MAGA's Descent Into Socialism

Introduction

We live in unfortunate times. Donald Trump was elected as a "Peace and Prosperity" candidate, and only a few months into his presidency he has stoked the flames of war with Iran and implemented disastrous economic policies.

In a previous post, I already detailed the math behind why tariffs damage the nation that imposes them. The summary is that tariffs necessarily lower aggregate demand in the domestic economy, and thus are always recessionary.

Recently, many people have attempted to insert nuance into the tariff discussion, when none is merited. 2+2 equals 4. There isn't any reasonable debate, tariffs are terrible for the economy.

Facts About Tariffs

Here are a couple statistics to demonstrate how terrible tariffs actually are:

• In 2018, the Kent A. Clark Center for Global Markets asked economists of various political persuasions if, "new US tariffs on steel and aluminum will improve Americans' welfare." Weighted by each expert's confidence, 100% disagreed.
• Researchers examined 151 countries with tariffs across 50 years and found that "tariff increases are associated with an economically and statistically sizeable and persistent decline in output growth." Notably, the detrimental effects of tariffs increase the longer they are implemented:

Response to Rebuttals

• "You don't pay the tariff if you buy American!" This is of course, nonsense. In reality, nearly all imports are inputs in domestic industry, and "around half of everything imported into the United States is stuff used by other U.S. manufacturers." So, you will pay the tariff even if you buy American, and domestic prices will rise.
• "Trade deficits are bad!" Trade deficits are not bad. You have a trade deficit with your grocery store, barber, and dentist. And everyone understands that there is no problem with that. You buy their service because you value it at the price they're selling it. It is completely irrelevant whether or not they reciprocate a purchase from you. So long as you are selling a different specialized service to someone, you have your income. The United States had a trade surplus during the Great Depression, how did that work out?
• "If we produce everything domestically, all the money stays here!" It is astounding that people, Republicans, are making these inane arguments in 2025. First, the United States will never produce certain goods and services as efficiently as other countries. Please try growing coffee domestically and compare it to the cost of growing it internationally. Second, there are not enough people in the United States to efficiently produce everything. There is already a labor shortage in manufacturing, so where are the hundred million Americans going to appear from to produce every product we currently consume? Third, when you pay $5 for a pair of internationally produced socks instead of $100 for 100% domestically produced socks, you save $95 that can be spent on actually efficient domestic industries, such as software. Protectionism cripples economies.

Communists Hate Free-Trade

• Nikolai Bukharin was a Soviet communist who literally wrote The ABC of Communism. He was a staunch advocate for increasing tariffs.
• "The reply of the proletariat to the economic policy of finance capital, to imperialism, cannot be free trade, but socialism. The aim of proletarian policy cannot today be the ideal of restoring free competition -- which has now become a reactionary ideal -- but the complete elimination of competition by the abolition of capitalism." — Rudolf Hilferding (p. 84)
• "Indeed, what would the abolition of monopoly of foreign trade mean for the workers? For them it would mean abandonment of the industrialization of the country, cessation of the construction of new works and factories and of the expansion of the old works and factories. To them it would mean that the U.S.S.R. would be flooded with goods from capitalist countries, the destruction of our industry, because of its relative weakness; increase in unemployment, deterioration of the material conditions of the working class, and the weakening of their economic and political conditions. In the last analysis it would mean the strengthening of the Nepmen and the new bourgeoisie generally. Can the proletariat of the U.S.S.R. agree to committing suicide like this? Clearly it cannot." — Joseph Stalin
• "To sum up, what is free trade, what is free trade under the present condition of society? It is freedom of capital. When you have overthrown the few national barriers which still restrict the progress of capital, you will merely have given it complete freedom of action. So long as you let the relation of wage labor to capital exist, it does not matter how favorable the conditions under which the exchange of commodities takes place, there will always be a class which will exploit and a class which will be exploited." — Karl Marx
• "The sixth point is the embargo, that is, no trade with us. Is this advantageous or disadvantageous to us? I believe that the embargo benefits us a lot. We do not feel it [to be] disadvantageous at all. It will have tremendous beneficial impact on our [handling of] clothing, food, housing, and transportation, as well as on our reconstruction (including the production of steel and iron)." — Mao Zedong

It seems that MAGA would agree with all these communist sentiments on free-trade, and they echo the same talking points. MAGA, when you find yourself economically aligned with the regimes that caused the mass starvation of millions of people, perhaps it is time to look inward and admit your policies are wrong.