Politics & Power Quote by Thomas Sowell

Sowell’s line is built like a simple chain reaction, and that’s the point: it dares you to follow the consequence past the comforting headline. “Save jobs” is put in scare-quote proximity to the policy tool that allegedly accomplishes it, then immediately translated into its less marketable twin, “higher steel prices.” The sentence is doing ideological jujitsu: it accepts the protectionist premise on its own terms (jobs) and then shows how that premise, once you trace the inputs and outputs, flips into its opposite.

The subtext is a critique of political optics. Tariffs are sold as muscular patriotism and worker solidarity, but Sowell frames them as a targeted benefit with diffuse costs. Steel is not just a product; it’s an ingredient. When you raise the price of an input, you quietly tax every downstream industry that uses it - autos, appliances, construction equipment - and you make American finished goods less competitive abroad. That’s why he emphasizes “around the world”: protection doesn’t happen in a vacuum, it happens inside export markets and supply chains that punish higher costs.

Context matters here because Sowell is speaking from the long-running American argument over industrial policy, especially the periodic steel tariff fights where the beneficiaries are visible and organized while the losers are scattered and harder to count. His punch is the asymmetry: the jobs “saved” are legible and politically profitable; the jobs lost are larger, downstream, and conveniently invisible until the damage has already been rebranded as some other problem.