Is there a moral imperative in deciding how to approach tariffs and international trade? Is the higher calling to protect American employment and the communities upon which that employment supports? Or is it to encourage global free trade and employment worldwide, and hence cheaper goods?
Like many young college students raised in Pennsylvania, my friends and I worked in the steel mills in the summer to pay for college. I recall forging welding tanks at Taylor Wharton and pouring brass into pump molds for the US Navy at Ingersoll Rand. During school, we worked evenings in a local shirt factory.
My father (of blessed memory) spent his working life as a draftsman for Bethlehem Steel, calculating and ordering the steel used in a number of New York’s skyscrapers and the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. He told me that the company policy was that if he bought a foreign-made car, he would not be allowed to park on Bethlehem Steel property.
Public domain” src=”https://images.americanthinker.com/y4/y4e7qj7b3nxndaa65qss_640.jpg” />
Bethlehem Steel Works by Joseph Pennell (1857-1926). Painted in 1881. Public domain.
Those plants and factories no longer exist. Bethlehem Steel’s signature steel mill in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, is now the Steel Stacks casino. Most of the US steel we use is imported from China, albeit there is still some superior-grade steel made in the US.
When the shirt factory closed, I recall thinking, how is this okay, morally: a) that we are not taking care of our own people in our community, and b) that we’ve traded employment here for some 12-year-old girl in Asia to work basically as a slave so we can have cheap shirts? Some claim that the young girl is better off as a quasi-industrial urban slave than in rural poverty. Is that true?
More importantly, families in my community were losing manufacturing jobs that had been providing their basic financial underpinning. Free trade was not fair trade. It was for that reason that I was drawn to the Democrat party as a teen. The Republicans were free-trading globalists, stressing that in the end, free trade will lift everyone. I never understood how a Samuel Gompers (an early leader of the US union movement) was going to emerge in a third-world, dictator-led Asian country to organize the workers to seek livable wages.
Ironically, as we look at the picture today, the Democrats seem to have abandoned their core constituency, chasing woke issues instead of protecting American jobs. President Trump’s efforts via tariffs as a starting point in negotiations may help reverse a fifty-year dive in US manufacturing.
A number of economists are betting that the tariffs end up at 10% for most countries, with China somewhat higher. Time will tell. Some will say Trump is using a sledgehammer, and the better approach is for Congress to handle this more surgically. As a former Hill staffer, I can attest to the almost impossible effort that would entail. The lobbyists’ influence would almost certainly grind that process to a halt.
Today, many, if not most, major US businesses have reconfigured into a dependence on a worldwide supply chain, and new plants cannot be built overnight. New construction of US plants may take several years, as many have noted.
The short-term challenges for the US economy may not be insignificant. Business leaders thrive on certainty to plan for the future. The “tariff-leading-to-negotiation” approach and outcomes are uncertain. The challenge for today’s business leaders is certainly understandable and significant. Nevertheless, the long-term gain of increased manufacturing jobs for US workers and their families should be worth a period of short-term uncertainty.
Our moral imperative is to focus our energies in concentric circles: taking care of family first, then our community (geographic and religious), then our nation, and then the world. Tariffs may help us refocus on family, community, and nation first. Americans should all be joined together in this effort.
Gary Schiff is a natural resource consultant.
This article was originally published at www.americanthinker.com
