JUST AS SURELY AS SOCIALISM/PROGRESSIVISM, TRUMPISM/NATIONALISM IS THE WAR ON WEALTH:

With President Donald Trump soon departing Washington, now is a great time to assess his protectionist trade policies. From tariffs to his hectic bullying of other governments to renegotiate trade agreements to his support for American export subsidies, the Trump years were more than infuriating on trade matters; they were destructive.

This harsh conclusion is no surprise to those of us who understand international trade. We realized from the start that the president's trade philosophy is the mercantilist one that Adam Smith debunked nearly 250 years ago.

For instance, Trump believes that the success of U.S. trade policy is best gauged with a trade-balance scorecard -- the notion that trade deficits are bad and trade surpluses are good. For this reason, he believes that the ultimate benefit of trading lies in the amounts that we export, while imports are to be feared and kept to a minimum. But Trump's understanding is backward. After all, exports are what we produce for foreigners, while imports are what foreigners produce for us.

Early on in his administration, Trump raised tariffs. The Cato Institute's Scott Lincicome describes the president's trade war as having "implemented five different tariff actions on almost $400 billion in annual U.S. imports (as of 2018) under three different laws with different rationales: 'safeguards,' 'national security,' and 'unfair trade.' " We were promised ever-more jobs thanks to the tariffs. But as numerous academic studies have shown, the people who shouldered nearly all of the burden of these import taxes were not foreigners but, rather, Americans.

Protectionism reduces the overall wealth of the nation.

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