Is it the court that’s right, or the executive? A child’s question. The real matter lies elsewhere: how much free trade can a nation swallow before it begins to rot from the inside?
I once mouthed the hymns to free trade with the rest of the congregation. Not out of conviction, but out of laziness. The catechism sounded plausible so long as I didn’t gnaw too deep. But curiosity eventually dragged me under the rug and forced me to chew the doctrine to the marrow. What I found was simple: free trade works only when the players march to the same standards, when rules are not weapons but boundaries.
That world, of course, doesn’t exist. Not even the European Union—with all its treaties and bureaucrats—achieves true uniformity. Everyone cheats; everyone wiggles. And no one wiggles with such reptilian ease as the autocracies, for whom free trade is simply another crowbar to pry open weaker societies. Trade with them is not commerce—it is self-harm disguised as diplomacy.
There is no instant cure. The patient cannot be purged in a single night. But tariffs—clumsy, unfashionable, despised—at least smell like medicine.