Trump is irritating, bombastic, and a general pain in the patuti to all spectrums of political ideology– but you must admit that his unconventional methods get people looking at issues from new angles. Who would have thought that those on the left would become free traders? They oppose Trump’s tariffs meant to protect the American worker (or let’s avoid reading too much into the mind of the art of the deal maker).
And there’s more to see of the unseen. Writers are unveiling things like ‘hidden costs.’ In this super article by Luis Garicano, The Myth of the Single Market, the author proposes that national customs have always charged an override on goods and services that move across European borders.
The IMF puts the hidden cost of trading goods inside the EU at the equivalent of a 45% tariff. For services the figure climbs to 110%, higher than Trump’s “Liberation day” tariffs on Chinese imports—measures many saw as a near-embargo.
We advocate for the idea that social costs are part of the price at Home-Economic. They are hidden only in the sense that they are not talked about. It’s not polite to say to someone that they paid a luxury/status surcharge for their watch because they want to show off, even if Veblen said it was so a hundred years ago. People don’t want to think about whether they selected a bigger house at the expense of a longer commute, which takes their time away from their children. These trades in social commitments are sheltered from the glaring eyes of sharpened pencils and numerical analysis.
But that doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Social costs and surpluses have always been a part of price. Tariffs are just the name for the formalized process of collecting and directing them.
Thank Trump for that bit of awareness.
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