Taxing American companies and consumers who use steel — which is what Trump’s steel tariffs do — is costly, economically illiterate, and on net a bad idea.
Amid all the arguments against protectionism, though, critics should acknowledge the complexity of the issue of free trade and domestic industry. That is, the economic arguments for free trade, while overall true, have a tendency to ignore human costs that don’t show up in a theoretical model, but do show up in real life.
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