Merchant Ships Passing in the Night

During my tenure as a student at the University of Minnesota Law School, I was fortunate enough to study evidence, civil procedure, and Art of the Courtroom under Professor Irving Younger. Younger was a master teacher. He combined a brilliant mind with a gift for oratory. He had a quick wit and perfect comedic timing. To this day, Younger’s “Ten Commandments of Cross Examination” is the gold standard for the teaching of effective cross examination techniques.

One day in class, Younger posed the question, “If you call a dog’s tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have?” A couple of enthusiastic students blurted out “five.” Younger put his thumbs under his trademark suspenders and said: “The answer is four . . . calling a dog’s tail a leg does not make it one.” That little nugget has stuck with me all these years. Unfortunately, less than a year after I graduated from law school I attended Professor Younger’s memorial service. Pancreatic cancer claimed his life at the age of 55.

I am a proponent of free market economics. And of course, free trade is at the heart of free market economics, whether it is free trade between two people in a marketplace or between nations across the ocean from one another. I am philosophically opposed to tariffs . . . if free trade is the alternative. However, the United States is not engaged in free trade with other nations. America’s trading partners have countless trade barriers and tariffs. Free trade? Hardly.

Those who oppose the Trump tariffs in the name of free trade make the same mistake as my fellow students who fell into the trap of believing that you can make a dog’s tail into a leg by labeling it as such. Saying that we are engaged in free trade doesn’t make it so.

I don’t know if President Trump’s tariff campaign will achieve the intended effect. A lot of things have to go right in order to restructure an economy and change the way business is done worldwide. However, his goals are laudable: address America’s trade imbalance; revive our industrial production; work toward reducing the national debt, among other things.

I can respect you for being philosophically opposed to tariffs. However, please don’t base your opposition on the idea that you are defending free trade. Letting other nations impose tariffs without any answer has not worked. Maybe it is time to try something different.