Did you catch the President’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend?
He pointed to a string of encouraging data—market highs, low inflation, solid GDP growth, factory construction, investment announcements—and argued that this was the payoff from his trade policy.
The President is taking a victory lap because it looks like the dire warnings from people like me seem to have been much ado about nothing.
(Remember I said, looks like. We’ll revisit this in a few months.)
We said tariffs could crash markets, ignite inflation, or maybe even bring everything to a grinding halt, and admittedly, that hasn’t happened.
Still, that doesn’t mean the explanation on offer is the right one.
The economy isn’t tidy. It doesn’t run on single causes, and it definitely doesn’t respond on cue. By the time a policy goes into effect, businesses are already adjusting to a dozen other things—interest rates, labor shortages, supply chains, regulatory changes, and consumer habits that haven’t looked “normal” in years.
So when growth happens, attaching it confidently to one lever-pull should always make us skeptical.
Economists like Ludwig von Mises pointed out long ago that every economy is really just the result of human action—millions of people making daily choices based on their own needs, priorities, and incentives. An economy isn’t a “thing” that can be manipulated from some central control point; it’s a living, breathing organism shaped by individuals acting in what they believe is their own best interest.
Tariffs don’t exist out in the open where everyone can see them working. They show up indirectly and change prices quietly. They alter which projects a company decides to move forward on, which ones they don’t. They reward some behavior and discourage other behavior.
And that matters a whole lot.
There’s no headline for the company that decides not to expand, and no chart for the product redesign that gets shelved. There’s no accounting for the family that absorbs higher costs by cutting back somewhere else and never realizes that it ties back to a campaign promise.
These unseen effects don’t mean the economy can’t grow. It often still does because people continue to make daily, individual choices that prioritize their own best interests. People adapt, businesses reroute, and momentum carries things forward longer than critics might expect.
So while the numbers tell you what happened, they don’t tell you what would have happened, or what might still be unfolding more slowly than we expected it to.
And it’s always important to remember that policies that start as temporary responses have a way of sticking around for good. Industries eventually reorganize around them as expectations change. Over time, success depends less on meeting real demand and more on navigating the rules correctly.
None of that shows up in quarterly reports, but you can see it eventually in how rigid things become, how hard it is for newcomers to break in, how much effort gets spent protecting what exists instead of building something better.
Prosperity doesn’t always make clear what sustains it, but it sure fades when the conditions disappear.
It’s encouraging to see positive numbers—I don’t think anybody’s hoping for collapse just to win an argument. But there’s a difference between news that things appear to be going better than expected, and assuming we’ve figured out why.
Tariffs teach the wrong lesson: that government can "fix" markets by taxing trade and favoring some industries. But real prosperity comes from voluntary exchange, division of labor, and sound money—not barriers that punish consumers and exporters.
We want families raising thinkers who understand incentives, prices, and why free trade (fair and open) lifts everyone.
That's why our books hammer home the principles of sound economics, and give honest looks at government overreach and its predictable outcomes.
This way of thinking about the economy—individual choices instead of top-down political lever-pulling—is something we focus on in The Tuttle Twins and the Messed Up Market. It’s based on Mises’s Human Action and helps kids understand what makes an economy, and how cause and effect actually works when people are free to act.
And that’s a lesson definitely worth teaching to our kids. Especially when partisan policies are being credited for outcomes they didn’t create on their own.
— Connor
