YES, THAT'S GOING TO WIN OVER THOSE NIKKI HALEY VOTERS.

In the continuing Republican primaries, it appears as though she has become the protest candidate of choice.  I'll let psephologists come up with explanations (crossover Democrats? security moms? fed up?) for those votes.

Donald Trump seems content to campaign, and win, without any special appeal to Haley voters, whilst Joe Biden gives lip service to having their votes.  Then he issues a ukase imposing prohibitive tariffs on electric cars from China.  Reason's Eric Boehm sums it up.  "Bad for consumers, bad for American industry, bad for his administration's own environmental goals, and bad for an increasingly irrational executive branch."

Four years ago, Donald Trump was the trade warrior.

When he was campaigning four years ago, Joe Biden offered voters an alternative to the flawed protectionism and expensive tariffs of the Trump administration. "We're going after China in the wrong way," he said at one point during that successful run at the White House. On other occasions, he (correctly) highlighted how Americans were bearing the brunt of then-President Donald Trump's tariffs, a sentiment that reflected his long history of pro-trade views.

With the prospect of a rematch against Trump looming in November, the Biden administration announced Tuesday that voters won't be getting that choice this time around.

After days of speculation and leaks, the White House officially ordered massive new tariffs against Chinese-made electric vehicles (E.V.s), semiconductors, port equipment, and medical gear, including syringes and rubber gloves. In other words, Biden is now actively pursuing an agenda that he once termed "the wrong way" to counter China.

Today, though, it's an echo, not a choice.

When voters go to the polls this November, they will face a choice between two men who have used their presidential powers to hike import taxes on American businesses and consumers (one of whom is campaigning on a promise to use tariffs even more aggressively in the future). Now would be a good time for Congress to claw back some of the trade policy power it has delegated to an increasingly irrational executive branch.

What, though, does the latest ukase do to win over Haley voters?  One candidate is imposing prohibitive tariffs while unelected bureaucrats carrying out his intentions are doing everything they can to make it more difficult to purchase an internal combustion automobile.  "Grievances include claims that the executive branch is unconstitutionally manipulating the marketplace by setting requirements higher than manufacturers can adhere to, effectively mandating sales of electric vehicles that have been broadly unpopular in the United States."  Make those mandated sales at higher prices from manufacturers not located in China.  Watch the Jarrett regency slag on those manufacturers for price gouging or some other invented offense.  It's hard not to look at these policies and conclude that the deprivation is the point.

The other candidate doesn't object, in principle, to tariffs on Chinese products, or on products assembled in Mexico with Chinese parts.  But he has no objections to continued oil development, or to continued production and sale of internal combustion cars, or, for that matter, to the continued production and sale of free-flowing shower heads and washing machines that get the clothes clean.  Along that margin of choice, the Haley voter might be a Trump voter.  Moreover, a restoration of Congressional review of those unelected bureaucrats might be desirable.

Total government integration into any industry is technically a form of totalitarianism in the eyes of the law. Historically, the concern was that undermining the free market would lead to economic catastrophe and that political leaders had no business managing the private businesses. However, the Clean Air Act and decades of increased regulatory involvement has kind of muddied the waters. What was once considered taboo has arguably become fairly commonplace, or at least tolerated in plenty of federal courtrooms.

The president's argument for the tariffs reads like Received Wisdom from Robert Kuttner or Ira Magaziner, back when the pundits first started lamenting about the Rust Belt.

American workers are — can outwork and outcompete anyone, as long as the competition is fair.  But for too long, it hasn’t been fair.

For years, the Chinese government has poured state money into Chinese companies across a whole range of industries: steel and aluminum, semiconductors, electric vehicles, solar panels — the industries of the future — and even critical health equipment, like gloves and masks.

China heavily subsidized all these products, pushing Chinese companies to produce far more than the rest of the world can absorb.  And then dumping the excess products onto the market at unfairly low prices, driving other manufacturers around the world out of business.

You know, we — I won’t go into it, but we were talking about today about how many aluminum plants there used to be and how many there are now.

The prices are unfairly low because Chinese companies don’t need to worry about a profit because the Chinese government subsidized them and subsidized them heavily.

Figures, doesn't it, that somebody who believes printing money produces a strong economy fears that the Chinese printing money will work out for them.  I'm not persuaded.  "I'm skeptical of second-best arguments that use other countries' distortionary subsidies as arguments for offsetting subsidies or taxes in the United States. If other countries are prepared to tear up their economies to make some U.S. citizens better off it's probably better to let it happen."  That post went on to argue "The same argument applies to Chinese subsidies to its steel industry, intention of exporting to the United States notwithstanding, or to any other national policy that might provoke allegations of 'dumping'."

Meanwhile, without any sense of irony, Old Joe continues, "And now, Trump and his MAGA Republicans want across-the-board tariffs on all imports from all countries, if reelected. Well, that would drive up costs for families on an average of $1,500 per year each year. He simply doesn’t get it."  Doing the proper analysis of the Chinese Masks and Solar Cells Exclusion Tariffs will take time: they're not going to lower the price of anything for families here.

Outside the Beltway's James Joyner, who is more sympathetic to strategic trade policy than I, comes to a similar conclusion.  Apparently there are people who conflate comparative advantage with low wages, and see a difficulty with open trade.

While there was indeed a bipartisan elite consensus on free trade—of which I was part—going back to roughly 1945, there has been a large group of dissenters on the Democratic left since at least the early 1990s. The argument, which I’ve come to largely agree with, is that free trade only works among relative equals. When it’s rich countries trading with poor ones and democracies trading with autocracies, it creates a race to the bottom in terms of wages and working conditions.

Like everything else in economics, that comes with qualifications.  Low-wage Bangladesh has never been known as a manufacturing powerhouse, nor has Mississippi attracted microchip-engraving workshops away either from California or Taiwan.  Trade between the United States and China involves two relatively rich technocracies, and immiserisation of the toilers is incidental to the other ways the technocrats are ripping up their own economies.

With regard to China, there are national security goals, economic goals, climate goals, and domestic political goals. So, boxing out Huawei and TikTok serves security goals but comes at the cost of domestic goals, including the affordability of telecommunications and courting the youth vote. Tariffs on goods may well save jobs in related sectors but, almost by definition, increase prices for consumers. Achieving balance in these goals really depends on one’s priorities and longer-term vision.

Trump’s China policy was ill-conceived, in that its goals were dubious and likely unachievable but was popular because it was brash and spoke to real concerns across large sectors of the electorate. Biden’s is more targeted and nuanced, so less likely to resonate with voters. Whether it’s shrewd really depends on whether you support the tradeoffs.

Ultimately, he concludes, other industrialized countries will benefit by any trade war involving the States and China.

While I actually agree with Trump and Biden that the longstanding elite consensus was wrong, I’m skeptical that either version of the new policy makes much sense. It made no sense to continue to treat China as a member in good standing of the WTO, given decades of thumbing their noses at the rules. And it may well be foolish to allow China to flood the market with cheap electric cars and the like, given that there’s no real way for American companies—who have to pay American-style wages and comply with American safety, environmental, and other regulations—to compete on price.

At the same time, it strikes me as unlikely that the United States will ever return to the level of unionized manufacturing of the postwar golden age Biden and Trump voters long for. Trade is simply more globalized now and the combination of cheaper workers in other high-education countries and replacement of people with technology would seem to preclude that. Even if we successfully box out China, the Indias and South Koreas of the world are much more likely to supply green technology than we are.

Ah, but there is a way for North American companies to compete on price.  It's called labor-augmenting technical change, and we've been doing that in a number of ways for over two centuries.  Sometimes that technical change benefits workers with a lot of human capital, more frequently it's a way for making use of people with relatively little human capital working alongside machines or assisted, these days, by algorithms.

Neither major party has much to offer consumers with respect to Chinese goods.  When it comes to offering consumers freedom of choice, it's advantage Trump, if he'd but call attention to it.