Public Statement in Favor of Free Trade and Against Tariffs

America’s prosperity is today, as it has always been, rooted in principles of entrepreneurship and voluntary economic exchange. For 250 years, the United States of America has demonstrated to the world that a people left free to innovate and produce for themselves, and for all who trade with them, will enjoy increasing abundance, higher standards of living, and greater security both economically and militarily.

Since taking office in 2025, the Trump Administration has adopted steep protective tariffs by unilateral executive decrees. These measures have injected uncertainty and chaos into the global economy through wildly fluctuating rates and ever-changing orders. Cumulatively, they impose the largest tax increase on trade in almost a century. The proponents of tariffs portray these measures as acts of ‘economic liberation.’ Instead, tariffs invert the principles of liberty that ushered in an American-led age of human freedom and prosperity.

America’s Founding Fathers rejected the bestowing of political favors and the imposition of Mercantilism. In his instructions to Virginia delegates to the Continental Congress in 1774, Thomas Jefferson urged them to stand for the American colonists’ right to “the exercise of a free trade with all parts of the world.” Two years later, the Declaration of Independence enumerated the causes that impelled those colonies to revolution, among them a protest against King George III “For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world.”

This is from “Trade and Tariffs Declaration: A Statement on the Principles of American Prosperity.” Some economists led by Don Boudreaux and Phil Magness put it together. My contribution was to find a few typos and to get 3 of the main economists listed, and one of the others further down on the list, to sign.

Read the whole thing. You can also sign on if you’re a bona fide economist. Some other academics, e.g., in philosophy, history, and political science, are also listed.

If you aren’t in the categories above, you can support without being listed.

By the way, usually when I sign such statements, I pretty much know everything in them before reading them. But one big surprise I got was to learn the number in the following:

The American economy is a global economy that uses nearly two thirds of its imports as inputs for domestic production.