Introduction
While the heyday of affirmative action hiring and admissions policies seems to be careening into the landfill of awful ideas where it most certainly belongs, the persistence of certain insane and unjust tendencies is remarkable. Just when the last fool’s gold is proven counterfeit, another shyster shows up and the sheep herd obediently toward his stall.
We’ve just been through several decades of official state-sanctioned racism and sexism, reducing people, citizens of these United States no less, to their sex, skin color, or nation of origin, perhaps most infamously illustrated by former President Biden’s vow to appoint a “female person of color” to the Supreme Court. He did not vow to appoint the most qualified person for the job, the wisest, most constitutionally astute person. No, he vowed to use a perverse prejudice, limiting and reducing his choice first to their sex and skin color, which incidentally (and somewhat ironically) gave us Ms. Ketanji Brown Jackson, who among other omens, was notoriously unable to define what a woman is during her confirmation hearings, protesting that she is not a biologist. And the senate dutifully bowed at that DEI altar and confirmed her.
Of course President Trump has done his own version of this on occasion celebrating the sheer number of female members of congress. But what, an astute observer might ask, has “femaleness” to do with it? To which many would find themselves in a similar position to Ms. Jackson. On the other hand, the new Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth seems to be on a Trump sanctioned rampage of the military, clearing out every vestige of wokeness, reestablishing a meritocracy based on actual, you know, fighting abilities. And while we might wish for an even more explicit repudiation of women in combat, his rhetoric and policies will surely go a long way toward that goal.
Laying out Some of the Parallels
Nevertheless, the virus of affirmative action is not yet entirely eradicated, particularly in the economic realm. Economically speaking, tariffs and protectionism are a sort of affirmative action applied to markets. Tariffs are taxes on imports, meant to punish or threaten the country of origin of those imports, but it is American consumers or businesses that will be forced to pay. To the extent that we’re just talking about “leveling the playing field” or “trade deficits,” that’s discriminatory affirmative action. It’s treating the free exchange of goods and services among humans as quotas based on (at least) nation of origin.
For example, if Trump slaps a tariff on coffee imports from Brazil and Columbia because he doesn’t like some of their economic policies toward the US, the immediate effect is that coffee shops in America that depend on coffee from Brazil and Columbia will pay more for their coffee beans, and you and me will end up paying even more for our afternoon caffeine hits. But that means that those coffee shops that don’t import from those countries now have a superficial advantage in the market. The tariffs discriminate like Affirmative Action in that sense, but they are also discriminating against Columbian and Brazilian coffee growers. Their governments may be corrupt or slimy, but the farmers are usually just trying to make a living. Tariffs treat individual businesses and business owners like they are part of some superficial “class” of enemy. And if you happen have to the good fortune to be living and growing coffee beans in Mexico, your beans are currently (according to GROK) blessed with tariff-free access to American markets. So while Biden’s Affirmative Action pick for the Supreme Court was admittedly a far greater travesty to justice, Trump is currently favoring Mexican coffee over Brazilian and Columbian. That is Affirmative Action in the marketplace: favoring and limiting products and services based on their country of origin.
Let me be clear: civil magistrates have full biblical authority to protect their nations from actual enemies and limit, penalize, or even ban trade where there are true security threats, egregious moral atrocities, unjust wars, terrorism, etc., but Trump’s team has not laid out any clear explanation for why Mexican coffee beans are currently the favored flavor.
I’m also willing to leave some room for the use of tariffs and protections as bargaining chips (with the ultimate goal of ending all tariffs), and I have perhaps a bit more patience than some of my free-trade friends to let Trump’s team throw some wild pitches before determining that he doesn’t know what he’s doing.
However, when it comes to trade policy in general. Many conservatives are being sucked into the affirmative action narrative through the backdoor of previous horrific economic policies. And the parallels between affirmative action and tariffs on this point really are quite striking.
We’ve Been Here Before
Progressives and fools of all stripes often create problems with their absurd policies and then pretend that the problem was not their previous policy but that they were not able to completely implement said absurd policy: we have just not given them enough money or power. Stupid political policies are known for their inability to work apart from vast amounts of theft and slavery. It’s like the ancient chieftain claiming he can walk through the air if only all of his subjects will let him walk on their backs.
Government schools and socialized medicine are among the chief illustrations of this tendency. We gave the government control (terrible idea), and then when they drove education into the ground, right on schedule, they asked for more money and more control – over and over again. “Now, we will make sure no child is left behind!” – after having driven decades of school buses off the cliffs of Darwinism and all its ugly fruit. And like Lucy with the football, certain Charlie Brown Republicans will be right at the front of the line championing giving more money to government education. Ditto letting government “fix” health care, health insurance, and provide for the poor and elderly. I always just think that’s like asking the DMV to take care of your grandmother.
But affirmative action was the government trying to “fix” social and economic disparities after having created those very disparities through social welfare policies for decades, while steadfastly refusing to address the actual root causes of poverty: the breakdown of marriage and family and religious virtue. Why did we need government programs ever expanding? Because the government insisted on “welfare,” promoting divorce, adultery, out of wedlock pregnancies, and abortion. And having often targeted minority communities with their sick and twisted “benevolence,” more was needed, and hence affirmative action was required to make businesses and colleges take the ‘products of their misconceptions.’ As Thomas Sowell has famously said, “The welfare state has done to black Americans what slavery couldn’t do….And that is to destroy the black family.”
Protectionism & Stockholm Syndrome
But a wholesale embrace of protectionism is like running back into the arms of your abuser. It is absolutely true that America has lost numerous jobs overseas, that the rust belt has deteriorated into opioids and despair, but the answer is not more government intervention. The government was one of the central players that did this. The answer is government deregulation. How did we get to this place? It was minimum wage laws, building codes, health codes, labor laws, rising income taxes, rising corporate taxes, rising property taxes, rising employment taxes, and then a few dump truck loads of green energy and environmental insanity. The government has been harrying and harassing employers and business owners for decades, making business in America like doing business in an Italian ghetto. There were no doubt any number of problems with NAFTA, but the main one was the government mafia’s involvement to begin with. The enemy of rural white America (and urban black America for that matter) is the biggest thug on the block: government bureaucrats and regulations. Just look at your paystub. How much got taken from you? And how much did your employer have to pay off the government mob boss to keep you on his payroll?
So when the government comes in and says it will now protect American jobs and American workers, pardon me, if I burst out in a belly laugh. If the government wants to help, they need to stop mugging us with confiscatory taxes and all the assault and battery via rules and regulations. To the extent that working class Americans trust tariffs and protectionism, we have Stockholm Syndrome, returning to our abuser for protection.
And just like affirmative action, tariffs pick and choose winners and losers, just economically. Instead of sex and color of skin, the focus is on country of origin. Where did you buy those clothes, that car, that computer? It’s so like an abuser to be this controlling. Having beaten you, they say they love you, and then in the very next breath tell you who your friends can be and where you can shop, or at least subtly manipulate you and threaten penalties if you don’t abide by their rules.
Conclusion
Having robbed the American people for decades via social security taxes, income taxes, gasoline taxes, sales taxes, inheritance taxes, property taxes, and labor laws and health and environmental codes, there is something incredibly insulting about telling American workers that the solution is just paying a little more for everything. Of course the promise is that after a bit more pain, manufacturing will return to America, but under what conditions? Under these same abusive conditions? That’s a bit like a slave master assuring the slaves that after a bit more pain, they won’t ever have to leave the plantation.
No, the solution is to stop beating the American worker. Stop abusing American businesses. Let Americans be free. Let employers and employees operate freely. Let Americans actually compete. If Americans were actually free to compete with China or India or Mexico, there would be certain things that other nations could do better and cheater, and if there were good reasons for Americans to have access to some goods in case of supply chain ruptures, Americans would see that and prepare for it. But if we were actually, free I have no doubt that we would be very competitive, like we used to be.
Of course with freedom comes responsibility, and if we were actually free, there would be all kinds of challenges and abuse of that freedom. But then the civil government could do what it is actually well-suited to do: punish criminals. At the same time, such a situation would demand the heavy involvement of the private sector: families and churches and private schools and Christian businessmen cultivating virtue and justice in communities and markets. Families and churches will no doubt fail at various points too, but haven’t we had enough of the solutions of big government?
Photo by Maksym Kaharlytskyi on Unsplash
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