The Free Traders Have It Backwards: America Doesn’t Need the World for Quality
The next time you order a pint of hazy double IPA, you can thank the diversity, dynamism, and competitiveness of the American economy.
Scott Burns of Texas Christian University and Caleb Fuller of Grove City College, writing in the Wall Street Journal, want you to believe this was made possible by foreign competition—that Americans only learned to brew good beer because Heineken and Stella showed us the way or posed a competitive threat to domestic brewers. They even make the outlandish claim: “Most brewmasters will tell you this improvement was spurred by foreign competition, not protectionist pampering.”
We’re pretty sure they didn’t truly ask any actual American brewmasters who built the craft beer revolution about that. If they did, they would have heard a very different story. America’s beer revolution was a home-brewed affair. In the 1970s, a handful of giants dominated U.S. beer. Then regional breweries and microbreweries exploded across the country, fighting for tap handles and shelf space. Out of that domestic ferment came the most innovative beer culture on earth: hazy IPAs, barrel-aged stouts, sours, craft lagers. And all this happened despite the relatively small market share and regulations that shielded U.S. producers from European competition.
Quality didn’t arrive in a shipping container. It was born of the competition that only a vast, wealthy internal market can sustain and only a dynamic, experimental, supply-side oriented economy can produce.
The U.S. Is Already The World’s Largest Free Trade Zone
And this is where Burns and Fuller’s argument collapses. The U.S. economy produces about $28 to $29 trillion a year—roughly the same size as all the world’s exports combined. Our GDP is one quarter of all the world’s output. Imports might add variety at the margins or bring in goods that foreign producers are especially good at producing, but they aren’t crucial to bringing quality products to American consumers.
Free-trade theory says countries should stick to what they have a “comparative advantage” in—coffee for Colombia, wine for France, cars for Germany. That tidy model might work for small, specialized economies. It doesn’t fit America.
The U.S. is a continental economy with every climate, resource, and skill base. We grow olives and cranberries—crops that never overlap anywhere else on earth. We make semiconductors and soybeans, airplanes and avocados. That’s not comparative advantage. It’s comprehensive advantage. Our economy is so large and diverse that the neat Ricardian trade story collapses. We have the domestic capital and labor to make quality products at a scale and variety unknown to history or the rest of the world. We don’t need to specialize in one niche to be efficient. Our domestic market is big enough to support competition and quality across the board.
That’s why the classic free-trade story holds for smaller nations but not for the United States. France, Canada, South Korea, Britain—all depend on imports to get variety and quality. America doesn’t. Our economy functions as its own internal world market, where competition drives the innovation that Burns and Fuller claim only comes from foreign trade. That flips the free-traders’ story on its head. They argue we need access to the world to ensure quality. In fact, it’s the other way around: the rest of the world’s consumers would see their lives vastly improved by better access to American products. Their consumers are hurt by their protectionism. They should open their markets to the U.S. even as we raise our own tariffs.
Which, actually, is what is happening, thanks to President Trump’s trade policies and the trade negotiations led by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer.
Tariffs Preserve Competition
Free traders insist tariffs mean “you pay more for worse products.” But here’s where their own argument turns on them: if competition drives quality, then we need competitive domestic industries. Let foreign producers—often state-subsidized monopolies—wipe out American competitors, and you get exactly what Burns and Fuller warn against: a lack of competition leading to lower quality and higher prices. Except now we’re dependent on foreign suppliers with no domestic alternative.
Tariffs don’t eliminate competition. They preserve it. They ensure American industries survive long enough to compete, innovate, and improve inside the world’s largest market. Without them, you don’t get free-market competition—you get foreign monopolies selling us whatever they want at whatever price they choose.
Raise a pint of beer. Drizzle olive oil on your roast chicken. Break out the cranberry sauce. Only in America can all of these be high-quality domestic products.
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