{"id":2469113,"date":"2025-08-29T06:02:57","date_gmt":"2025-08-29T10:02:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/monetizemail.com\/magatoon\/?p=2469113"},"modified":"2025-08-29T10:56:29","modified_gmt":"2025-08-29T14:56:29","slug":"only-lobbying-and-self-deception-can-keep-tariffs-alive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/monetizemail.com\/magatoon\/2025\/08\/29\/only-lobbying-and-self-deception-can-keep-tariffs-alive\/","title":{"rendered":"Only Lobbying and Self-Deception Can Keep Tariffs Alive"},"content":{"rendered":"

In early 2025, National Review<\/em> reported that lobbying expenditures on tariffs had jumped an astonishing 277 percent<\/a> over the prior year. Trade associations and industry groups flooded Washington with petitions, exemption requests, and campaign checks.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Steel companies, electronics firms, and agribusinesses weren\u2019t suddenly struck by patriotism or altruism. They were doing what public choice theory predicts: seeking concentrated benefits while offloading costs onto the public. What is striking is not rent seeking<\/a>. That is familiar enough. What is striking is how easily it gets dressed up as civic virtue. Tariffs survive and thrive not just because they pay, but because we persuade ourselves they are somehow noble. That is where self-deception enters, something to which we shortly return.<\/p>\n

On the surface, tariffs are border taxes<\/a>. Governments levy them on imported goods, raising their price. The official rationale is to \u201cprotect\u201d domestic industries by \u201cleveling the playing field\u201d with foreign rivals. The economic reality is less flattering. Tariffs distort prices \u2014 the very signals we rely on to allocate resources efficiently.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This is something economists have often explained: FA Hayek stressed prices are information, aggregating dispersed knowledge<\/a> better than any planner could manage. When you tax imports, you aren\u2019t simply raising revenue. You are also garbling the knowledge system that allows specialization and cooperation across borders. What looks like protection is really manufactured ignorance. This willing distortion of market information makes it easier for politicians, special interests, and others to deceive themselves about the benefits of tariffs.\u00a0<\/p>\n

First, though, we should unpack the nature of self-deception. The evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers offered one of the most influential accounts<\/a>: people deceive themselves in order to better deceive others. For most people, it is hard to lie convincingly if you know you\u2019re lying. But if you can persuade yourself to believe the claim, then it is no longer a lie, allowing you to project confidence, sincerity, even indignation, and avoid casting suspicion with physical and emotional tells. Tone, eye movement, and body language are powerful second-order evidence in social life. They make other people more likely to believe you, especially when the subject is too complex for them to evaluate directly.<\/p>\n

Politics is exactly that kind of environment.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Few voters read trade policy studies. Most rely on conviction and narrative. So when politicians insist tariffs will \u201csave American jobs<\/a>\u201d or \u201crevive industry,\u201d with confidence and gusto<\/a>, the claim is not effective because it is true but because it is sincerely believed (at least in some cases).\u00a0<\/p>\n

That sincerity is often a product of self-deception. And in addition, poor incentives potentially enable self-deception. As public choice<\/a> theory reminds us: politicians are not benevolent planners; they\u2019re actors responding to incentives. For firms facing competition, the incentive to lobby for tariffs is obvious. Protection from imports means higher profits and market share. For politicians, the incentive is just as obvious: deliver concentrated benefits to a vocal, well-organized industry while dispersing the costs thinly across millions of consumers who barely notice the extra dollars at the checkout line.<\/p>\n

This asymmetry explains why tariffs are politically attractive but economically destructive. Benefits are concentrated and visible; costs are diffuse and hidden. But incentives alone don\u2019t tell the whole story.\u00a0<\/p>\n

If voters suspect they are being fleeced, resentment builds. The system works better when the rationalizations are actually believed. And that is where self-deception meets public choice: it helps politicians, special interests, and others better convince others of the benefits of tariffs because they are (in some cases) self-deceived.<\/p>\n

At this juncture, the logic of tariffs and self-deception is straightforward:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Tariffs create clear opportunities for concentrated gains (through economic \u201cprotection\u201d).<\/li>\n
  2. Concentrated gains attract lobbying and rent-seeking.<\/li>\n
  3. Rent-seeking requires a moral and political cover story.<\/li>\n
  4. Self-deception<\/a> makes that story convincing.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The steel executive convinces himself that tariffs are about \u201cfair trade,\u201d not rents. The senator convinces herself that tariffs are about \u201cworking families,\u201d not campaign donations. The citizen convinces himself that higher prices are patriotic dues, not hidden taxes. All of them may be wrong, but all of them are sincere. That sincerity, enabled by self-deception, is precisely what makes the rent-seeking effective.<\/p>\n

    This is why the debate feels so disconnected from economic reality. Economists can calculate the deadweight losses, the pass-through of costs to consumers, and the retaliatory spiral. They can show that tariffs lowered real incomes in the US by billions<\/a> during the 2018\u20132019 wave. Tariffs show how that capture \u2014 highlighted by public choice theory \u2014 can be greased not just by money but by psychology. If regulators, legislators, and industry lobbyists all come to believe that their cause is just, then the capture doesn\u2019t feel like capture at all.<\/p>\n

    Anne Krueger famously noted<\/a> that the social cost of rent-seeking isn\u2019t just the transfers themselves but also the resources wasted chasing rents. When self-deception enters the picture, that waste can multiply \u2014 extending beyond economic resources to epistemic ones, in the form of intellectual energy spent rationalizing a tax on consumers<\/a> that benefits only a concentrated few.<\/p>\n

    In the end, the 277 percent spike in tariff lobbying is not an accident. It\u2019s the predictable result of a policy that creates concentrated privileges. But what allows those privileges to endure is not just money \u2014 it\u2019s psychology. Tariffs harness our natural tendency toward self-deception, making rent-seeking persuasive and capture respectable.<\/p>\n

    The post Only Lobbying and Self-Deception Can Keep Tariffs Alive<\/a> was first published by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER)<\/a>, and is republished here with permission. Please support their efforts.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    In early 2025, National Review reported that lobbying expenditures on tariffs had jumped an astonishing 277 percent over the prior year. Trade associations and industry groups flooded Washington with petitions, exemption requests, and campaign checks.\u00a0 Steel companies, electronics firms, and agribusinesses weren\u2019t suddenly struck by patriotism or altruism. They were doing what public choice theory …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":456,"featured_media":2324418,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2469113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/monetizemail.com\/magatoon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2469113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/monetizemail.com\/magatoon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/monetizemail.com\/magatoon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monetizemail.com\/magatoon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/456"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monetizemail.com\/magatoon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2469113"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/monetizemail.com\/magatoon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2469113\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2469114,"href":"https:\/\/monetizemail.com\/magatoon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2469113\/revisions\/2469114"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monetizemail.com\/magatoon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2324418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/monetizemail.com\/magatoon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2469113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monetizemail.com\/magatoon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2469113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monetizemail.com\/magatoon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2469113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}