In his book Minority Report, H.L. Mencken writes: “The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve. This is true even of the pious brethren who carry the gospel [sic] to foreign parts.”
With a little rewriting, we can update the quote for protectionism:
“The urge to defend the nation is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all protectionists seek: not the chance to serve.”
National defense is a common justification for protectionist tariffs, and it has been driven to absurd extremes: clothespins, sugar, and baby food have all been described as vital to national defense and subject to tariffs.
In a particularly goofy example, Senator Rick Scott of Florida has called for a ban on Chinese-grown garlic on the grounds it threatens national security. Now, perhaps if we were a nation of vampires, this claim would make sense. But it’s hard to see how garlic, even garlic that is potentially tainted, is a threat to national security. Scott argues that the garlic poses a potential health threat, but that is not the same as a national security threat.
What is weird about the argument Scott is putting forth is that he does not need to ban Chinese garlic as a national security threat if it is as dangerous as he claims. We already have a food safety program here in the US, and foreign goods are also subject to it. If Chinese garlic is a public health threat, the FDA has the authority to act by issuing recalls and otherwise effectively banning the tainted product if it poses a threat to human or animal health. It’s unclear why Senator Scott’s act is needed.
To go back to a theme I have been harping on in recent posts, any intervention needs to be justified beyond just some hypothetical musing. Simply showing that some intervention could accomplish some desired outcome does not mean the action is justified or desirable. We need to examine the current state of laws and legislation to see if the intervention is actually justified, or if it is just rank corruption hiding behind a false-face. One question Senator Scott (or others who defend this intervention) must answer is: why is the current legislation inadequate? It is already illegal to sell tainted food in the US. If Chinese garlic is such a threat, why hasn’t the FDA shut it down?
National defense is one of those justifications that people don’t seem to think about that much. It is invoked and simply not questioned. Indeed, this is probably why “national defense” is such a successful false-face to rent-seek: few look too closely at the mask. Perhaps, like the partygoers at Poe’s masquerade in the Masque of the Read Death, the people who support spurious national defense claims are afraid to see what lies beneath that mask.
Jon Murphy is an assistant professor of economics at Nicholls State University.
