Safeguard Duty on Hot Rolled Flat Sheets - Is it a mistake?
AS reported in DDT yesterday, the Government had imposed safeguard duty on Hot Rolled flat sheets and plates. This move has a critic in distant London. Tim Worstal, a Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London wrote in Forbes,
Again, I insist, the wrong thing to be doing. Why it happens is well known. The producers are a small number of people but a small number of people who are very, very, interested in being protected from competition. The users of steel are everyone in the country. Who are only very mildly interested in the price of steel. Sure, we all use some every day but if the price of steel doubled, or halved, it would make very, very, little difference to us. A refrigerator might cost $5 more or something and how often do we buy one of those? But those steel producers are very, very, interested in this price. And it is always true in politics that a concentrated interest will defeat a dispersed one. Thus producers generally win on the subject of trade tariffs and consumers lose.
All of which is why we've got to decry this protectionism each and every time we see it. We're supposed to be running the economy in the interests of the consumers, not the producers. And no tariffs, yea in the face of cheap imports, even dumping, benefits consumers. Thus we should never have tariffs against imports, no matter how much the producers complain and whine.