By Alex Sarison
The American Founders, in their deliberations, did not stumble upon tariff authority by accident. The Constitution, in Article I, Section 8, grants Congress the power “to regulate commerce with foreign nations,” and this was not a ceremonial clause. For much of the 19th century, the federal government was funded largely by tariffs. Abraham Lincoln, an ardent Whig before he was a Republican, viewed tariffs as both moral and prudent—protective measures meant to ensure the dignity of American labor and the viability of American industry.
From the 1820s through the 1920s, the United States grew from a collection of frontier states into an industrial behemoth behind a wall of tariffs. This was not incidental. In 1861, Congress passed the Morrill Tariff, significantly raising import duties. The result was a boon to Northern manufacturing—an insulated economic sphere capable of producing locomotives, steel, textiles, and rifles, free from foreign price pressures. As Charles Beard observed, the rise of America’s internal industrial capacity was inseparable from its protective tariff regime.
The twentieth-century commitment to global tariff reduction, codified by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1947 and culminating in the 1995 creation of the World Trade Organization, was hailed as the triumph of liberal economic philosophy. But its costs were obscured by the celebratory rhetoric of comparative advantage. As the West dismantled its tariffs, capital became mobile, chasing returns wherever wages were lowest and environmental standards weakest. American towns emptied. Textiles left North Carolina for Guangdong; steel mills in Pennsylvania rusted as South Korean output soared.
This was not “creative destruction.” It was sanctioned abandonment. Washington, in its bipartisan embrace of globalization, ceded industrial sovereignty to a supply chain built atop cheap labor and foreign authoritarianism. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the U.S. lost more than 5 million manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2020. Median wages stagnated. The social consequencesaccumulated while coastal technocrats championed container ports and logistics platforms.
Global trade has also imported moral hazards. Cheap goods arrive not only wrapped in plastic but steeped in invisible costs. They are manufactured in provinces where rivers run black with chemical runoff, where industrial waste is dumped into waterways with impunity, and where energy is generated by burning low-grade coal. A cargo ship crossing the Pacific emits as much sulfur oxide as 50 million cars. Each bargain-priced hoodie or electronic gadget, produced in environmental anarchy, accumulates into planetary cost.
The human ledger is worse. Forced labor, child exploitation, and prison labor in Xinjiang persist behind the euphemism of “global sourcing.” The trade order, marketed as the handmaiden of progress, has become a system wherein moral distance facilitates moral evasion. American consumers, insulated from the sweatshop and the smokestack, buy low and look away.
In our scramble for stock market appreciation and quarterly profit growth, we have forgotten a fundamental truth: wages are higher in the United States not by accident, but because this nation demands more—clean air, safe working conditions, the right not to be exploited. Tariffs are not barriers to trade; they are boundaries of principle. They level the field against nations that recognize no floor beneath labor and no ceiling above pollution.
Trade policy cannot just be about consumerism and free markets—it must also be a reflection of values.
