It’s merit that should decide success, not political connections.
It’s merit that should decide success, not political connections.
A s basketball star Michael Jordan’s career wound down in the late 1990s, sports-marketing executives and fans began wondering who the “new Jordan” would be. But they were training their gaze on the wrong sport. The next huge star wasn’t gliding around a hard court; he was striding down fairways and digging his feet into sand traps. Soon, Tiger Woods was the toast of the sports world, bringing new fans from around the world to golf.
And when Woods suffered a string of self-inflicted catastrophes, the next sports luminary wasn’t swinging a club. She was hitting 30-foot jump shots, electrifying crowds with breathtaking passes. Because of Caitlin Clark, the WNBA’s attendance and ratings have skyrocketed, lifting all women’s sports to never-before-seen levels of popularity and financial success.
In sports, the only constant is unpredictability. There is no invisible hand guiding which players will be popular and which sports will continue to hold our attention.
Imagine if there had been a central planner in charge of determining who our next sports stars would be. They would have bet wrong virtually every time, suppressing the real talent the public actually wanted to see. As F. A. Hayek counseled in The Fatal Conceit, “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” And nobody could have seen what was coming in sports.
Sure, big-time athletics are far less complicated than the economy at large, even if they do work within a free marketplace. Nonetheless, the sports marketplace suggests the great things that can happen when innovation happens organically and not because government begins slathering favor on the entities it deems worthy.
President Trump, however, seems to view the free market as a game board on which he controls the pieces. His system would tell us how many dolls and pencils our kids can have, where our goods must be manufactured, and how much we should pay for each item. Trump’s dizzying tariff announcements throttle innovation and product development, injecting uncertainty into a functioning market. (To be clear, Caitlin Clark does not create products and Trump can’t thwart her development — the sports analogy takes imaginative liberties.)
Trump’s tariff regime operates like a velvet‑roped VIP line rather than a neutral border tax: firms must petition Washington for exemptions, unleashing a lobbying bonanza that lets the White House dispense carve‑outs to political friends or enemies looking to change their fortunes. For example, a 2024 analysis showed that companies aligned with Republican donors were markedly more likely to win waivers from tariffs imposed by Trump in his first term than those that backed Democrats. Want to be one of Trump’s “winners”? It’s going to cost you.
Take the Whirlpool example from Trump’s first administration: After the company lobbied for protection, Trump slapped tariffs of up to 50 percent on imported washing machines. Whirlpool boasted that this move created 200 Ohio jobs, but only after it nudged competitors’ prices skyward. By the following year, washers and dryers cost American shoppers roughly 12 percent more — about $90 per appliance.
When tariff threats become bargaining chips, capital flows toward influence instead of innovation, and consumers foot the bill for presidential favoritism — a textbook case of crony capitalism masquerading as “tough trade.”
Trump has even made noises about picking what movies we get to see. A few weeks ago he proposed a 100 percent tariff on movies filmed overseas. No one has yet figured out how this would even work, though it created yet more uncertainty as to where the president’s tariff journey may take us.
The chaos isn’t just expensive; it’s paralyzing. Business plans die in limbo because managers don’t know whether the next presidential tweet will turn their imported component into contraband. Entrepreneurship thrives on certainty — on contracts you can price six months out, not on coin‑flip proclamations from a Truth Social post. A craft brewery in Austin can’t hedge aluminum costs as deftly as Anheuser‑Busch; instead, it passes the pain to customers or kills the dream of expanding to the next neighborhood.
Free markets are messy. But laissez‑faire messiness is exactly what breeds spectacular surprises. When merit, rather than political connections or government intervention, is the primary consideration, the market creates unexpected benefits for citizens.
Trump’s tariffs, by contrast, are messiness without the magic: higher prices, stunted choice, and a bureaucrat’s thumb smudging the scoreboard.