There is a gate across this road. The modern man says, “I see no reason for it; let us remove it.” The wiser man says, “If you see no reason for it, I will not let you remove it. Go away and and think. When you can tell me why it is here, I may let you destroy it.”

The gate in question is the tariff - that sturdy, unglamorous, and often much-maligned barrier erected by the European Union to keep the flood of cheap Chinese steel from washing away the local foundries. To the economist, the tariff is a clumsy obstruction, a jagged piece of iron in the smooth machinery of global trade. To the consumer of European steel, it is a tax on progress, a way of making the very bones of industry more expensive and less accessible. The modern reformer looks at this tariff and sees only a wall that prevents the cheap and the plentiful from reaching the hungry. He sees a barrier to the “free” flow of goods, and he concludes that the barrier is an error.

But the man who looks only at the flow of goods forgets that a river without banks is not a river at all; it is merely a swamp. A river requires banks to give it direction, to give it force, and to keep it from drowning the very fields it is meant to irrigate. The tariff is the bank of the European industrial river. It was not built merely to be difficult; it was built to maintain a certain level of pressure, to ensure that the local industry does not simply evaporate into a mist of low-cost imports.

The tragedy of the modern intellectual is that he is often quite right about the cost of the fence, but entirely wrong about the purpose of the gate. He correctly observes that doubling the tariff to fifty percent will raise the price of steel for the European manufacturer. He is quite right that this will cause a certain amount of friction, a certain amount of heat, and perhaps even a certain amount of fire in the form of trade tensions with the East. He sees the cost, and because he sees the cost, he assumes there is no value. He treats the economy as a mathematical equation to be solved, rather than a living ecosystem to be tended.

The economist argues that if steel can be produced more cheaply elsewhere, we should let it be produced there. This is a magnificent piece of logic, provided one does not mind the disappearance of the people who used to make it. He treats the disappearance of a domestic industry as a mere change in a ledger, a shift from one column to another. But a nation is not a ledger; it is a collection of people, of skills, and of hearths. When a steel mill closes because it cannot compete with a subsidized giant from the East, the loss is not merely a loss of “output”; it is a loss of a way of life, a loss of a community’s anchor, and a loss of a piece of the continent’s very substance.

The paradox of the tariff is that by making the steel more expensive, it attempts to make the industry more permanent. It is an attempt to preserve the “expensive” reality of local production against the “cheap” illusion of global abundance. The reformer wants to remove the tariff because he wants things to be cheaper; the defender of the fence wants to keep the tariff because he wants things to be real.

We are told that this increase in tariffs is a defensive measure against “unfair” competition. The clever man scoffs at the word “unfair,” as if fairness were a sentimental whim rather than a structural necessity. He believes that competition is only valid when it is a race between equals. But he fails to see that the fence was built precisely because the competitors are not equals. To remove the fence in the face of an unequal force is not to promote competition; it is to facilitate a conquest.

The true danger is not that the tariff will raise prices - it is a well-known fact that it will. The danger is that in our haste to lower the cost of the metal, we may find ourselves with a world of cheap, easy, and plentiful steel, but with no one left in Europe who knows how to forge it. We may achieve a perfect, frictionless market, only to find that the market is a desert, and we are standing in the middle of it, admiring the low price of the sand.