Written by: Richard Hanania
Translated by: Block unicorn
The American right is eager to restore manufacturing jobs. Long before Donald Trump's "liberation day" tariffs, free trade was blamed for causing a series of problems, from children no longer playing outdoors to national weakness and strategic disadvantages against China.
However, these views are hardly supported by empirical data, and the ethical arguments behind protectionism are varied, both incomplete and utterly absurd. Despite the common sense and overwhelming consensus among economists, the untenable arguments against trade still exist, indicating that we need to understand that protecting manufacturing employment from foreign competition is rooted in evolutionary psychology. Protectionism is a preference that converges at the intersection of two very intense emotions: hostility towards outsider groups and an aesthetic preference for work producing tangible goods.
[The rest of the translation continues in the same manner, maintaining the original structure and fully translating the text while preserving the specified terms like Block, UNI, AR, and CHR]It is worth noting that, similar to manufacturing, agriculture is often romanticized and protected, possibly because it has a pre-modern counterpart. Like factories, farms evoke images of hard physical labor, subsistence, and independence. The aesthetic preference for such work is deeply rooted in our collective psychology. However, the structure of modern work has changed. Manufacturing and agriculture now occupy only a small part of the economy in developed countries.
Today, most Americans do not produce physical goods. They provide care, solve problems, create knowledge, or facilitate transactions. These jobs are just as real and valuable as factory work, but lack the intuitive, visible output that our brains are shaped to consider valuable. Therefore, nostalgia for manufacturing is not based on economic logic or ethical clarity, but rather an instinctive bias towards our ancestors' past forms of labor.
Of course, emotions are important in politics. Nevertheless, it is crucial to recognize when we are driven by psychological illusions. Some might argue that the path to happiness is to indulge our natural instincts, building a closed economy that allows more people to manufacture tangible items, even if this would cause our living standards to collapse. However, protectionists almost never make such an argument—and for good reason. Once you understand the nature of these biases and their irrationality, arguments against trade fall apart.
This is why protectionists instead argue that their policies will economically improve the nation, or at least transfer wealth from the rich to the poor. The correct response is that their assumptions are fundamentally incorrect. Rather than erecting trade barriers or attempting to revive long-disappeared employment landscapes, we should consider how best to support existing workers, not the workers we imagine. This means supporting flexible labor markets, higher-quality training and education, and eliminating unreasonable barriers to making a living such as occupational licensing systems.
