Donald Trump doing the right thing on trade

The Review Journal’s Oct. 7 editorial regarding the many benefits of economic freedom was, for the most part, spot on. But even though President Donald Trump has been hard at work tearing down the economic barriers President Barack Obama put up, you couldn’t resist throwing in a barb at Mr. Trump. Specifically, you blame him for a “penchant for triggering trade wars.” I am surprised the writer did not see the inherent contradiction of such a statement.

The United States has run a trade deficit for 43 straight years. In other words, our trading partners, as a group, have imposed more barriers to importing goods and services from the United States than we have imposed on them. In a perfect world, where no trade barriers existed, trade between countries would be a zero-sum game where each country’s gain or loss would be balanced by the gains and losses of its trading partners.

As previously stated, the United States has had a trade deficit for 43 straight years. The odds of that happening randomly in a perfect world is incomprehensibly large. Furthermore, the fact that our trade deficit has been in the hundreds of billions of dollars proves mathematically the trade barriers put up by our partners compared to the barriers we have are grossly unbalanced in favor of our trading partners.