. When I wrote in The Wealth of Nations that the division of labour is limited by the extent of the market, I had chiefly in view humble manufactures and inland roads, not vast reservoirs of fresh water shared by two political communities. Yet the same principle holds: where men agree on the names, rules, and expectations that govern a space, they extend one another’s market; where they fall into rival nomenclatures and retaliatory tempers, they contract it. A lake with two sovereigns and one understanding is a source of opulence; a lake with two sovereigns and two competing stories is an invitation to endless and unprofitable parade.

The renaming would be of little moment if it stood alone, a mere vanity of ink and cartography. It is joined, however, to a trade war in which the American government has laid a fifty percent tariff on twenty billion dollars’ worth of Canadian goods, and the Canadian government promises to answer “dollar for dollar.” Here the comedy sharpens into tragedy. For the ministers who impose such duties can make a loud show of vigor at the frontier, while the real burden falls, slowly and silently, upon their own people at the shop door. The producer may, for a time, be sheltered; the consumer is, from the first day, sacrificed. The gross sum of the tax is paraded; the invisible diminution in the annual produce of the land and labour is neither calculated nor confessed.

In my own century, I described the doctrines which set one nation’s supposed gain against another’s as a species of mercantile prejudice, born from the importunities of traders who confound the wealth of the public with the balance of their own cash-books. Here I observe a similar spirit, though adorned in the language of wounded sovereignty rather than of trade accounts. We are told that one country has been “ripping off” another, as if all voluntary exchange between neighbors were a species of pillage, and that stronger measures will teach the offender a lesson. Yet in every such quarrel, the lesson is taught chiefly to the labouring poor, who find their wages buy less, their employers sell less, and their prospects shrink, while their rulers discover that tariffs and insults make an excellent accompaniment to electioneering speeches.

The renaming of the lake, and of the gulf besides, reveals the same pattern in miniature. The benefit is concentrated and theatrical: a few moments of patriotic fervour, some pleasing images of signs overturned and geese in military attire, much talk of never backing down from a bully. The costs are diffuse and prosaic: a little more suspicion between customs officers, a little more uncertainty for investors whose enterprises span both shores, a little more hesitation in every cross-border partnership that depends upon steady rules and calm tempers. When one cartographer feels obliged to print one name for one people, another for another, and both for the rest of mankind, we may be sure that the true map—of trust, of credit, of long-term projects—is being quietly redrawn in a less favorable hand.

From the point of view of moral judgment, which I attempted to describe in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the impartial spectator asks not what is applauded in the tavern, but what conduct would deserve esteem from a well-informed and disinterested observer. Would such a spectator find it praise-worthy that great nations, already linked by trade, language, and innumerable private friendships, should choose to quarrel over the label of a lake while loading one another’s goods with penal duties? Would he not judge that to guard one’s sovereignty is proper, but to stake that dignity upon a cartographical prank is to mistake the shadow for the substance? To be loved without being lovely is, as I long ago observed, of little worth; and to be cheered for acts that impoverish one’s own people is to incur a blame which praise cannot wash away.

The state has, in my view, serious and expensive duties: to defend the society from violence, to administer justice, to erect public works and institutions which, though profitable to the community, could never reward a private undertaker. To rename lakes and gulfs in a spirit of bravado, and to levy tariffs that invite equal retaliation, is no part of this necessary business. It is rather the pastime of the man of system who plays upon the great chess-board of human society, imagining that he may move whole nations, like pieces, into his chosen pattern of dominance and deference. He forgets that each piece has a principle of motion of its own, and that when governments treat neighbors as enemies for sport, the market contracts, the poor suffer, and the water between them grows wider than any map can show.