He likes to tell people he’s a free market guy.
More than most members of Congress, Rep. Dave Brat, R-Va., knows what those words mean. He earned a Ph.D. in economics, did consulting work for the World Bank, and chaired the economics department at a little liberal arts college before congress — all of which makes apparent protectionist flirtations alarming.
But his justification for what some might describe as free market heresy is not tortured or convoluted. “For me,” Brat tells a recent meeting of the Washington Examiner editorial board, “there are two pieces: economics and geopolitics. It’s like chess.”
“You’re doing geopolitics and the first move on the board is a tariff,” Brat says. “Well economically, you’re going to have a loss.” Take the aluminum and steel tariffs. This White House may have saved some jobs production side but at a much larger cost on the fabrication side. Brat would say that loss is a pawn sacrifice, played in order to gain a greater advantage later on.
Some will disagree whether a pawn sacrifice is worthwhile. No one can accuse Brat of pretending that pawn sacrifices alone will win the game. He admits that tariffs don’t have a positive economic affect and since the beginning Brat has been urging caution to this administration. When Trump unveiled his tariffs, Brat quickly called on the president to adopt “a targeted approach” to achieve the desired affect without setting off a full-blown trade war.
The limited and targeted tariff is an equalizer in Brat’s mind. Backed up by the purchasing power of the world’s largest economy, they can convince other nations to reconsider their own trade barriers. It isn’t some mercantile fever dream about upsetting global trade. According to Brat, it is a means for restoring and conserving “the whole post-war liberal economic order.”
The United States has a right to meddle in world markets, Brat argues. After all, we built them, we sustain them, and we ought to have some more control over how they work.
“We set up Bretton Woods,” Brat says of the monetary management established by the United States while Europe and the rest of the world was rebuilding after the Second World War. “We propped up our arch enemies — Germany and Japan. We set up the IMF, U.N., World Bank, and we paid for it. We still pay disproportionately for all of it.”
It was going so well, then “along comes China into this nice liberal order where everyone’s gotten rich and they don’t know what win-win means.” Double dealing and unfair trade in the East disadvantaged the West, he said. “Now we are trying to repair some of that and say ‘hey the American people are kind of sick of this stuff.’ We’ve paid the piper in all sorts of ways. It’s time to do a little geopolitical chess.”
And that’s how a free-market guy like Brat justifies the tariff.
