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| Murray Rothbard |
Tariffs and various forms of import quotas prohibit, partially or totally, geographical competition for various products. Domestic firms are granted a quasi monopoly and, generally, a monopoly price. Tariffs injure the consumers within the “protected” area, who are prevented from purchasing from more efficient competitors at a lower price. They also injure the more efficient foreign firms and the consumers of all areas, who are deprived of the advantages of geographic specialization. In a free market, the best resources will tend to be allocated to their most value-productive locations. Blocking interregional trade will force factors to obtain lower remuneration at less efficient and less value-productive tasks...
The arguments for tariffs have one thing in common: they all attempt to prove that the consumers of the protected area are not exploited by the tariff. These attempts are all in vain. There are many arguments. Typical are worries about the continuance of an “unfavorable balance of trade.” But every individual decides on his purchases and therefore determines whether his balance should be “favorable” or “unfavorable”; “unfavorable” is a misleading term because any purchase is the action most favorable for the individual at the time. The same is therefore true for the consolidated balance of a region or a country. There can be no “unfavorable” balance of trade from a region unless the traders so will it, either by selling their gold reserve, or by borrowing from others (the loans being voluntarily granted by creditors).
The absurdity of the protariff arguments can be seen when we carry the idea of a tariff to its logical conclusion—let us say, the case of two individuals, Jones and Smith. This is a valid use of the reductio ad absurdumbecause the same qualitative effects take place when a tariff is levied on a whole nation as when it is levied on one or two people; the difference is merely one of degree.25 Suppose that Jones has a farm, “Jones’ Acres,” and Smith works for him. Having become steeped in protariff ideas, Jones exhorts Smith to “buy Jones’ Acres.” “Keep the money in Jones’ Acres,” “don't be exploited by the flood of products from the cheap labor of foreigners outside Jones’ Acres,” and similar maxims become the watchword of the two men. To make sure that their aim is accomplished, Jones levies a 1,000-percent tariff on the imports of all goods and services from “abroad,” i.e., from outside the farm. As a result, Jones and Smith see their leisure, or “problems of unemployment,” disappear as they work from dawn to dusk trying to eke out the production of all the goods they desire. Many they cannot raise at all; others they can, given centuries of effort. It is true that they reap the promise of the protectionists: “self-sufficiency,” although the “sufficiency” is bare subsistence instead of a comfortable standard of living. Money is “kept at home,” and they can pay each other very high nominal wages and prices, but the men find that the real value of their wages, in terms of goods, plummets drastically.
Truly we are now back in the situation of the isolated or barter economies of Crusoe and Friday. And that is effectively what the tariff principle amounts to. This principle is an attack on the market, and its logical goal is the self-sufficiency of individual producers; it is a goal that, if realized, would spell poverty for all, and death for most, of the present world population. It would be a regression from civilization to barbarism.
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