Looking at tariffs on medicine and medical equipment, one might think that tariff policy is secretly controlled by Christian Scientists. In 1984, a West German company developed a lithotripter that destroys kidney stones by shock waves from outside the body. The new German machine was a vast improvement over existing methods of surgical removal of kidney stones. The high tariff strongly discouraged more American hospitals from importing the medically advanced German machine. Many deaths from kidney-stone surgery could have been avoided if American hospitals had not been deterred by the U.S. tariff code from quickly adopting this new technology.
Some high tariffs are remnants of previous trade wars.
U.S. tariff policy assumes that it is better to let the poor go hungry than to allow them to eat foreign food. Even though American companies did not produce the special fabric, ATMI thought some companies might choose to make the product if the tariff were kept high. A few more singed firemen is a small price to pay for the possibility that a domestic firm might deign to make a fabric already supplied by foreign companies. Tariffs are not merely a slight nuisance imposed by government clerks at the national borders. So far as foreigners are concerned it only indirectly affects their freedom to trade with that particular country, while to citizens of that country it is a direct curtailment of the freedom to trade with all the world.