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The Rightful Caliph has blogged over at ACX that The Populist Right Must Own Tariffs.
He is arguing that while tariffs are an "idiosyncratic obsession of Trump’s" which are not a load-bearing part of the MAGA platform, the fact that he can push through them is a consequence of his cult of personality and him being surrounded by yes-men who will not risk his anger by telling him an idea of his is terrible. So the tariffs in particular point to a broader failure mode of right-wing populism, which he contrasts with the ideological capture of institutions by the left.
He is then saying that he prefers to salvage institutions captured by the left to Trump's approach of starting without institutional knowledge and just see how things go.
As usually, this is compellingly written. It did not make me update a lot on Scott's politics -- he had explicitly endorsed anyone-but-Trump for the presidential election, and extrapolating that he would not be a fan of the tariffs was not exactly hard. I like how Scott took this issue which has been discussed to the death on the object level, then took a step back and asked "but what is the deeper truth about that political system beyond the object level stupidity?"
As usual for Scott blogs about CW-adjacent topic, there is a lot of discussion going on at ACX.
Scott is a Democrat partisan now. He used to have useful insights, but then they got him, first by attacking his reputation, and then his Californian social circle has naturally limited the scope of acceptable opinions that he can hold. Of course he prefers to salvage institutions captured by the left. All of his friends live there.
At what point of his ideological history would you have expected him to go "actually, tariffs are great and Trump is great for trying to do tariffs"?
Tariffs used to be a pretty standard left-liberal policy position, Paul Krugman literally got the (not)Nobel Prize for arguing for them. The only coherent objection to what Trump is doing from that perspective is "his goals are good, but he's doing it wrong", which a few principled left-wingers are doing.
Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize for the New Economic Geography, which includes an agglomeration model where industrial policy can have a long-term benefit even if markets are efficient. And that industrial policy could use targeted tariffs as a tool. But Krugman the political commentator has consistently said (ever since he became a Famous Economist whose political views are taken seriously - not just since Trump started supporting tariffs) that he doesn't think that countries at the technological frontier can make industrial policy work in practice. He supported NAFTA and the WTO when those were live political issues.
Krugman the economics populariser put a lot of effort into debunking the macroeconomic case for broad-based tariffs. About a third of his Slate columns were attacking the idea that imports destroy jobs. And he said things about current and capital account imbalances (the two are opposite sides of the same accounting identity) are broadly that bilateral imbalances are harmless, and that overall imbalances can be good or bad, are always dangerous, and that the right tool to control them is capital controls and not tariffs.
It is hard to distinguish between "the Trump tariffs are implementing a bad policy" and "the Trump tariffs implementing a questionable policy incompetently" because Trump is deliberately opaque about what the policy the tariffs are implementing actually is. (For the umpteenth time, tariffs are a tool, not a policy). My personal guess is that there isn't a policy at all, just vibes. But the arguments Navarro is making for the tariffs are macroeconomic, and the details of the tariffs we got are consistent with the goal being macroeconomic rather than industrial policy. So Krugman opposing these tariffs is entirely consistent with what he has been saying since the 1990's.
Paul Krugman, the famous economist whose views are taken seriously, is the guy writing academic papers. Paul Krugman, the economics popularizer whose political views are Taken Seriously, is possibly the biggest hack who ever existed in the history of punditry, so to the extent the distinction is worth making, it works against your argument.
If tariffs are a tool not a policy, then the absence of "Trump tariffs are implementing a good policy incompetently" as a possibility should show you that the argument is not being made in good faith. There are principled leftwingers who do make that argument, they point out why the trade policy done up to now was bad for America / the world, why you might want to change it, and why tariffs can be the right tool for the job, and then proceed to show why the way Trump is doing it is bad. But implying that tariffs are somehow ideologically incompatible with left liberalism is just historically wrong.
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the claim that capital controls are ok for dealing with imbalances but tariffs are bad seems questionable. if they both end up making changes in trade to change the imbalance then it would seem both would have the same deadweight losses associated them. i can understand that maybe capital controls have some large side benefit that tariffs do not which would offset the deadweight loss from the change in trade. for example God could come down from heaven and because he supports capital controls he could dump container loads of semi-conductor chips into the US like mana from heaven. this would be a massive benefit that would not normally appear if you implemented tariffs. but i strongly suspect there are no special large benefits from capital controls that would offset the same deadweight loss tariffs also suffer from.
the classical argument against tariffs is the change in trade they produce is bad. so if you find some technique that produces the same change then it just seems like you have come up with some abstraction to try and hide that you are doing the bad thing. tariffs would be a great tax if they did not produce a change in trade.
I endorse Steve Waldman's argument on these points (split across multiple blog posts dated April 2025), which is broadly the same as Krugman's. The tl;dr is that tariffs discourage balanced trade as well as imbalanced trade - in a world where everyone agrees that the rules of the game are the deficit countries increase tariffs and surplus countries reduce them to restore balance, there are a bunch of tariffs and therefore less trade than there would be otherwise, making the world poorer for the usual Ricardian reasons*. Whereas achieving balance with capital controls allows balanced trade while discouraging balanced investment. And balanced foreign investment** is not obviously good in the way that balanced trade is - there is a reason why "absentee landlord" is a slur.
*Countries may be able to better than free trade with enforced balance if they adopt targetted tariffs as part of an effective industrial policy - this is an argument against broad-based tariffs as a macroeconomic policy.
** I disagree with Waldman on the desirability of foreign direct investment - I think a world where BMW opens car factories in America and Intel opens chip fabs in Germany is better for it because of the resulting knowledge-sharing. I am more sympathetic to the argument that it would be better if there was less foreign portfolio investment - if I buy Tesla stock from the UK and you buy
AstraZeneca stock from the US it arguably weakens both countries' asabbiyah for a trivial benefit to our portfolios' diversification.
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