In defense of cheap goods

On the heels of the Trump Administration’s “Liberation Day” tariff rollout, trade protectionists have been steadily workshopping their best arguments in support of these import taxes that Americans pay on foreign goods. Perhaps the least defensible of them, however, is the claim that “Americans need to get over their addiction to cheap goods.”

Gentler versions of this argument have been advanced by figures such as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent (“access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream”) and American Compass’ Oren Cass (who acknowledges that the tariffs he supports will make us poorer in the short term). However, the most odious form of these claims comes from social media accounts that attempt to baptize the administration’s trade policy with a thin veneer of Christianity.

These influencers coached spiritual indifference or even delight in the plummeting stock market prices following President Trump’s steep tariff taxes, which single-handedly wiped out trillions of dollars of Americans’ savings and investments. Even now, market indexes like the S&P 500, which usually grow by ten percent a year, are struggling just to claw back to the levels they were at when Trump took office.

In response to the economic news, Benny Johnson wrote that “losing money means nothing. Digital ones and zeroes. In the end, you won’t miss any of it.” It is worth noting that Johnson (as well as many of these tariff boosters) took a very different tone about money loss, albeit in the form of inflation, during a Democratic administration.

Another commentator invoked the King James Version of Matthew 6:24 and 1 Kings 18:27 in gleeful mockery of the day’s market losses: “Cry aloud, for Mammon is a god! Perhaps he is musing, or tied up in bureaucracy, or attending a [World Economic Forum] panel on ‘equitable wealth distribution.’ Maybe he is asleep and must be awakened—with another bailout.” The irony might have been lost on him that Trump used bailouts to soften the impact of his tariff agenda in his first term and will probably do so again. So much for smashing idols!

Christianity really does preach a radical message about money. There is no getting around the Bible’s difficult teachings here, including in the Gospel of Matthew: “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.”

It is because of passages like this one that many Christians have taken vows of poverty or informally renounced worldly wealth for lives of faithful service in remote regions and backwater towns among the least of these. As George Eliot wrote in Middlemarch, “the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” Their witness, often invisible, reminds us of our higher, heavenly citizenship. To these men and women, we owe the deepest respect.

Yet even still, the eschatological vision of Christianity is not property-less bliss and content. The World Economic Forum might preach that “you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy,” but the prophet Micah promises that “everyone will sit under their own vine and fig tree, and no one will make them afraid.” At its best, the American experiment, and the American dream that was born of its fruits, anticipates this prophetic vision. (George Washington quoted it frequently throughout his letters).

The phrase “American dream” first came into broad usage during the Great Depression. Despite having persistent trade surpluses of the sort lauded by the current White House, this was a period of incredible economic hardship, a situation that was deeply exacerbated by tariffs.

It is no surprise that the American dream—“that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone,” according to its first popularizer—would gain traction when it did. Countless Americans were displaced from their own vine and fig tree, forced west in search of work at rates barely enough to make ends meet.

The American dream was born at a time when Americans were desperate for cheap, affordable goods like food, transportation, and shelter. Despite our relative prosperity, surveys show that Americans are feeling increasingly that same way today.

Americans then and now have a God-given desire for the security of their own vine and fig tree. Market tumbles and high prices from tariffs only push the American dream further out of reach, driving the inflation and deaths of despair that Donald Trump was re-elected to address. Rather than downplay this national desire or mock it as Mammon-worship, it is time for politicians and pundits to take it seriously.