Expecting free-market clarity from the Very Stable Genius is a fool's errand

A lot of good takes today on Trump's boneheaded conduct of the trade war with China, but perhaps the best comes from Eric Boehm at Reason.

In a series of tweets starting Friday and continuing over the weekend, President Donald Trump outlined a plan for the federal government to use tariff revenue to buy agricultural goods from American farmers and redistribute it to other parts of the world.

It is, well, a pretty wild idea.

 @realDonaldTrump

....The process has begun to place additional Tariffs at 25% on the remaining 325 Billion Dollars. The U.S. only sells China approximately 100 Billion Dollars of goods & products, a very big imbalance. With the over 100 Billion Dollars in Tariffs that we take in, we will buy.....

4:43 AM - 10 May 2019

....agricultural products from our Great Farmers, in larger amounts than China ever did, and ship it to poor & starving countries in the form of humanitarian assistance. In the meantime we will continue to negotiate with China in the hopes that they do not again try to redo deal!

4:43 AM - 10 May 2019

Though Trump has repeated this notion in a few other tweets, none of them go into much detail.

He seems to be proposing to use tax revenue paid by farmers—and by other Americans hurt by tariffs—to pay farmers to grow products they cannot sell, then to buy up the excess supply and spend more money shipping it to other countries where there is a demand for food.

If only there were some other mechanism for balancing supply and demand, right?

This Rube Goldberg–esque scheme is a good indicator of how convoluted Trump's trade war has become. Even before last week's ramp-up of U.S. tariffs and today's retaliatory action from China, the trade war was already warping international supply chains. Brazil, for example, was shipping more soybeans to China after China, the world's top consumer of soybeans, cut off imports of the crop from the United States. Brazil was sending so many soybeans to China that it actually had to import some from the U.S. to meet domestic demand.

Because trade, uh, finds a way.

And could that phenomenon of coming to resemble that which you oppose be at work here?

Paying farmers to grow crops that they won't be able to sell sounds a lot like something China would do . . .

And has the VSG thought about this?

. . . simply dumping American-grown agricultural goods into other countries would likely wreck local markets—and would probably violate World Trade Organization rules prohibiting such behavior.

Can Kudlow spin this?