All your trade are belong to us

There is a consistent error out there in that people keep thinking that it is the people selling the stuff who garner the advantage in trade. Thus we get the absurdity of people insisting that we must retaliate when people refuse to buy our production - retaliate by making ourselves poorer by refusing to buy, or taxing ourselves for buying, those lovely things made by Johnny Foreigner.

Sometimes though reality does intervene. A ship is. most amusingly, stuck in the Suez Canal and trade is thus interrupted:

Consumers pay price of snarl-up in Suez Canal

Quite so, as it is consumers who benefit from trade it is consumers who pay the price - by not gaining the benefits - of an interruption in trade. This is thus true of tariffs, quotas, Buy British and all the rest.

As we were told getting on for a century ago, trade protection is as:

…to dump rocks into our harbors because other nations have rocky coasts…

Or, to block our canals because others have the mishap of having blocked their own. Just one of those evergreen truths we need to recall. The only logical trade stance is unilateral free trade.