I am surprised at the capacity of a number of commentators, including some purporting to embrace classically liberal views, to see something of an economically defensible logic in US President Donald Trump’s tariff policy.

In his piece in The Australian Financial Review, John Lee from the Hudson Institute in Washinton DC notes that “the consensus in Australia about free trade is an intuitively seductive one”. He goes on to note the firm theoretical foundations that support that intuition. These foundations, I would add, have endured for some 250 years, and feature a distinguished line of economists.