At a U.S. Chamber of Commerce event today, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said the following:
But I think that we have pursued a really unfettered liberalization policy for the past many years and decades. And it is part of what has brought us to this current reality of very, very fragile supply chains.
I feel like I hear this kind of phrasing a fair amount: Liberalization has been "unfettered" in recent years, and that was a mistake. But I don't see how anyone can look at the following aspects of U.S. trade and economic policy and think of it as involving "unfettered liberalization":
- Ordinary tariffs in the U.S. tariff schedule
- Trade remedy tariffs (AD/CVD/safeguards)
- Regulatory protectionism such as the U.S. country of origin labelling for beef statute/regulation (not all country of origin labelling measures are protectionist, but this one was)
- Protectionist restrictions on international trade in many service sectors
- Buy America government procurement policies
- The Jones Act
I'm not even including here the Section 232 and Section 301 tariffs imposed under the Trump administration (because they are a bit anomalous), which obviously make things even worse.
So, while there has been liberalization in the last few years and decades, there have been plenty of fetters on it as well.
Maybe I'm being overly nitpicky here, and people are using "unfettered liberalization" just to mean "lots of liberalization," but I worry that the term creates a misimpression of what our actual trade policy has been, and that makes it more difficult to get policy right going forward.