“Our trade policy rests firmly on the foundation of free and open markets,” said President Ronald Reagan in 1986. Thirty years later President Donald Trump tweeted, “The word TARIFF is a beautiful word indeed.” His administration imposed—to cheers from parts of the GOP—tariffs of as much as 50% on steel, aluminum, and an array of Chinese goods. After being the party of free trade for almost four decades, some Republicans need a refresher course on the dangers of protectionism.

Republicans undoubtedly consider the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act to be the crowning achievement of the Trump era. Yet many who heralded its pro-growth tax relief for working families now support tax increases on these same families in the form of tariffs. Numerous studies have shown that almost all the costs of tariffs initiated under the Trump administration were paid by American consumers and businesses. To take one example, the median price of a washing machine increased by $86 within months after President Trump imposed tariffs on them. According to the American Action Forum, Mr. Trump’s tariffs combined have increased consumer costs by approximately $51 billion a year.

Some tax cut.

Today the concern of most blue-collar workers isn’t the loss of their jobs to foreign competition, it’s the loss of buying power from a shrinking paycheck and historic inflation. I doubt many “elites” shop at Walmart, but working people do. Though the Bentonville, Ark.-based retailer doesn’t advertise the fact, Walmart remains the nation’s largest importer. The Zebco fishing rods Walmart sells are produced in China; the cowboy-cut Wrangler jeans likely come from Bangladesh. Walmart’s shelves are stocked with tons of affordable foreign-produced goods that help working families make ends meet. Tariffs make those products more expensive.

Washington has legitimate concerns over the safety and reliability of supply chains running through China. Even Adam Smith mentioned national-security exceptions to the free-trade rule in The Wealth of Nations. But many companies are in the process of relocating their supply chains. Additional pro-growth tax and regulatory policies would likely spur even more to do so. A host of export controls, foreign direct investment approvals and defense procurement requirements exist to meet the threat China poses. But the national-defense argument remains one of the most abused in Congress and shouldn’t become a pretext for abandoning free trade in favor of industrial policy, corporate welfare and protectionism, all of which harm economic growth and innovation.

In most respects the Trump tariffs on Chinese goods failed. The trade deficit, which remains a misleading statistic, actually increased during the Trump administration. Any decrease in the U.S. trade deficit with China was offset by increases in deficits with other countries. Further, two can play the tariff game. Ask the Midwestern farmers who suffered from China’s retaliatory tariffs and had to be bailed out with $12 billion in subsidies from the U.S. Treasury. It could not be clearer that tariffs did nothing to reduce China’s military saber-rattling, human-rights abuses or carbon footprint.

For some Republicans, the loss of manufacturing jobs to foreign facilities has made protectionism seem attractive. Manufacturing employment as a percentage of the workforce has decreased dramatically since 1980. While some communities have struggled with this transition, these jobs have largely been replaced with service ones. That doesn’t mean low-pay employment like burger flipping, but rather jobs in fields such as healthcare, tech, communications and finance. The U.S. is the world’s No. 1 exporter of services and runs a surplus in services trade.

Foreign competition isn’t killing U.S. manufacturing jobs. Productivity is the culprit. According to the American Iron and Steel Institute, it took 10.1 hours to produce a ton of steel in 1980; today it takes only 1.5 hours. While there are fewer manufacturing jobs than there were 40 years ago, the ones that remain pay better because of productivity gains. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the median income of blue-collar workers in manufacturing increased 50% in inflation-adjusted terms between 1960 and 2019.

The reality is that tariffs harm most manufacturing jobs. Roughly 60% of all goods imported are intermediary goods or materials used for domestic manufacturing, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Many pipeline-manufacturing companies import specialty casings for oil and gas projects. How ironic for any Republican to call for an “all of the above” energy policy yet support making hydrocarbons more difficult and expensive to produce through protectionism.

Republicans love to talk about “draining the swamp” in Washington. But the tariffs imposed by the Trump administration empowered hundreds of bureaucrats at the Commerce Department and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to grant waivers under what can at best be described as an opaque process with discretionary standards. As one company officer of a small pipeline manufacturer told National Public Radio in 2019, applying for a waiver “is a nightmare, like dealing with a lawyer and the IRS at the same time.” A schedule of tariffs doesn’t drain the swamp. It fills it with well-connected lawyers and lobbyists who know how to work the system.

The most important argument for free trade has nothing to do with economics. It has everything to do with securing “the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” In other words, it’s about freedom. Fundamentally, trade should not be viewed as a discretionary foreign policy but as an individual right. If the GOP stands for freedom of speech, free enterprise and the freedom to bear arms, it should again unequivocally stand for free trade.