Scratch a Free-Trader, Find a Protectionist

My wife and I joined a gym. I haven’t belonged to a gym for decades. The last time I joined a gym, I was barely out of high school, and never exercised there. I only joined so I could sit in their sauna when I had a hangover, which was often enough. But since then, constant physical labor has been my only exercise. Our new digs don’t allow for that, so we have to pay other people to let us to lift heavy objects, which strikes me as backwards somehow. Oh well.

It’s a trip, the gym is. The people run the gamut. I like gamuts and like to see them run. In addition to seeing the bizarre sartorial choices of the workout clothes, there are banks of giant teevee screens everywhere, with the sound turned down so you can hear Eye of the Tiger and similar organized noises piped in over the muzak speakers. The patrons double down on the visual and audio cacophony by jamming waxy earbuds into their heads and clutching phones. Everyone seems to want bedlam inside their head at all times.

The teevees are tuned to one of three stations. The first station is some kind of sports jibberjabber. Extreme closeups from a webcam looking up Charles Barkley’s nose with the sound off can be somewhat unsettling. I’m guessing he thought it was turrrble, though, because he thinks most things are. The chyrons crawled across the screen and wondered why a good team traded their good player to the bad team for a bag of balls and a bad player to be named later. I’ll bet Las Vegas and the networks don’t wonder.

The second teevee feed might actually have programming, I’m not sure. I’ve never noticed any, but I’m not sure how many seconds of show you get in an hour of commercials these days. It seemed like an endless stream of pitches for stairlifts, motorized wheelchair things to help you desolate the aisles in the dollar stores, hearing aids, and various pharmaceuticals that promised to give you things or take things away, or both, if you needed it. It struck me as a strange choice to display to people lifting weights and running in place. There but for the grace of gym membership go I, perhaps is the thinking.

The third choice was Chicken Noodle News, something I haven’t seen since the anchor women had big hair and shoulder pads in their dresses. There was no sound, but it was obviously a 24/7 non-stop diatribe against the latest tariffs that were placed on Canada and Mexico (oops, the Mexican ones were removed while I was typing this). As is predictable, this policy was being touted as uniformly bad for God, Country, and Mother, and would of course have us all gleaning straw in the fields to try to make our bread and bricks in no time. It’s par for the course that any major news outlet would beg the question on tariffs, because they beg every question. But the tariff one struck me as funny, because I knew every man-jack of the tariff-haters secretly love tariffs.

The dictionary definition of a tariff is a tax imposed by a government or a supranational union on the import or export of goods. This has been expanded to include things like services and other stuff. This arrangement of funding the government and protecting American industry and residents suited the United States just fine for about 150 years, but somehow now even broaching the topic is verboten. But  I can help but notice that the same people who say it’s verboten just call it something else, and wallow in tariffs every chance they get.

The United States is, essentially, 50 different countries acting supranationally. And every time one of those individual governments gets a chance, they raise taxes on the other state’s citizens to avoid taxing their own. Let’s look at my home state of Maine:

About 75% of tolls collected on the Maine Turnpike are paid by out-of-state drivers

Approximately 60% of Maine’s hotel taxes are paid by out-of-state residents.

Around 70% of the car rental taxes in Maine are paid by out-of-state residents

This is not happenstance. When tax bills are discussed, politicians openly and gleefully testify that these taxes are intended to soak people from other states. Because screw them, that’s why. If out-of-staters want in, they have to pay.

We’re pikers, so to speak, compared to nearby New Hampshire. The New Hampshire Turnpike is just a 16-mile section of interstate I-95 that you use to get from Massachusetts to Maine. It serves no other purpose, and it wasn’t built by New Hampshire, either. Upwards of 70% of the tolls collected at the two(!) New Hampshire toll plazas are paid by out-of-staters. That number is kind of a lie, anyway, it’s closer to 100%, because New Hampshire has a program to give you a credit for your tolls if you’re a resident of the Live Free, or Else state.

The tolls aren’t cheap. It costs $2.50 to transit N.H. in a car. About 70 million vehicles stop and pay those tolls every year. A back of the envelope calculation for what it would cost to build a mile of superhighway would be somewhere between 3 and 10 million dollars per mile. So you could destroy and rebuild the entire 16-mile stretch of I-95 in New Hampshire every year, with plenty left over. I believe tearing up the entire highway system every year has been tried in Connecticut, but they never get around to the rebuilding part that I’ve seen.

Scratch a free-trader, find a protectionist. Simple access to the population of a polity is definitely tariffable, and quite popular. If you want access to our ticks, our slush, our black flies, our $20 lobster rolls, our red hot dogs, and all the other fine things Maine has to offer, be prepared to pay. But since Maine is the only continental state that has only one state on its borders, be prepared to be held hostage by New Hampshire first.