If you’re in the market for “cheap rooftop solar panels,” you might have to reconsider. The Commerce Department has slapped “tariffs ranging from about 34 to nearly 47 percent on most solar panels imported from” China.
Tariffs, quotas, anti-dumping penalties, or any other trade barrier, force the American consumer to subsidize less efficient local industries, making him the poorer for it. Hundreds of industries—“the burgeoning business of installing cheap rooftop solar panels,” for example—are destined to shrink or go under in order to keep local, politically efficient industries in the lap of luxury.
This is not in the interest of the American consumer and it violates his freedom of contract and association.
The meddlers in Commerce had “determined that Chinese companies were benefiting from unfair government subsidies and were selling their products in the United States below the cost of production, a practice known as dumping.”
Dumping is good for American consumers. Antidumping penalties are typically imposed by the West on poorer nations to stop them from selling their wares bellow market prices. Such protectionist policies are detrimental to less- developed and Third-World countries, which gain advantage through the use of one of the only resources they have, their labor.
The US flouts freedom when it meddles in the affairs of the Chinese and the US consumer. The latter loves cheap Chinese products.