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OAN Guest Commentary by: Theodore R. Malloch and Nicholas Capaldi
Thursday, March 27, 2025
April 2nd (not “April Fool’s,” the day prior) has now been deemed “Liberation Day” by President Donald Trump.
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And what is being liberated? America, our capitalist economy, and our future.
“We’ve been ripped off by every country in the world — friend and foe,” Trump said in an interview that aired last week. “On April 2, I call it the liberation of America. We’ve been the fat, dumb, foolish country that allowed everyone to rip us off.”
No more.
The Trump administration will announce five policies in determining how to enact reciprocal tariffs, nontariff barriers, currency manipulation, unfair funding and labor suppression, and value added taxes.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has stated that if countries fail to adjust their policies, the Trump administration “will put up the tariff wall to protect our economy, protect our workers, and protect our industries.”
“For years we’ve allowed our country to be raped and pillaged,” Trump told Fox News, arguing the United States has been unfairly treated in economic relations with other countries, even allies.
Final details regarding Trump’s reciprocal tariff plan are still being worked on but the main thrust will be a new system of tariffs altogether that treats every other country — exactly as they treat us.
In other words, if Canada places 250% tariffs on U.S. dairy products, we will do exactly the same thing to them. If they lower it to zero, we do the same. This will work for every country in the world and every product.
We will not take it any longer. Let’s see if the world reacts. Will they suffer their own tariffs or fairly lower them—even to nothing?
“If India, China, or any other country hits us with a 100 or 200 percent tariff on American-made goods, we will hit them with the same exact tariff,” Trump said during the presidential campaign. “In other words, 100 percent is 100 percent. If they charge us, we charge them – an eye for an eye, a tariff for a tariff, same exact amount.”
This will change everything.
The very logic of modernity explains how the technological project, the major driver of the world economy, operates best within a free market economy, limited government, the rule of law (an Anglo-American version), and a culture of personal autonomy.
If as we have argued is correct, then the maximum benefit for the entire world dictates a world economy that has or favors those features. This is the form of global activity that is defensible, even as it is defined by sovereign nation states, not international organizations.
China, the EU (seduced by the economy of its former colonial power), former colonies obsessed with infantile resentment, and a host of other national and so-called “shithole” economies, do not understand this. They game the system by imposing tariffs economically and fail to understand and/or adopt fully the civil institutions that would make a benign model of global relations work.
The U.S. (Democrat version): has attempted to engineer benign globalism from the “top” down (a form of hubris) by introducing limited government, which they misunderstand as majority rule, through the U.N. model. This failed since all the morally inept countries (not having read Tocqueville or J.S. Mill) think majority rule means the redistribution of ‘Western’ wealth. This is the cry of the UN and its statist globalism under the Millennium Goals and constant diatribes against America, Israel, and on climate change and net zero.
The U.S. (Republican version): is government dominated by Wall Street Journal (WSJ) thinking, and various selfish vested oligarchic economic interest groups, like Wall Street itself, have also attempted to engineer benign globalism from the ‘top’ down. This is in the same way that many had believed they were liberating Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, only now by introducing markets through policies like the WTO, World Bank, and overly generous trade deals. It has not and does not work since morally inept countries project their own culturally corrupt practices onto it, and besides, there are no real enforcement mechanisms, cheating proliferates and dumping has no costs.
By imposing non-reciprocal tariffs on the U.S., other countries that want to access the U.S. market (it is the largest market because it best exemplifies the logic of modernity) have been gaming the system. The U.S. does not respond because, under the tutelage of WSJ free market ideology, it has turned anti-tariff orthodoxy into an article of faith, forgetting what Hayek taught us—that there are no contextless laws of economics. The same can be said for free labor mobility (viz. mass immigration) and the principle of comparative advantage when elevated to a foolish absolute article of faith.
By threatening and, if need be, actually imposing reciprocal tariffs — Trump will drive the rest of the world to eliminate tariffs and perhaps adopt the full logic of modernity.
This is how the U.S. shall achieve benign global supremacy and save capitalism from itself.
Theodore Roosevelt Malloch is CEO of Roosevelt Global Fiduciary LLC. He served as Research Professor at Yale University, Senior Fellow Said Business School, Oxford University and Professor of Governance and Leadership at Henley Business School where he co-led the Director’s Forum. His latest book is Common Sense Business, co-authored with Whitney MacMillan, former Chairman and CEO of Cargill, the world’s largest privately held company.
Nicholas Capaldi is Legendre-Soule Eminent Chair of Business Ethics emeritus at Loyola University New Orleans.
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