Tariffs do not require a national emergency to be justified.
There was a vote in the House aimed at constraining tariff authority on Canada. It should be vetoed.
But not for the reason most people are debating.
The current justification for tariffs often leans on the language of “national emergency.” That framing implies tariffs are exceptional tools — used only in crisis, only temporarily, only under duress.
That premise is flawed.
Other countries do not need to cite a national emergency to protect their industries. They don’t apologize for industrial policy. They don’t pretend self-sufficiency is extraordinary.
They treat it as baseline sovereignty.
The United States should do the same.
Comparative Advantage — Or Comparative Dependency?
The intellectual foundation behind resistance to tariffs is the theory of comparative advantage.
In textbook form, it’s elegant:
Each country specializes in what it does relatively better. Trade maximizes total output. Everyone benefits.
If a country’s “comparative advantage” is simply doing labor-intensive tasks that no one else wants to do, that isn’t strategic strength. It is cost arbitrage.
If another country’s advantage is assembling components designed elsewhere, using imported energy and foreign intellectual property, that isn’t industrial dominance.
It is scale.
And scale without technological supremacy is fragile.
BRIC Tech
When people cite the rise of China as proof of comparative advantage triumph, they often measure GDP growth in percentage terms. Catch-up growth always looks dramatic in percentages.
But absolute technological layers tell a different story.
Take military aerospace as an analogy:
A loud, visually imposing aircraft is not equivalent to a stealth platform.
One competes on spectacle.
The other competes on physics.
The true layer of advantage is not appearance — it’s invisibility, signal control, materials science, radar cross-section management.
That same hierarchy exists across the industrial value chain.
Surface-level output is not the same as structural advantage.
Commodities Are Not Strategic Advantage
Another misconception: that commodity production confers durable power.
It doesn’t.
Commodities are natural capital.
They are geological accidents.
And history has repeatedly shown that:
New reserves can be found
Substitutes can be engineered
Extraction methods can evolve
Unconventional oil extraction in the United States is a perfect example. Shale was once dismissed as uneconomic.
Technology changed that.
To be continued…….