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WHY ARE WE STILL DEBATING FREE(ER) TRADE?
The current brand of modern economic nationalism is willing to sacrifice overall prosperity for relative, and unlikely, global supremacy.
Dylan Oliver Malagrino
Preface
Recently, the current, U.S. Administration has imposed a series of new tariff policies quite different than the international trade regulations of the past. Historically, the United States has used tariffs as a transitory instrument to help emerging economies, or as a temporary punitive measure to prevent human rights violations. Modern tariffs are designed to be a carrot or stick. However, recent tariffs seem to have a different goal in mind: global supremacy. To respond, I felt a need to type up and annotate the notes I use to teach basic economic trade policy to the students, who enroll in my Antitrust and Trade Regulation course, so they can have somewhat of a rudimentary foundation to understand better the more complicated economics we eventually cover in the course. Here, I present those notes as an essay to show and caution that the current brand of modern economic nationalism is willing to sacrifice overall prosperity for relative, and unlikely, global supremacy.