Howard Lutnick Doesn't Get To Decide What You Buy

There is no "royal we" in the marketplace.

Every day, thousands of transactions take place in which Americans and Canadians consent to exchange currency for goods.

Treasury Secretary Howard Lutnick thinks there is someone they forgot to ask.

"We don't want to buy 60 percent of our aluminum from Canada," Lutnick explained during an interview with Fox News on Thursday. "We want to bring [aluminum production] to America."

Lutnick's phrasing there is pretty telling. There is no "royal we" in the marketplace—that Canadian aluminum is not being bought by the federal government, but by private American businesses, which are making deals with private companies on the other side of the border.

There is, indeed, no reason to think about those transactions in a nationalist way at all. The economy is not a World Cup match. When Canadian companies exchange their aluminum for American companies' money, both sides win.

About 60 percent of the aluminum used by American companies to make all manner of products comes from Canada. That should be none of Lutnick's business. In fact, no one should have to give a flying fuck what the commerce secretary—a position that really shouldn't even exist—thinks about where American businesses source their aluminum (or any other product). What happened to the days when Republicans believed businesses should be free from interference from Washington?

What Lutnick is talking about is central planning, plain and simple. It's also just silly. How much of America's aluminum supply should come from Canada if not 60 percent? Is 50 percent the right amount? Is it 17.54 percent? Lutnick doesn't know—because no one does—because that's a question without an answer.

Clearly, however, the Trump administration wants the figure to be lower. New 25 percent tariffs on aluminum imports might accomplish that, but at significant cost to American consumers and businesses, whose only offense is buying aluminum from sources located within a country that is a close American ally and the signatory of a trade deal that the current president negotiated just five years ago.

Lutnick's message, in essence, is that none of that matters if the current set of elected and appointed officials in Washington suddenly decide otherwise. That's a deeply flawed way to run both an economy and a government.

Later, in that same Fox News interview, Lutnick asked whether Americans should be doing business in Canada at all. "Why are we doing all this business in Canada if they're not respectful and thankful?"

There's that "we" again.

As for the answer to his question, I'd suggest he read up on Adam Smith, who famously wrote that "it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." That's true even when the butcher is an aluminum smelter located in another country.

America doesn't need Canada to thank us for doing business with them. (How would that even work? Does the whole country have to sign a giant card? And how often must one be sent?)

And the country certainly doesn't need Lutnick deciding what can be bought and sold, and in what amounts. "We" will always be better off when businesses and consumers can buy and sell across borders freely.