To start with the blindingly obvious: Orange Man Bad. Very bad indeed. Worse, probably, than I’d expected ― and I expected he would be very bad. To a far greater extent than the first time around, it’s not just his own constituents but everyone else, starting with Canada, has to figure out what to do about it. Being the target of a trade war and an annexation threat does that. If I may have a view from the relative safety of the Welcoming Land, I don’t think we’re doing well. Specifically, I worry that the Canadian response ― and I’m afraid the response of the Orange Man’s other targets, in due course ― will embody and indeed exacerbate the same sort of structural issues that are at present enabling the Orange Man.
An important point about the Orange Man’s trade war is that it is only happening because the President of the United States is, at present, seemingly able to rule as an autocrat. Some have argued (sorry, I can’t really be bothered to track back the tweets) that there is very little genuine political support for the tariffs. But that hardly matters because the US Congress has enabled presidents to act unilaterally ― or at least has seemed to have done so. As Keith Whittington puts it:
It’s worth noting that, over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Ilya Somin outlines the legal arguments that could be made against the legality of the tariffs and even the constitutionality of the purported statutory authority for them, though he notes that neither a slam-dunk (especially the constitutional argument). But sorting out the legal issues will, inevitably take time, and while a court order may eventually restore the legal status quo ante, it cannot repair the business connections that will have frayed in the meantime, let alone heal the breach of faith to which the Orange Man has committed the United States.
All that said, the Orange Man’s actions are not only the consequence of his own wickedness, cruelty, and stupidity, nor are they only enabled by a lack of statesmanship among present-day Congressmen and Senators. The problem with power to impose tariffs is not merely that, because of these ladies’ and gentlemen’s deriliction of responsibility, it can be exercised by an erratic executive branch, but that it exists at all. Ilya Somin put the “Nearly Unconstrained Power to Restrict International Trade” at the top of his list of the US Constitution’s defects, arguing that “[a] well-designed Constitution would at the very least make it far more difficult to enact trade barriers”. And beyond even constitutional design, the existence of this power is the product of a political culture in which there is broad agreement that government is warranted to interfere in dealings between and among consenting adults either in the hope that this will make someone else better off, or indeed simply because it despises some of these consenting adults, including on account of their politics or nationality.
The same lack of constitutional constraint on, and cultural tolerance of, economic interventionism is at play in at least some of the many other disturbing features of the Orange Man’s rule. I am thinking, in particular, of the tech companies’ crass ― or outright corrupt ― bootlicking, which follow, it is important to recall, equally crass or outright corrupt bootlicking of his predecessor. As Robby Soave reports for Reason
By criticizing Trump’s views on immigration and otherwise touting liberal causes, Zuckerberg may have thought he had successfully ingratiated himself with the Biden administration; yet in July 2021, President Joe Biden accused Facebook of “killing people” because Zuckerberg had not unilaterally put the government in charge of content moderation. And that, in a nutshell, is why so many of the wealthiest and most influential innovators in the tech sector are abandoning the Democratic Party en masse. (Paragraph break omitted)
Mr. Soave note that “many Republicans—too many—have also railed against tech in recent years”, but argues that “the progressive war on Big Tech is very different” because it comes from a place of deep principle rather than annoyance at particular moderation decisions. Maybe. But maybe the “tech bros” have simply understood, at last, that both sides not only are out to get them but, more importantly, can get them if they decide to ― as regulators elsewhere are and can ― and they need to lick the boots of whoever is in power in the United States, in the hope that this will avert American regulation and maybe even induce the recepient of these ministrations to protect them against regulation abroad.
In short, much (not all, undoubtedly) of what is wrong and frankly terrifying about the Orange Man’s reign is an outgrowth, a metastasis, longstanding abuses of big government and of the way in which the American political and constitutional culture accepts and indeed embraces it. In a nutshell, it is a political constitutional culture that allows government to impoverish and imprison its people on the assumption ― grotesquely counter-factual, as is plainer than ever ― that it knows better than they. And on this point the American political and constitutional culture is not very different from, certainly no worse than, the political cultures of Canada, of the UK, or of continental Europe.
And this brings me to the response to the Orange Man’s agression that is already being formulated in Canada, and will probably be adopted elsewhere. This response is, largely, to do more or less the sorts of things, to deploy the sorts of powers, to draw on the same cultural currents, that enable the Orange Man himself. It doubles down on big government and, inevitably, on the executive’s rapid exercise of barely-constrained, barely-accountable power, in the hope of resisting the same.
The first and most important element of this response is the implementation of retaliatory tariffs: that is to say, the Canadian goverment deciding that it too must interfere with the arrangements arrived at by consenting adults because it despises some of those adults on account of their nationality. The defence of that is, of course, that we’re not the ones who started it, and that our ill-feeling, unlike the Orange Man’s, is accordingly justified. That’s true. But that doesn’t change the fact that the Canadian government has decided that, because Orange Man Bad, because Orange Man wants Canadians to be poorer and less free, they must be even poorer, and even less free, than he would make them.
And consider the legal structure that enables this. So far as I can tell ― I’m no international trade lawyer, so I would welcome correction ― the relevant statutory provision is s 53 of the Customs Tariff (which is an Act of Parliament, though it is not called an Act). In relevant part, it provides that
(2) Notwithstanding this Act or any other Act of Parliament, the Governor in Council may, on the recommendation of the Minister and of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, by order, for the purpose of enforcing Canada’s rights under a trade agreement in relation to a country or of responding to acts, policies or practices of the government of a country that adversely affect, or lead directly or indirectly to adverse effects on, trade in goods or services of Canada, do any one or more of the following:
…
(a) suspend or withdraw rights or privileges granted by Canada to any country under a trade agreement or Act of Parliament;
(b) make goods that originate in any country … or a class of such goods, subject to a surtax in an amount, in addition to the customs duty provided in this Act and the duties imposed under any Act of Parliament or in any regulation or order made under any Act of Parliament, for those goods or that class of goods;
This strikes me as a pretty damned broad delegation of power to the executive. The exercise of this power would of course be subject to accountability to Parliament… if there were a Parliament in session. As it happens, there isn’t one just now, and ther is not planned to be one for another six or seven weeks. It would also be subject to legal challenge in case of abuse, but good luck arguing that a cabinet-level determination that ” acts, policies or practices of the government of a country adversely affect, or lead directly or indirectly to adverse effects on, trade in goods or services of Canada” is unreasonable, in under Vavilov. Pretty much any act, policy, or practice of a trading partner might adversely affect, at least indirectly, trade in Canadian goods or services. If a Canadian Prime Minister were feeling orange, they’d have the legal powers needed to express their feelings at their disposal.
Again, I’m not equating the Canadian government and the Orange Man’s. But it remains the case that the Canadian government it is relying on very broad and, at the moment, quite unaccountable powers, and while I can understand why it is doing that, I don’t think I have to approve of this. We shouldn’t forget that the Orange Man also started, in his first term, with targeted and more limited tariffs. L’appétit vient en mangeant. I’d rather the Canadian government weren’t helping itself to appetizers.
Another element of the Canadian response, this one coming from the provinces, is to stop the sale of American booze in government-monopoly liquor stores. Having lived outside Canada for 13 of the past 15 years, I cannot begin to describe how much the concept of government monopoly on booze infuriates me every time I go back. Suffice it to say, since I moved to the UK, I’ve been getting most of my liquor and my beer on Amazon, and my wine from the grocery store (and it is not the proverbial-in-Quebec vin d’épicerie). But Canadians have nowhere to go for their tipple but the government, and the government has decided that patriotism requires they do without bourbon, so no bourbon it is.
Again, I understand the impulse. I had been hoping to visit the United States later this year, for academic purposes. I don’t think I will, unless something quite significant changes. I may resent government monopoly on liquor and any number of other things about Canada (including the ideological monoculture in its legal academy), but I resent the Orange Man’s agression and, frankly, his voters more. But that’s my choice. As Bastiat pointed out, the defenders of government intrusion in private life are convinced ― probably quite sincerely in many or even most cases ― that without government coercion no righteous or worthy thing will ever be done. That’s the principle on which provincial governments, as well as the federal one operate, so they won’t let people decide what American products or services they can or should forego in the name of patriotism ― the government, including in its ludicrous capacity as liquor monopolist, will decide for them.
Of course it will do any number of other things. It will withdraw from people in rural areas subsidized high-speed internet provided by the Orange Man’s chief vizier, which it previously deemed they must have. It will overpay uncompetitive Canadian companies lest public contracts go to more effecient American ones. It might, if the Federal Leader of the Opposition has his druthers, enact unfunded tax cuts that will impoverish future generations by burdening them with even more debt. The week before last, The Line‘s editors even mused about the necessity of enslaving ― sorry, conscripting ― actually, not sorry, enslaving ― young Canadians to show the Orange Man and the rest of the world how badass Canada is. This is all stupid and destructive. (Sorry, Line Editors. It really was stupid, and I’m glad this at least didn’t make its way in the written version.) But this is all stupid and destructive in a specific way: namely, in a way that empowers and expands the government, and disempowers and impoverishes individual Canadians.
The problem is all the more glaring because the alternatives are no secret. Instead of making things even more expensive or indeed impossible for Canadians to buy in the name of a patriotism decreed and defined by the executive, open the doors to the Americans’ competitors. Remove taiffs, abolish restrictions on non-Canadian providers in sector after sector of the economy. Remove barriers to interprovincial trade yesterday, for fuck’s sake.
How much will you bet on any of it happening within, say, oh, a year? I wouldn’t bet much. And while it might be tempting blame deep-seated Canadian brokenness, inaction, indolence, I think that would get things quite wrong. Canadian governments are acting, after all: see the shiny new tariffs. See the shiny new procurement rules and broken contracts with Starlink. See the empty shelves at the LCBO, SAQ, etc. Canadian governments are acting fast when it comes to making themselves bigger, more pervasive, more intrusive. It’s only when it comes to giving people more choice, more room to decide for themselves, that they freeze in place. This isn’t indolence: this is conviction.
I expect that the response to all this will be, if not to simply dismiss it as unpatriotic, to say that extraordinary times demand extraordinary measures. Just as there are, we were blithely told, no libertarians in a pandemic, there ought to be no libertarians in a trade war. But, as I wrote here when the Orange Man was reelected three months ago, right or wrong do not change based on election results. It is wrong to deprive Canadians of freedom and prosperity, and it is wrong to expand the government in order to do so. It’s bad when the Orange Man wants to do this to us. It’s no better when we’re doing it to ourselves. If that’s what patriotism demands, it really is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
