THE COLUMN: Tariffs Aren't the Issue

All the fuss and geschrei over Donald Trump's Great Tariff War really is much ado about nothing -- but it's also about everything.

To begin, what it's not about is tariffs. What it is about is repatriating American manufacturing and thereby restoring Great Power status to the U.S.A. Tariffs are merely the mechanism by which to get the ball rolling. Adam Smith's hidden hand is about to come roaring back into play.

The naysaying Left -- which never met a tax hike it didn't love -- has jumped on tariffs as a "tax," which of course they are. A tax on foreign-made goods coming into the country. A tax that -- unlike most taxes -- you can avoid by not buying the product. The U.S. managed to get along perfectly well from the presidencies of George Washington to that of William Howard Taft (a "progressive," along with Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson) financed by tariffs and excise taxes, with only occasional, and temporary, taxes on income.

It was not until the passage of the 16th amendment in 1913, during the Wilson administration -- the first of the "progressive era" amendments that also included the 17th, 18th, and 19th, all of which need to be repealed; one down three to go -- that the notion of taxing labor, previously and correctly deemed unconstitutional, reared its inhuman, statist head. And practically from that day on, America plunged into a debt spiral from which it has never recovered.

What has happened since the U.S. abandoned its prior reliance on excise duties and tariffs, which served the nation well for the first 140 years of its existence, is that the Congress, with the now-infinite resources of the American taxpayer and the Treasury's printing presses, has entirely abandoned all fiscal propriety—the inevitable consequences of an income, as opposed to a tax on goods and services.

Diabolically, the "progressive" Left has long pitched "progressive" income taxes as an act of enforced Christian charity, even though few of them are Christians, either of the professed or practicing variety. The income tax instead has proven to be a mechanism by which the wealthy—especially those benefitting from generational wealth, and thus have no "earned" income to report to the IRS—continue to thrive while the middle class, which has its money sucked out of its pocket via "withholding" (1943-), can never accumulate enough to move up. The truth is simple: when you have an income tax, you also get massive, snowballing debt.

The course correction from a "service" economy to a real economy is long overdue. There's a reason that the Rust Belt has been called into being, why Detroit went from America's richest and most residentially beautiful city in the country to a dysfunctional ruin. There's a reason why the U.S. Navy has sunk from being a formidable two-ocean fighting force to the most "woke" of the armed services, one that can't keep its ships under DEI captains from crashing into one another and can't replace the rusting hulks still in service. There's a reason why our infrastructure is collapsing, why Boeing has plunged from the gold standard to the dross of the airplane-manufacturing business, whey you can't get parts for anything but you can get fries with that, and a robot voice on the phone when you call to "customer service" to complain.

Read it and weep.

Listening to the siren song of twaddle by the "environmentalists," seduced by the lure of money for nothing peddled by Wall Street, educated for several generations now by Marxist college professors, assured that "green jobs" would somehow miraculously appear despite the utter absence of any evidence for their existence, imprisoned in their own homes for several years by an audacious and inimical hoax weaponized by the laptop classes to exploit a nasty but hardly apocalyptic man-made virus from China with an assist from elements in the U.S. medical establishment, America has taken a metaphorical and physical beating.

Which would you prefer: plastic junk from China under "free trade" or helping your neighbor down the street to keep his job by buying American? This is Trump's whole point. Wall Street is not America.

Under the relentless battery of the Frankfurt School communists and their dogma of Critical Theory, up became down, white became black, and the highest form of patriotism became first "dissent," and then, in its end-state, outright treason. Since at least the Clinton administration, the top levels of the American political establishment have become dominated by Ivy Leaguers who move easily from journalism to government and back again in a revolving door of ideological group-think. It's no coincidence that Columbia University, the home to the malevolent refugees from Hitler in the 1930s, has become synonymous with the collapse of higher education.

It was easier and cheaper to "outsource" industries both grimy and pharmaceutical to foreigners, some of whom bear us manifest ill will. Globalism -- a suicide cult for any nation-state -- demanded it. The fact that no Great Power in western history has not also been a manufacturing power (think Great Britain, Germany) was either lost on them or deliberately obscured by the "environmentalist" watermelons -- green on the outside, red on the inside.

After the Battle of the Coral Sea, the damaged Yorktown limped back to Honolulu, apparently out of commission for weeks. Admiral Chester Nimitz, the architect of American victory over Japan in the Pacific, ordered her back into action in time for the Battle of Midway a month later; she was repaired in 72 hours, but was sunk during the critical battle of the Pacific War. Just six months after Pearl Harbor, American manufacturing had turned the tide in the Pacific. And yet, in a trice, we went from makers to takers, instituting a well-intentioned post-World War II international tariff system to take root in order to help our defeated enemies, Germany and Japan, to get back on their feet by restoring their manufacturing sector, but one we and they no longer need.

The election of 2020, with all of its miraculous anomalies, may thus prove liberating for President Trump in his second term. Most re-elected presidents become instant lame ducks, but the interregnum, along with the catastrophic failure of the "Biden" administration and the Wizard-of-Oz reveal of the mendacious media, has liberated him. He doesn't have to care about re-election; he has a successor in place in J.D. Vance who will still have to earn the nomination in 2028; he can finally ignore the media, whose approval -- his Achilles heel -- he no longer needs. Even the beta-male and girl-powered Supreme Court under John Roberts seems to be coming around to the notion that some things are not justiciable and are best left to the American people via their elected representatives in Congress and the Executive.

Behold Trump Agonistes. Talk loudly and carry a big stick. Crush the lawfare and self-interested law firms that have profited from it. Ignore the corrupt media. Make, not take. And watch the world fall into line. Leadership is a wonderful thing.