Tariffs are taxes on American consumers and businesses. They make inputs more expensive, reduce choice, and slow investment. They don’t bring jobs back—they make the tools to create those jobs more costly.
During the campaign, Vice President JD Vance claimed that “a million cheap, knockoff toasters aren’t worth the price of a single American manufacturing job.” The line got applause. But it betrayed a dangerous economic illusion.
Vance sees the toaster. He doesn’t see the millions of families who bought that toaster for $20 instead of $80 and used the savings for groceries, medicine, or a child’s school supplies. He doesn’t see the small business owner who bought cheaper equipment and hired another worker. He doesn’t see the everyday miracles of freed-up capital, redirected investment, and second-order job creation.
Henry Hazlitt called this the fallacy of the “seen and unseen.” It’s the oldest trick in politics: show the factory job you might save, hide the thousands of better futures you quietly destroy.
If we want a freer, fairer global economy, we don’t get there by torching trust and slapping taxes on ourselves. We get there by enabling investors and entrepreneurs to build competitive industries, by investing in lifelong education and innovation, and by strengthening institutions that last longer than one man’s grievance.
That’s what America used to stand for: rules, not whims; institutions, not improvisation.
Steve Miran argues that because the US has run trade deficits for decades, the economic models must be broken. But that’s like saying gravity stopped working because planes fly. The persistent US deficit isn’t a flaw in the system. It’s a reflection of how much of the system depends on us. Models need to be read with the institutional context in mind.
The stakes are bigger than a trade balance. What’s being traded away—at a terrible cost—is the American model of principled leadership, rooted in liberty, trust, and rules. We lose that, we lose the quiet miracle behind a billion pencils.
