Professor Elam

Mr. Robinson: What do you make of the present president of the United States and his tariffs?

Thomas Sowell: It’s painful to see a ruinous decision from back in the 1920s being repeated.

Now, insofar as he’s using these tariffs to get very strategic things settled, he is satisfied with that. But if you set off a worldwide trade war, that has a devastating history.

Everybody loses because everybody follows suit. And all that happens is that you get a great reduction in international trade.

It’s disturbing in another sense. Franklin D. Roosevelt, when he was president in the 1930s, said that you have to try things. And if they don’t work, then you admit it, you abandon that, you go on to something else and you try that until you come across something that does work.

That’s not a bad approach if you are operating within a known system of rules. But if you are the one who’s making the rules, then all the other people have no idea what you’re going to do next. And that is a formula for having people hang on to their money until they figure out what you’re going to do.

And when a lot of people hang on to their money, you can get results such as you got during the Great Depression of the 1930s. So if this is just a set of short-run ploys for various objectives limited in time, fine, maybe.

But if this is going to be the policy for four long years, that you’re going to try this, you’re going to try that, you’re going to try something else, a lot of people are going to wait.