In 2020, government officials around the world shut down economies in the name of public health. Small businesses were closed, livelihoods destroyed, and personal freedoms suspended based on the belief that central planners were better at managing risk than citizens themselves. A minority rightly objected, warning not only of the flimsy rationale for suppressing commercial and social activity but also that concentrated power and coercion would do more harm than good.
And yet, today, some of those same people are cheering for a different kind of lockdown: protectionist trade policies. The justifications may differ, but the structure remains the same—top-down economic intervention, paternalistic rhetoric, and deep mistrust of free people making voluntary decisions in open markets.
The protectionist argument mirrors the logic of lockdowns. “We’re not against trade,” they claim in unison. “We just want fair trade that protects American jobs.” It’s no different than saying, “We’re not shutting down the economy; we’re just pausing it to save lives.” In both cases, the result is the same: coercive policies imposed on millions and unintended consequences as far as the eye can see—all rooted in the debunked idea that governments know better.
In 2002, President George W. Bush imposed tariffs on steel imports to “save” the domestic industry. The result? Nearly 200,000 jobs were lost in steel-using industries—more than the total number of workers in the steel mills the tariffs were intended to protect. Tariffs raise investment costs, burden small businesses, distort capital flows, and invite retaliation. They’re not “pro-American.” They’re anti-consumer, anti-market, and ultimately anti-prosperity.
Today’s advocates of tariffs claim to be defending national strength or reviving domestic manufacturing. But this eerily echoes the lockdown enforcers who insisted they were just buying time or protecting the vulnerable. What they were actually doing was sacrificing large swaths of the population to satisfy a theoretical model of centralized control.
F.A. Hayek warned us about this impulse: “The more the state ‘plans,’ the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.” Tariffs are planning. They are price distortions imposed by government that reduce our flexibility and constrain the decentralized problem-solving that makes markets resilient.
Markets, like societies, are not tidy. Factories open and close. Trade flows shift. But this dynamic nature is not a flaw—it’s a feature. Protectionists, like lockdown enforcers, fear the chaos of freedom more than the loss of control. They assume the system will collapse unless a politician or bureaucrat is at the wheel. In reality, the opposite is true: freedom is not the absence of structure; it is the presence of rules that emerge from voluntary cooperation, not state coercion.
Globalization is not perfect. There are dependencies and vulnerabilities. But just as the best defense against a virus wasn’t authoritarian lockdowns but individual judgment and innovation, the best response to trade challenges is adaptability and openness—not economic quarantine.
Tariffs, quotas, and other forms of protectionism don’t just target foreign producers; they punish every American family or business that depends on global inputs. They also empower lobbyists and politically connected industries while leaving small businesses behind. They erode our economic freedoms in the name of national interest, just as lockdowns eroded civil liberties in the name of public health.
And make no mistake: protectionism, like lockdowns and stay-at-home orders, creates a chain reaction. Once tariffs are introduced, they don’t just “protect” steel or chips. They spread. Industries learn to lobby. Politicians learn to promise. Soon, the invisible hand of bottom-up markets is shoved aside by the rising iron fist of top-down industrial policy.
Those who fought the lockdowns should recognize the pattern. Tariff-driven industrial policy is not a departure from the logic of command and control—it is its natural extension. The pandemic showed us what happens when officials believe they can freeze a complex system, redesign it, and restart it without loss. The same hubris drives today’s trade protectionists.
Freedom is indivisible. We cannot oppose coercive shutdowns in one context while supporting them in another. If you reject the idea that the government should decide who can open a barbershop or serve a meal in a restaurant, then you must also reject the idea that it should decide where an automaker buys steel or how balanced trade should be between American citizens and a foreign nation.
The era of the “journalistic flu” should have taught us that central planning is fragile and destructive. Tariffs, like lockdowns, are born of fear and enforced by force. They trade resilience for rigidity, prosperity for politics, and freedom for false security.
We’ve seen this movie before. Let’s not applaud the sequel.
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