Mick is a body on the solder line of the circuit board I own through two shells outside Shreveport — he presses the chips onto the boards that end up in the smartphone in your palm. Six years on the line. The market rate for his skill is $28 an hour; I pay him $18. The differential is $10, and I want you to hold that number while I tell you the best news I have had in a decade.
The Treasury secretary has gone and written a love letter to my balance sheet, and he signed it with a Founder’s name.
He called it economic statecraft. He invoked Hamilton. He said a great nation must build its own essentials behind a wall of its own making — its own chips, its own medicine, its own steel — and not depend on the kindness of foreigners. He dressed it in tricorn hats and the language of independence. I read it twice, slowly, the way you read a contract that favors you, and then I poured myself something brown and toasted the man.
Because here is what “build our own essentials” means once you strip the flag off it: a tariff is a wall, and a wall keeps two things out. It keeps out the cheaper board from across the water — yes. But that is the decoy. What the wall really keeps out is competition for Mick. The foreign supplier who might have undercut me, gone. The pressure that would have forced me to bid $28 to keep him from walking to a rival, gone. Statecraft did for me what I could never have done with a straight face on my own: it abolished the alternative, and a worker with no alternative is a worker who takes $18 and thanks me for the patriotism of it.
Let me put the numbers where you can see them, because I am proud of them. Mick’s market rate is $28. I pay him $18. The gap is $10. Across 2,080 hours that is $20,800 a year I keep that the market said belonged to him. Times six years — $124,800, captured clean, off one set of hands. Now multiply by the floor. Now understand that the tariff did not cost me that money; the tariff is what lets me keep it. The consumer pays the higher sticker — that is you, and you pay it gladly, because the box says it was made here. The incumbent pockets the protected margin — that is me. And the worker, the one the whole flag-waving sermon was supposedly for, eats the difference at $18. Three parties. I take from two of them at once and they both salute.
This is the genius of the Hamilton costume, and I tip my hat to whoever stitched it. Tell a man you are taxing him and he riots. Tell him you are protecting him, building America, standing up to foreigners — and he will pay the same tax with a tear in his eye and call you a patriot for charging it. “Economic nationalism” is the finest piece of euphemism the trade has produced in my lifetime: it launders a captured market into a virtue. It takes rent — pure, idle, extracted rent, the surplus I skim for owning the wall rather than building anything behind it — and it baptizes that rent as independence.
I am not unusual; I am a curriculum. For thirty years I have graded young men into this arithmetic at Warden, and my graduates sit in the firms that priced your own job. The best of them learned the lesson I am giving you now for free: never argue for your privilege on its own terms. Wrap it in the Founders. Wrap it in the factory town. Wrap it in the chip in the phone, made here, by hands you will never have to look at. The wall that “secures our supply chain” is the same wall that secures my margin, and the man who built the political case for the first one built the case for the second without ever having to say the word.
So buy the phone. Buy the next one. The box says American, and it is — Mick is as American as the differential I take off the top of him, and the tariff that keeps the foreigner’s cheaper board off the shelf is the same tariff that keeps Mick from ever being worth his $28. They told you the wall was to protect the worker. Look closely at which side of it I am standing on, holding the ledger, and decide for yourself who the wall is really for.
I have decided. I decided the day a Treasury secretary called my fence a Founding principle and handed me a flag to fly over it.