Michael Lind:

In reality, the global trade system has already disintegrated, thanks precisely to the policy of appeasing Chinese mercantilism that The Economistadvocates. Electric vehicles (EVs) are the perfect example. Using tariffs, subsidies, and other tools of industrial policy, state-supported Chinese firms have exploited access to American innovations and now seek to flood the American market with underpriced exports. Other than the obnoxiously anonymous lead writers at The Economist and a few libertarian dead-enders, who really believes that China’s crushing of the American EV industry would be a “free market” outcome that enhances American prosperity?

The market utopianism that The Economist shares with—and helped teach to—the neoliberal establishment has collided headlong with the market realism that long governed the international economy and American trade policy, and is now returning to its rightful place. Realizing this, savvier defenders of neoliberal globalism are changing the subject from the alleged benefits of cheap imports to the argument that tariffs are “taxes on consumers” and “regressive” ones at that.

The attack on tariffs as regressive taxes unites two of the themes of early twenty-first-century neoliberalism.

The attack on tariffs as regressive taxes unites two of the themes of early twenty-first-century neoliberalism. One is the left-neoliberal dogma that each individual tax—not government policy or the economy as a whole—must be progressive in its effects. The other is the right-neoliberal dogma that deregulating trade and immigration to reduce wages for workers and thus reduce prices for consumers is the “efficient” and thus best policy, as long as the “winners” compensate the “losers”—preferably in the form of redistribution through the tax code.