Tariffs, sanctions or bans? What will Trump really achieve when the US says ‘no’

In a way, tariffs, sanctions and bans all boil down to one word: no. We’ve just had a month of “no”. No-vember, you could even say.

But not all noes are the same. Tariffs, sanctions and bans are designed to achieve different things. This November, the words became confused, a scrambled negation.

So it is with Donald Trump’s tariffs, promised during the election campaign as a way to protect American manufacturing interests in the face of competition from global trade. These promises spoke to the towns and cities gutted and citizens rendered jobless and hopeless as corporates offshored their business. They painted a picture of resurgent industry and innovation in America, leading to prosperity for working people.

Trump’s tariff announcement wiped billions from the Australian sharemarket.Credit:

The idea of tariffs has economists in a flap. As you are sure to have heard them patiently, if condescendingly, explain by now, tariffs are really taxes on consumers in the country that imposes them. They make imported goods more expensive, lowering the overall buying power of the average punter.

In an economists’ paradise, our interests would be best served by removing trade barriers entirely and letting every country produce according to its ability and sell to others according to their need. Unfortunately, humanity has proven unworthy of this lofty ideal. In the real world, there are wars and chaos. In this world, a tariff can serve a strategic purpose – for instance, a country might put a tariff on the import of milk to protect its local milk producers. This ensures it always has access to the nutritious comestible, even if supply chains are cut off or relations with the supplying nations sour.

Trump isn’t yet president again, but he’s already described the tariffs he actually plans to make policy. When he gains office, at the end of January next year, he will slap a 25 per cent tariff on all goods imported from Canada and Mexico, along with another 10 per cent tariff on China. But here’s the perplexing thing: the purpose of these so-called tariffs is not to protect US industry (at least not any legal one) from cheaper goods from overseas.

The tariffs Trump has announced since winning have been focused on curbing the importation of illegal drugs and stopping immigrants entering the US without permission. Trump posted on his social media platform, Truth Social, that his tariffs “will remain in effect until such time as Drugs, in particular Fentanyl, and all Illegal Aliens stop this Invasion of our Country!”

Which reveals the problem: the word tariff doesn’t mean what Trump thinks it means. A tariff levied on all goods for the purposes of forcing a country to comply with international rules, such as respect for borders and prohibitions on narcotics, is not a tariff at all. It’s a sanction.

Sorry, not sorry, for splitting that hair. Confounding tariffs and sanctions is a serious matter, which will lead to poor policy outcomes and worse living conditions for your average world citizen. Only pedantry can save us now.

It could save sex, too, and the joy of human relations. To celebrate this No-vember, American women unhappy with Donald Trump’s win imported the 4B movement from South Korea. The name translates to the Four Noes – because adherents say no to dating men, no to marrying men, no to having sex with men, and no to having children with men (which presumably means no entirely to the last, given the tricky gamete situation faced by our dioecious species). This is a classic case of imposing a sanction where a tariff would be better suited.

It must be assumed that the women committing themselves to 4B are heterosexual women (otherwise there’s nothing to give up) who have decided, on the basis that some men have political or social attitudes that they disagree with, to place sanctions on the entire gender.

Not only is this a neat illustration of the fact that sanctions can also have consequences for the sanctioning party – these women are denying their own urges to inflict a punishment on others – but it demonstrates the importance of choosing the right tariff, sanction or ban to achieve your objective.

In this case, a tariff would be more beneficial. Instead of swearing off men entirely, heterosexual women (who want those things) could impose an extra cost on sex, dating, marriage and children by only engaging in those activities with men who treat women well and respect their physical autonomy. There are no rules that tariffs have to be levied in dollars and cents.

You could say that, before social norms changed, the tariff levied on sex used to be marriage; selecting for character was called being choosy. Sure, it’s harder to find a decent man than settle for one who’s handy, randy and willing. But as we’ve already established, while tariffs might protect something we consider desirable, they do it by making goods dearer for the consumer. At least, unlike sanctions, tariffs don’t render them unavailable entirely.

So the power of pedantry to clarify the different types of “no” is crucial to getting the best out of national and social relations. But it could also create a better conversation around the so-called social media bans for under 16s. This legislation has been rammed through parliament just in time for parents to spend Christmas trying to explain it to their children. The trouble is, the ban is not a ban – it’s an attempt to respond to the damage that autoplay and algorithms are doing to attention spans and to discourage a scrolling spiral of harmful content. And that needs, somehow, to stop. Most people don’t necessarily want to ban social media; we want it to be better.

Targeted modifications could help, but even more powerful would be a subscription fee that would force platforms to verify users through a credit card payment.

So, yes, it would cost the consumer to fix social media. But if there’s one thing we can learn from this November, it’s that saying no – whether through tariffs, sanctions or bans – can, in the right circumstances, be worth the price.

Parnell Palme McGuinness is managing director at campaigns firm Agenda C. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens.