MICHAEL WALSH: Tariffs Aren’t the Issue.

All the fuss and geschrei over Donald Trump’s Great Tariff War really is much ado about nothing — but it’s also about everything.

To begin, what it’s not about is tariffs. What it is about is repatriating American manufacturing and thereby restoring Great Power status to the U.S.A. Tariffs are merely the mechanism by which to get the ball rolling. Adam Smith’s hidden hand is about to come roaring back into play.

The naysaying Left — which never met a tax hike it didn’t love — has jumped on tariffs as a “tax,” which of course they are. A tax on foreign-made goods coming into the country. A tax that — unlike most taxes — you can avoid by not buying the product. The U.S. managed to get along perfectly well from the presidencies of George Washington to that of William Howard Taft (a “progressive,” along with Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson) financed by tariffs and excise taxes, with only occasional, and temporary, taxes on income.

It was not until the passage of the 16th amendment in 1913, during the Wilson administration — the first of the “progressive era” amendments that also included the 17th, 18th, and 19th, all of which need to be repealed; one down three to go — that the notion of taxing labor, previously and correctly deemed unconstitutional, reared its inhuman, statist head. And practically from that day on, America plunged into a debt spiral from which it has never recovered.