{"id":2499782,"date":"2025-10-29T02:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-10-29T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/monetizemail.com\/magatoon\/?p=2499782"},"modified":"2025-10-29T06:53:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-29T10:53:09","slug":"cowboy-diplomacy-ranchers-reject-tariff-rhetoric","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/monetizemail.com\/magatoon\/2025\/10\/29\/cowboy-diplomacy-ranchers-reject-tariff-rhetoric\/","title":{"rendered":"Cowboy Diplomacy: Ranchers Reject Tariff Rhetoric"},"content":{"rendered":"

The howls of disapproval from the cowboy-hat demographic have been loud<\/a> this week, and for good reason. President Trump has announced plans to quadruple the import quota of Argentine beef to \u201cbring beef prices down\u201d at the grocery aisle. It was accompanied by a characteristically Trumpian broadside<\/a> on Truth Social:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cThe Cattle Ranchers, who I love, don\u2019t understand that the only reason they are doing so well, for the first time in decades, is because I put Tariffs on cattle coming into the United States,\u201d Trump said on Truth Social<\/a> on Wednesday. \u201cIf it weren\u2019t for me, they would be doing just as they\u2019ve done for the past 20 years \u2014 Terrible! It would be nice if they would understand that, but they also have to get their prices down, because the consumer is a very big factor in my thinking, also!\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In a single post he managed to both praise and insult the very people who embody the mythos of American self-reliance. You don\u2019t talk down to cowmen \u2014 as a rule they\u2019re damn sensitive to being told their fortunes hinge on the beneficence of a politician. As an example of the pitfalls of dabbling in command economics, you can\u2019t conjure a better case study.<\/p>\n

Ranchers are no fools \u2014 they know that prosperity in a tenuous sector doesn\u2019t come from tariffs, subsidies, or decrees. It comes from hard work and resilient management in the face of fickle weather and shifting markets. When a big-city billionaire \u2014 even one they\u2019ve largely endorsed \u2014 tells them \u201cyou\u2019re doing well because of me,\u201d the reflexive response is basically what I heard from a cowboy buddy in Arizona: \u201cGaslight us harder<\/em>, Mr. President.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump is right: cattle prices have been astonishingly high the past few seasons, for a variety of extremely complicated factors mostly having to do with the size of the national cow herd<\/a>. But Trump is laughably off base to attribute the recent high prices to his tariffs, which to the extent they had any effect at all, were applied long after <\/em>the rise in cattle prices.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s maneuvering reflects the deepest problems of a command economy \u2014 you simply can\u2019t foresee the knock-on effects of various market manipulations. Once you start tinkering \u2014 raising tariffs to curry favor with domestic producers, then slashing them to win over consumers, or allocating tariff revenues to those who are harmed<\/a> by the tariffs \u2014 you trap yourself in the same contradictory logic that doomed the old Soviet planners. Every knob you twist sends vibrations through a market ecosystem too vastly complex to predict.<\/p>\n

Take beef, which is a deceptively \u201csimple\u201d product. It isn\u2019t. Its price is the result of feedlot margins, grazing leases, rail freight rates, hide buyer availability, veterinarian fees, hay producer margins, and farm credit, and a kaleidoscope of other factors. Like many industries, it is also heavily influenced by government regulations, including tariffs. Price signals ripple through this vast and interconnected network like nerve signals in a living body. Interference with one aspect risks numbing the whole. Beef, as a product of the modern integrated global market is no more \u201csimple\u201d than a semiconductor, and managing its price is a fool\u2019s errand.<\/p>\n

Ranchers can no more unilaterally \u201cget their prices down\u201d than they could unilaterally get their prices up<\/em> over the 20 years when they were doing \u201cTerrible.\u201d Cow-calf producers (the foundational unit of the beef complex) take 400-600 pound calves to sale and pretty much take whatever price is being offered by the \u201cbuyers\u201d (usually background\/stocker\/feedlot representatives). Those prices have, for decades, been marginal at best and were often lower than the input costs. In the absence of a vigorous small-scale meat processing complex (regulated largely out of existence), the options were limited. That has changed recently with the higher prices that come with lower inventories, and many ranchers are regaining some solvency lost over preceding years, but they all know it\u2019s out of their control. Like the rain, they take it when they can get it.<\/p>\n

Still, ranchers are right to feel whiplash. One day, they\u2019re told tariffs are patriotic; the next day, they\u2019re scolded for high prices. They are pawns in a political game that treats them alternately as mascots and villains. The message from Washington \u2014 sometimes in the same sentence \u2014 is: We love you, but you\u2019re doing it wrong. <\/em>This is the cultural insult buried at the heart of Trump\u2019s missive. Rural America has long sensed that its independence is something to be managed, not respected. Trump insists that cowmen owe their good fortune to his tariff policy, but by doing so he adopts the same paternalism that ranchers despise in bureaucrats from either party. Whether the diktat comes from a Manhattan boardroom or the White House, it still smells like the city: clueless and smug, all at the same time.<\/p>\n

The kind of economic nationalism Trump has unleashed pretends to restore dignity to the producers and manufacturers forgotten by globalization. But true dignity never comes from protection \u2014 it comes from freedom. Give ranchers open access to world markets, stable rules, reduced regulations, and the assurance that government won\u2019t yank the reins every election cycle, and they\u2019ll take care of the rest. The West was not won on quota systems.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s galling about this latest announcement isn\u2019t just the inconsistency; it\u2019s the presumption that prosperity can be engineered by presidential decree. Beef markets, like any living system, balance themselves through millions of daily decisions \u2014 when to calve, when to sell, when (or if) to buy feed, when to hold back heifers. That\u2019s the invisible hand at work, and it\u2019s far smarter than any White House staffer with a spreadsheet.<\/p>\n

Politicians often say they \u201clove\u201d the rancher, the farmer, the working man. But love, in economics as in life, is best revealed by respectful restraint. Don\u2019t interfere. Don\u2019t pretend to know better. Don\u2019t weaponize one group against another in the name of populist sympathy. Ronald Reagan, the cowboy president, said the nine most terrifying words one could hear was \u201cI\u2019m from the government and I\u2019m here to help.\u201d As the cattle industry turns its back on Trump\u2019s meddling, he is about to learn the political perils of a command economy as well. The best thing Washington could do for the beef industry is to stop helping it.<\/p><\/p>\n

The post Cowboy Diplomacy: Ranchers Reject Tariff Rhetoric<\/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":"

The howls of disapproval from the cowboy-hat demographic have been loud this week, and for good reason. President Trump has announced plans to quadruple the import quota of Argentine beef to \u201cbring beef prices down\u201d at the grocery aisle. It was accompanied by a characteristically Trumpian broadside on Truth Social: \u201cThe Cattle Ranchers, who I …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":207,"featured_media":2324418,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2499782","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\/2499782","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\/207"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monetizemail.com\/magatoon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2499782"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/monetizemail.com\/magatoon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2499782\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2499783,"href":"https:\/\/monetizemail.com\/magatoon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2499782\/revisions\/2499783"}],"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=2499782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monetizemail.com\/magatoon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2499782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monetizemail.com\/magatoon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2499782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}