The Optimum Tariff: The Idea Behind Trump’s Trade Strategy
For decades, American elites have spoken of free trade as though it were a moral commandment engraved in stone—unquestionable, sacred, eternal. Tariffs, they say, are relics of the past. Economic heresy. An automatic road to higher prices, shrinking output, and worldwide retaliation.
What they don’t tell you—what most of them don’t know—is that some of the most brilliant economists in history developed a theory proving exactly the opposite: under the right conditions, tariffs can make a country richer.
This idea goes by the name optimum tariff theory, and it has been around since long before modern economists started pretending free trade was a universal good. Long before Donald Trump ever uttered the word “tariff,”
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