Two hundred and fifty years ago, a collection of farmers and merchants got fed up. The British Crown had rigged the game against them, flooded their markets with goods they couldn’t compete against, extracted their resources, and used economic dependency like a leash. So they did something radical. They didn’t form a committee or draft a petition asking nicely for reform. They declared independence and fought for it.
We’re facing something eerily similar today, except the enemy isn’t wearing red coats. It’s the Chinese Communist Party, and they’ve been waging economic warfare against us for decades while we stood around debating the finer points of free trade theory.
Here’s the thing about free trade. It works beautifully when everyone’s playing by the same rules. You need private companies chasing profits, prices that actually reflect production costs, and competition that rewards whoever makes the best product most efficiently. That’s the deal. That’s what we signed up for when we opened our markets to the world.
China never signed that deal. They just let us think they did.
The CCP’s entire industrial strategy is built on cheating. I’m not being hyperbolic here. They subsidize their industries with amounts that would make even our most wasteful government programs blush. They artificially suppress the cost of everything (land, energy, capital, labor) so their manufacturers can undercut any legitimate competitor. They force foreign companies into joint ventures where the price of entry is handing over your technology and intellectual property. Then they flood global markets with goods sold at prices no private company operating under actual market conditions could ever match.
This isn’t competition. Competition implies both sides have a chance to win based on merit. What China’s doing is systematic elimination. They pick a sector, pour state resources into it regardless of profitability, crush all competitors through predatory pricing, and then dominate that market. Rinse and repeat. We’ve watched it happen in steel, solar panels, telecommunications equipment, and countless other industries.
The old Washington crowd keeps having the wrong argument. They debate whether we should protect American industries from foreign competition, as if that’s what’s happening here. But the CCP isn’t a foreign competitor. It’s a communist government using the full power of the state to destroy our industrial base sector by sector while we tie our own hands behind our backs in the name of free market purity.
You know what’s not free market? Letting a communist dictatorship weaponize trade against you while you pretend it’s just healthy competition. That’s not principled. That’s stupid.
Our Founders understood something we’ve forgotten. Economic independence and political independence are inseparable. You can’t remain free if someone else controls your supply chains, manufactures your medicines, dominates your critical technologies, and holds leverage over your economy. The British tried that approach and our ancestors fought a war over it.
We don’t need a war now, but we desperately need that same renegade spirit. We need to stop pretending that our relationship with China is anything resembling free trade. It’s not. It never was. We’ve been getting played while our intellectual class wrote papers about comparative advantage and the beauty of global markets.
The solution isn’t complicated, though it’ll take courage. We need to rebuild our industrial capacity here at home. We need to stop allowing American companies to hand over our technological crown jewels for access to Chinese markets. We need tariffs that reflect the real cost of doing business with a state that cheats systematically. And we need to accept that economic security is national security.
Some will call this protectionism. Fine. Call it whatever makes you comfortable. But if protecting American workers, American innovation, and American sovereignty from a communist government’s economic warfare is protectionism, then sign me up. I’ll wear that label proudly.
Our Founders pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to break free from economic manipulation by a distant power. The least we can do is muster the courage to acknowledge what’s happening and respond accordingly. China’s counting on us being too timid, too invested in outdated theories, or too corrupted by their money to fight back.
Let’s prove them wrong.
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