From this angle

When Bush announced the TARP bailout for stock criminals in 2008, a few “leftist” economists understood it. They called it privatizing the gains and socializing the losses. Banks and stock criminals could keep all their criminal gains from reckless betting, and the government would automatically make up their losses when their stupid bets missed the mark. Most “leftist” economists flipped their tune when Obama rebranded it as a Democrat program. It’s all about teams.

Wolf describes a tariff as a tax on corporate profits. Well, it is a tax but it’s primarily a fine or penalty for corporate crime. Free trade, like TARP, privatizes the gains and socializes the losses.

What are the losses? Graybill defined the losses in a delicate literary way.

The people of Free-Trade countries are therefore driven into the few occupations which are left, by reason of the destruction of their formerly more varied pursuits. Hence those diversified talents with which men are endowed are not developed but remain latent and unused, an incalculable detriment to the prosperity of their respective countries.

In less delicate words, entire cities and entire types of business and entire groups of people are permanently impoverished and devastated and dying of drugs. 40,000 fentanyl deaths in a year.

If the corporations had directly bombed a large section of the country, and shot 40,000 young men with bullets, we’d understand their monstrous genocide more easily. Of course the free trade government would still reward them by reimbursing them for the bombers and guns.

A protectionist government punishes corporate crime and allows corporate good behavior to profit.

MOST countries are still protectionist. Only the criminal regimes of US/EU/UK are running free trade, letting protectionist China and protectionist India take the social gains from our internal genocide.

Trump is starting industrial policy from the wrong end, with the fines for crime but not the subsidies for good behavior, but you gotta start somewhere.

We still don’t know his goal. Is he trying to bring back proper punishment, or just LBOing Canada and Mexico? Is he using tariffs for proper ends, or just running our normal economic war, placing sanctions against countries we want to destroy? Time will tell. Canada believes he’s making war against Canada, and I think they’re probably right.

Despite Trump’s intentions, the effect on US criminals is the same as a tariff for correct purposes, so it counts as a correct move from this angle.

And the effect on Canada is the same as our previous crazy sanctions against Cuba, Persia, Russia, et al. Those countries responded to our insane war by regaining their own independence and improving their own skills and resources. Canada is starting to do the same.