American Lent: The Metaphysics of Import Duties
Giving up something that is good for you is not really what Lent is all about
Lent is a good time to think about what is important and what is not. The forty days before Easter serve to remind Christians to get their priorities straight. What do we value in our lives, what impedes us on our path to becoming a better human being, and what can we do without?
This year, the humble Marco Rubio, U.S. Secretary of State, kick-started the period of soul searching by appearing on national television to declare that the U.S. would give up Ukraine for Lent. Wearing the tell-tale sign of an Ash Wednesday cross on his forehead, the practicing Catholic declared that it was time to end the “proxy war between the United States and Russia” and give the aggressor what he wanted: Ukrainian surrender. Of course he phrased in coded diplomatic language, although the bit about “proxy war” was in there, just to make sure the Kremlin understood that he, Rubio, digs Kremlin-speak.
Marco Rubio, the U.S. Secretary of State, on Ash Wednesday, March 5, 2025
His boss, the faithful Mr. Trump, was all along for giving up Ukraine, Lent or no Lent, stating repeatedly that with him in office, the war would not have started in the first place because he, Trump, “loves Russia” and would have made sure that not a single bullet would have found its way to the defenders of freedom which in turn would have likely made it possible for Putin to install a puppet in Kyiv.
Not to be outdone by his acolyte Rubio, Trump decided he had to give up something for Lent, too. No, we are not talking about Greenland where JD Vance was told last weekend to give up the island before he had a chance to “get” it, to use the word his real estate chief likes a lot. Had Vance succeeded in “getting” Greenland and then given it up, he would have outdone the President by a factor of almost four: Greenland’s landmass is 2,166,086 square kilometers (836,330 sq mi) versus Ukraine’s 603,700 square kilometers (233,100 sq mi). I think we could assume that Trump would not have liked his Number Two to give up four times as much land – and the mineral rights that go with it – as he was willing to do without in Eastern Europe.
Trump has decided he needed to give up something much larger than Ukraine and Greenland combined. We never hear Trump speak about his sins, nor do we catch him reflecting on the good deeds omitted. But judging by what he has decided to give up, he must have done a lot of reflecting and concluded that his atonement must be commensurate with his numerous missteps in and out of Office, and in the bedroom. To give up something for Lent to become a better human being, and a better President at that, is not something to be taken lightly. IT MUST BE BIG. Big is beautiful, in Trump’s world, and it must hurt. Better yet, it must hurt a lot, which is to say it must hurt other people so that they feel his remorse and his earnestness in giving up something big for Lent. His atonement must be the people’s atonement. The whole world must feel the hurt and understand that he is serious about giving up something dear to all people, like their jobs.
Half-way through Lent, Trump announced that he would let every country on earth know on April 2nd how much he expects everyone to suffer for his atonement. In his usual reversal of meaning, he called it “Liberation Day.” We do not know what sins he may have committed or which good deeds he may have omitted. We will never be certain what compelled him to feel so much remorse. His demonstrative attempt to come clean in the White House Rose Garden, however, underlined his dead-seriousness about giving up something meaningful for Lent, like good relations with Canada, Mexico, and the European Union. What Trump does not understand, however, is that Lent is not about giving up something that’s good for you, it’s at best about giving up something harmful, like aping dictators for example.
Trump has a way of turning things on their head. Instead of giving up bad things and bad habits, the President decided he could easily do without good things.
Here is a list of what the President decided he – and the rest of us by implication – could do without:
1. Common sense (or what is left of it)
2. The high moral ground
3. Open debate
4. Respect for neighbors (and himself!)
5. Wisdom
6. Moderate views
7. Sound judgment
8. Humility
9. Decency
10. …. FREE TRADE (or at least low tariffs)
Number 10 has been in the news a lot lately, and the announcement of significantly higher tariffs for goods made in friendly countries (while sparing Russia completely) sent the stock market nosediving Stuka-like to inflict maximum damage on all of us, directly or indirectly.
Numbers 1 through 9 preceded number 10 both chronologically and in terms of creating the conditions for the bottom to fall out of international trade. Nobody gets up one morning and decides that it would be a fine day to impose a 20 percent tariff on the EU without having first abandoned numbers 1 through 9 over a long period of time. Stupid decisions have a DNA of their own. It takes time to think up evil stuff. It requires a special mindset to inflict harm on others and it comes with its own wicked gestation period.
The way we usually think about Lent is the other way around. People serious about introspection and open to self-improvement will first look at their motives before acting on impulse. They may spend a good amount of time questioning their inner moral fortitude and searching for character weaknesses before launching important initiatives. But that is not Trump.
Had Trump done some soul searching, he would have had to admit that his motives were borne of ill-will rather than what he professed his reasons were. It could not have been about the American worker, and much less about the American consumer, but about seeking to satisfy his big ego. Of course, the history books will make him immortal, but they will not remember him as a President whose decisions were preceded by much introspection. Rather, his impulses will be remembered as actions rooted in vengeance, retaliation, and malignancy. Add stupidity, please.
Trump should have recapped Econ 101 and rediscovered what he must have learned at one point in his life (at Wharton perhaps?): The U.S. economy is largely a service economy driven by gigantic consumer demand. It is, by comparison to Europe, not predominantly a manufacturing economy. It has not been for a long time and it cannot reclaim a strong manufacturing culture anytime soon, no matter how high the tariff walls may be. The U.S. lost the top manufacturing position to China in 2010. According to the National Association of Manufacturers, the U.S. still employed 12,765,000 workers in manufacturing out of a total workforce of 170.7 million people as of February 2025, compared to the EU where 32,128,400 out of 199 million employees held manufacturing jobs. That translates into a ratio of only 7.5% of Americans working in manufacturing compared to 16.14% of the EU workforce in the same sector.
In other words, Europe’s industrial base is about twice that of the United States. The new tariffs will not change that dramatically because strengths and weaknesses on both sides of the Atlantic have been steadily reinforced in a climate of liberally sharing the fruits of respective skills since World War Two. Americans have become used to buying foreign quality goods that they cannot manufacture to comparable standard. Europeans have profited from an American consumer driven economy strong in services that has been willing to pay top dollar for European manufactured products.
Higher tariffs by themselves will not change the dynamic currently entrenched. As in Lent, and by analogy, sustainable change requires reflection and preparation. If you want manufacturing jobs to come back to the U.S., you will have to change stubborn habits and a deeply ingrained work culture.
Foreign visitors with an eye for the subtle stuff will soon discover that the American soul is less keen on manufacturing than on providing services, retailing, entertainment, information technology, and finance. To be sure, Americans have awed the world with its industrial prowess and innovation. During colonial times, the Yankees of New England found out that standardizing the production of rifles and shoes would keep your army going, at a great advantage, while saving on cost and time spent on each item. Also, and this is crucial, standardization provided an acceptable quality made by people who did not require years of journeyman training.
As the country grew, so did its consumer base, and reliable mass products were just what people wanted. Sacrificing some quality for the sake of an unbeatable price, the American consumer grew accustomed to standardized household items sold by the millions. All of us owe a great deal to U.S. manufacturing-prowess that churned out a liberty ship once a week and airplanes, trucks, and tanks by the tens of thousands within a very short span of time when Europe was in danger of losing something far more important than its manufacturing base: its freedom.
But much has changed since then.
When I was seventeen, I wanted to be a foreign exchange student in America. After a long wait, I was accepted and thrilled beyond words. It was a dream come true. In my application letter I wrote that I wanted to see what life in a “superpower” would be like. In 1974, the cold-war term superpower sounded exciting and I half expected that people would be walking around with a special superpower demeanor. But they did not. I also expected them to work hard at maintaining that special status, but everyday life seemed strangely un-superpower. It was the most relaxed year of my life, and I loved it.
When Theodore Roosevelt had talked about the strenuous life at the onset of modern American imperialism, he had in mind that greatness was a burden, an obligation resting on the shoulders of each citizen who would not dare take it lightly.
Seventy years later, and after two world wars, the strenuous life had failed to produce a special superpower feeling, at least it did not in my high school heart.
There were a few things, though, that I noticed early on and that I think are relevant to Trump giving up things he never owned for Lent.
American wealth seemed based on very cheap and abundant energy, readily available natural resources, and a steady flow of skilled immigrants. In my previous experience, wealth was the result of conserving energy, strong innovation, and adding value to imported raw materials. The key was education and training.
I was stunned to see that public education in the United States, the superpower I admired, was not primarily designed around the need to leverage human resources to create the skills needed to maintain superpower status. Public high schools in the United States did not foster the mindset needed to prevail in international manufacturing competition. High school was fun, and I enjoyed every minute of it. For the first time in my life, I actually loved going to school. I never would have thought that high school could be fun. In my mind, I had associated school with a duty linked to the best of my abilities. But in America, school was self-fulfillment and social. To me, fun was a foreign word, with many sinful connotations, none of which were conducive to producing high-quality manufactured products.
In Europe, going to school university bound was hard work involving long hours, high pressure, and a competitive environment – much like real life in a culture that valued its high-quality precision manufacturing. My school in Europe began at 7:20 am and let out as late as 6:00 pm, followed by homework often until 11 pm. Our son, age 17, is going through it now, though at his school they start at 8 am. Generally, I go to bed at 11 pm when he is still doing homework. Some of his peers in industrial apprenticeship training begin their workday at 7 am, with only five weeks of vacation – per year. Despite what you might have heard JD Vance say about lazy Europeans, our young people do not get three months off in the summer, away from valuable training time. They are at the factory, learning to operate precision lathes that require years of concentrated training.
One more thing I noticed that in my mind would not translate into success in the industrial world. To me, Americans’ sense of place and time seemed casually approximate. Boundaries seemed fluid and time consensual rather than given objectively. In other words, it about drove me crazy at first when nobody could tell me exactly what time it was (back then, in 1974, before smartphones had us shackled in their own insidious ways). I got used to it, alright, and I admit that it was liberating to structure the day in more-or-less terms rather than suffering the guilt-ridden hyperventilation for leaving the house one minute late which could mean you’d miss the train that would rarely be a minute behind schedule.
But industrial prowess is all about precision in space and time. Exactness is an attitude first and relentless practice second. Developing a mindset that is conducive to high performance industrial output requires structure, discipline, and focus. You might say it requires pain in almost masochistic terms, and I would not blame you for reaching such a conclusion. Those are walls far more formidable than Trumpian tariffs and I doubt America would change its ways in any significant ways.
It could, but it will not. American students (and many teachers) love their summers off, their sports, their fun, their pocket money from small jobs that go nowhere, and hanging out together or, sadly, increasingly alone glued to smartphones made in China.
If you look at the countries hit hardest by Trump’s “retaliatory” tariffs, there is an eerie correlation between the amount of duty imposed and the rigors of training required of individuals to succeed in their respective country. The table below speaks volumes and should give pause to Trump and his number crunchers at the Department of Commerce. It could be the starting point for serious Lent reflection, and provide hints at how to usher in a period of American industrial renaissance. Hint number one: It does not start with tariffs.
Tariffs imposed:
China 34%
Taiwan 32%
Switzerland 32%
India 26%
South Korea 25%
Japan 24%
European Union 20%
To be fair, there are countries with even higher tariffs (Cambodia 49%, Vietnam 46%), but they are not in a league with the industrial powers above and their higher tariffs are calculated based on the trade deficit they run with the United States. Switzerland, for its part, abolished 99% of all duties on American products early last year already. Better yet, the Swiss government has said today (April 4, 2025) that it will not retaliate in kind and stick to its no tariff policy. That’s great news. Not that it matters much; getting the Swiss to buy a Maytag washer will be hard when you can have a German Miele. That latter machine will cost you about four times more, but remember, it’s about quality and that is not where the Swiss will tolerate compromise, no matter the cost.
If you still have doubts about the table above and the correlation between the level of industrial training and Trump’s “retaliatory” tariffs, consider the table below. The World Skills Organization is dedicated to promoting skills training as an efficient and indispensable way to boost economic development. As part of this effort, World Skills organizes biannual international competitions. One look at the rankings below will tell you which countries take industrial education and training seriously – and which countries are also hit hardest by Trumps’s misplaced anger:
The U.S. ranks 35th with just 4 total medal points, just behind Vietnam. Note, that the rankings are not adjusted for demographics. Larger countries, such as China, would naturally be in a better position to win big, and the hurdle for Switzerland and Austria (population 9 million each, roughly the same as New York City) correspondingly much higher.
The rigors of training pay off. Raising tariff walls will do nothing to boost industrial skills. On the contrary, it will make American manufacturers more complacent, less efficient, and less innovative.
Trump’s tariffs will backfire because they are a disincentive and will impede its industrial renaissance. As in Lent, there are no shortcuts to becoming a better individual or country. You must go through the entire forty days and be honest with yourself. Foreign tariffs are not the problem (most certainly not where there aren’t any), but arrogance and false pride are a big problem – and they will make it worse.
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Sources:
https://nam.org/mfgdata/facts-about-manufacturing-expanded/
https://www.wipo.int/en/web/global-innovation-index/2024/index