America has never been as capitalistic or as free trade as it has often been portrayed. From Andrew N. Smith at mises.org:
Rhetoric has recently trumped reality. It has become a misconceived bit of common “knowledge” that the United States of America is a bastion of free trade. Little could be further from the truth. The “freest” nation on earth, as we are taught to believe, imposes a staggering number of tariffs, import and export bans, sanctions and embargoes. Yet somehow “free trade” is blamed for the financial ills of the unemployed in the formerly industrial Midwest. Instead of taking a serious look at our existing trade policies, and maybe reducing some of the regulations, President Trump promised Midwesterners that their inefficient factor jobs that have been outsourced to the “right to work” south and overseas will be brought back by imposing new import taxes on specific companies. It is a naïve and ignorant notion that singling out countries and taxing the goods they import into the US will somehow help the unemployed while having absolutely no effect on the country’s general productivity and standard of living. Besides, we’ve already been doing that for far too long.
The US imposes tariffs on over 12,000 different goods and services. No that is not a typo — over 12,000. Some of these tariffs are so significantly prohibitive that they are effectively outright bans. Sugar, for example, is one product that Americans get gouged on, paying an average of $277 million more per year than they should. That is $277 million per year that would otherwise be used to consume other goods, invested in growing businesses, creating jobs, and raising real wages. This is nothing new. The original tariff was imposed as a “temporary” protection for US sugar farmers, that was more than 80 years ago. It has protected US sugar farmers, but has also decreased the productivity of the sugar farmers’ land. The laws of absolute and comparative advantage would dictate that the land on which sugar cane and sugar beets are grown and harvested should be used to produce goods in which these particular regions can more (cost and time) efficiently produce.
To continue reading: America Is Hardly a Bastion of Free Trade
STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC 
Reblogged this on The way I see things … and commented:
Before “heaping absurdity upon absurdity” as Bastiat put it in his famous essay The Petition of the Candlestick Makers maybe first we should take a look at the existing pile of absurdity that is US trade policy. To be clear, trade policies can carry many nuances. Tariffs don’t always necessarily only effect price, they could quite possibly effect profit margins of overseas corporations and create employment. They do always necessarily reduce prosperity. Even in the event that new jobs are created, they are likely to be less efficient jobs — either in cost, time or both — than their overseas counterparts. The best way to increase the number of jobs and the wages paid to those jobs is to increase the productivity of industry. First steps toward that should consist of tax reform, regulatory reduction, encouraging capital formation and accumulation, and repatriating the trillions of dollars stashed offshore as a result of high taxes and burdensome regulations. Imposing more tariffs on more goods and more countries will simply make America a less productive society. Instead we are far better off focusing on producing the goods and services that — as the law of comparative advantage dictates — we are most superior at producing.
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