Earlier this month, Barack Obama apparently completed an anti-free-market trifecta, adding "protectionist" to a rap sheet that already included "deficit spender" and "serial nationalizer." And not just any protectionist, mind you. In the words of former Bush spokesman Tony Fratto, Obama will hereafter be known as "the president who ‘lost' trade for America." The following day, the Wall Street Journal editorial page elaborated: "America now has its first protectionist President since Herbert Hoover."
So what did Obama do to earn this unsavory distinction? Order the Coast Guard to dump a fleet of German cars into the Atlantic? Set fire to a shipment of Malaysian T-shirts? Er, not exactly. What sent the self-styled defenders of capitalism into fits of hysterics was a modest tariff on Chinese tires--a single product accounting for a tiny fraction of both U.S. imports and Chinese exports. If this is what passes for a "whopper" of "geopolitical" proportions, as The Economist's editorialized, then one struggles to describe bona fide protectionism--like, say, the Smoot-Hawley tariff.
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