In Less Bad Arguments for Protectionism I offered a number of arguments for tariffs that, unlike the more common ones, are consistent with a correct understanding1 of the economics of trade; I do not find any of then convincing but someone else might. One had to do with national defense. Suppose we get into a war with China. It would be inconvenient if some of the things we needed for the war, ammunition, computer chips, drones, or something else, were things we did not produce because we had been importing them from China. So it might be prudent to use protective tariffs to keep critical industries going even if they could not compete with foreign competitors. It is not an absurd argument, but it has several problems, especially as a defense of the tariffs Trump actually imposed. Trump's tariffs were imposed on a wide variety of countries and goods, to first approximation tariffs on everything. A supporter might claim that protecting everything was fine since the more industries we...
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