Recent debates over tariffs have reignited old economic arguments with fresh intensity. At Praxis Circle, these debates offer something deeper than a lesson in economics: They are a vivid example of how worldviews shape the way we interpret facts and make decisions about the world we live in.
In his new eBook, What Is Truth?, Praxis Circle executive director Doug Monroe defines truth as “a subjective (personal) or objective (collective) judgment on reality that becomes a belief.” A Christian like Doug would recognize that human beings must make judgments about truth to survive and prosper, but it is God, ultimately, who is Truth and determines what Human beings recognize as such.
For this reason truth exists outside the consciousness of any one individual or even groups of individuals agreeing on what is true, and it is fundamentally different from purely subjective judgement. Christians and many other religious people believe God designs human beings as imago Dei, or human “receptacles” for truth with divine-like consciousness and conscience. They believe God reveals truth to them in human space-time, referred to as history. This would be one important aspect of God’s grace.
It’s not controversial that principled individuals with nearly the exact same worldview can look at the exact same data about trade, jobs, and national security and arrive at completely different conclusions about whether tariffs are good or bad. Some of this difference is simply different points of emphasis or probability assessment.
Introductory Worldview Questions
In this post we only quote Praxis Circle Contributors who are dedicated Christians, and there is much disagreement on tariffs. That divergence reveals more than policy preferences—it reveals worldviews in action.
Consider these interesting worldview-related questions bearing on the issue at hand:
- If you believe in a spiritual and material world, where and how do they intersect and influence each other?
- If you recognize religiously-based worldviews like Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or Hinduism, where and how do those worldviews interact with the material world, pragmatism, and common sense?
- If you believe in laws of nature and that good laws should rule society (perhaps, rather than men), why should citizens honestly follow the rules and act virtuously? Should laws reflect morality?
- If you see yourself as a pure pragmatist and believe in gaming theory or, say, the rules of football or basketball, why should people follow the rules?
- What should you do when people break the rules or intentionally cheat?
- If you believe war is an extension of politics and that power dominates politics and economics, how does national economic policy influence the power struggle?
- Do societies or nations need the skills and resources, including knowledge, within their own control to succeed in times of overt or deadly power struggle, known as war?
- Why would any warfare or power struggle need to be just or efficient? Are there good trade-offs between “just” and “efficient”?
- In a business, how are expenses, tariffs, tolls, taxes, and inefficiencies similar and different?
- Which is more costly, paying a 35% tariff or giving up 35% of the equity (a percentage of ownership) in an extremely successful, for-profit company?
- Should governments be allowed to own for-profit companies that compete nationally or globally with other for-profit companies?
- Can democracies really pursue the “long run” in competition with autocracies or tyrannies?
- Consider this principle (written the day after Palm Sunday) when you look around at how the world works for human beings: Is pain ever required to achieve the maximum gain, achievement, or happiness?
- Should a nation seek gain or deferred gratification for a long run good or a short run good? How short is “too short,” and how long is “too long”?
- You are building a cathedral in a city and a beach castle on vacation, why would you use more or less expensive materials to construct the structure itself and the foundation?
We submit that thoughtful answers to these important questions—all relating to tariffs, believe it or not—are directly related to worldview analysis. Ultimately, they are resolved by one’s worldview, including the narrative that accompanies it. Research shows that many if not most people, even consciously, apply selected and often conflicting worldviews to achieve desired decisions in pursuit of desired results.
Is this cricket or just useful? Are you applying a virtue, duty, or utilitarian morality?
In general, the above questions are mostly either epistemological or teleological. Concerning the latter, using Aristotle’s four element approach to causation might help you think about your own answers.
In this post, we don’t have time or space to take each question one-by-one and relate it to tariffs. We simply offer them for your reflection as you consider the pro and con tariff positions offered in the comments below. Let’s look at how the tariff issue plays out among some of Praxis Circle’s own Contributors.
The Case For Tariffs
To obtain an overview of the current situation in America on trade and tariffs, we encourage you to watch this interview of Peter Navarro, a key senior advisor on tariffs to President Trump:
Even if you disagree with the President here, we think the interview offers a wide-ranging overview of the issues involved. One of the main takeaways should be that there’s a lot more going on with the tariffs than just imposing taxes on imported goods.
Praxis Circle Contributor Frank Hill recently wrote an article entitled This Tariff Gambit Better Work. Frank was on Capitol Hill for over 20 years and played a role in setting up the forces that balanced the federal budget in President Clinton’s second term. In this article, Frank sees the importance of the tariff issue from a broad perspective, and he emphasizes the need to get it right.
For the first approximately 150 years of our nation’s history—the years during which America became the most powerful economic force in the world—tariffs were an accepted good for many reasons applied to other countries. Tariffs were outlawed between states in the U.S. Constitution. (Query: Why the difference?) Frank asks:
If tariffs were so terrible, why did all the nations that America helped rebuild post-World War II, such as Japan, impose high tariffs and then grow and prosper? Japan in the 1980s was viewed as the biggest economic threat to America, not communist China.
Eliminating tariffs is only part of the “helping consumers pay less” story. The really important next step toward reestablishing true free trade in America is to get rid of the regulatory “tariffs” our elected government has willfully imposed on our own American economy and almost strangled it to death.
Doing so will make U.S. goods that much more competitive pricewise on world markets.
The fundamental argument against tariffs today is that global free trade without tariffs can be a fundamental good, as the American Founders recognized in a front-of-mind way soon after the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations in 1776, as long as every nation plays by the same rules.
The problem is, argues President Trump and Frank Hill, very few nations play by our rules; on the contrary, we are being played as chumps.
We have a new global Cold War with China, they say, who charges high tariffs, dumps goods below variable cost in the U.S. (i.e., intentionally takes losses to weaken American industry as a matter of foreign peacetime warfare), prevents certain U.S. companies and industries from entering China, and insists on gaining equity stakes in and stealing their intellectual property from those companies who do establish China-based operations.
Obviously, President Trump wants to correct this and prepare America for “worst case” global conflict, perish the thought. We are losing knowledge and critical skills to our enemies when we hold the best, most powerful, most wealthy “hand of cards.” He would argue the ideal of free trade that prevailed in “the end of history,” or after the fall of Soviet Communism beginning in the early 1990s, is over. China has developed out of the Third World into the second most powerful nation on earth.
Other Praxis Circle Contributors see tariffs as not just economically viable but morally necessary. David Brat, a former U.S. Congressman, economist, and current executive at Liberty University (formerly head of the Business School at Liberty and the Economics Department at Randolph-Macon College), argues that tariffs are about fairness, not just economics. In a recent interview with a local news station in Virginia, he said:
Trump’s going for reciprocity, which is basically the golden rule. Whatever you do to us, we’re going to do to you. We’d prefer getting rid of tariffs and having a free trade world. Of course you can’t free trade with a totalitarian communist surveillance state like China. The tariffs are an attempt to put capital back in the hands of Americans. That’s the main part of this tariff strategy, putting capital in the hands of American workers.
Finally, Eric Metaxas, best known as a cultural commentator and author, has taken to X (formerly Twitter) to express his support for recent tariff proposals. In one post, he praised entrepreneur Kevin O’Leary’s favorable explanation of tariffs as a tool to level the playing field of international trade. In another post, he referred to the policy as “5-D chess.”
The Case Against Tariffs
In contrast, several of our Contributors have spoken out clearly against tariffs, citing their historical inefficacy and potential economic harm.
Anne Bradley, economist and Vice President of Academic Affairs at The Fund for American Studies, recently wrote the following in an article for the Acton Institute, The Tattered History of Tariffs:
A tariff is a tax on goods imported from another country and, thus, a trade barrier that raises prices and creates an economic burden. Tariffs penalize voluntary exchange by making it more costly for consumers to acquire desired goods . . . There is no free lunch here. Tariffs result in trade diversion, whereby imports shift from relatively lower-cost countries to relatively higher-cost countries. This means we divert resources to less productive uses, increasing production prices and costs. Guess who pays the bill? American producers and consumers.
George Weigel, a theologian and political commentator, comes at the issue from a different angle, but arrives at a similar conclusion. In a recent article titled, Against the Politics of Grievance, for First Things, he wrote:
Unfortunately, just when the politics of grievance seems to be running out of gas on the American left, it has emerged with a vengeance on the American right. Slogans like “we’ve been ripped off”—which distort the record of the most successful peace-keeping security architecture ever created (NATO), and which provide cover for tariffs that could wreck the world’s most successful engine of economic growth—exemplify a new grievance politics that’s the flip side of wokery.
Nicholas Eberstadt, a political economist at the American Enterprise Institute with a focus on demography, poverty, social well-being, and international development, tackled the assumption that tariffs can solve America’s labor force challenges. Writing for the New York Post, he argued:
Nearly 7 million men in the prime of life — over a tenth of the 25-to-54 age group — are neither working nor looking for work these days.
But Team Trump is trying to fix the problem with the wrong tools.
They argue that trade policy (tariffs) and industrial policy (special treatment for manufacturing) will reverse the long-term flight from work by men, by creating high-paying jobs to lure them back to work.
This approach may sound sensible to some. Unfortunately, it is likely to fail — even though the White House could succeed through other pro-work policies.
We should also note that Praxis Circle Contributor Deirdre McCloskey, as we very fondly know Deirdre being an arch Christian free market liberal, is probably against President Trump’s imposition of tariffs, as well.
Why It Matters
What do these differences tell us? First, they remind us that even when people agree on principles—individual dignity, the Golden Rule, economic opportunity, human flourishing—they can still disagree profoundly on policies like tariffs. That’s because those principles are interpreted through the lens of worldviews, including the base of knowledge that accompanies them, which informs how we perceive reality and what we believe is true.
Second, they highlight why it’s so important to understand our own worldview and the worldviews of others. As a result, the next time you hear someone arguing about tariffs (or taxes, or TikTok bans), don’t just ask what policy side they’re on. Ask what worldview they’re working from. Ask what assumptions they’re bringing to the table. You might find that the most important differences aren’t about tariffs at all.
