For 15 days in late November and early December of 2019, I traveled to Patagonia in South America to hike and see the sights in one of the remotest and most spectacular places on earth. I spent five full days hiking and sightseeing at Los Glaciares National Park in Argentina, and four full days at Torres del Paine National Park in Chile. In my time there I saw towering peaks, glaciers, pristine lakes, and herds of wild guanacos. What follows is not an exhaustive report on my trip, but a more practical guide for those who might be interested in a similar experience. I won’t attempt to duplicate the standard information you would find in any published guidebook. …

President Trump’s trade team will find little encouragement in this morning’s U.S. Commerce Department report on trade through July. On the president’s own mercantilist terms, in which imports are a “loss” and the trade balance the key measure of success, the report signals that his tariff war so far has been a failure.

In the first seven months of 2019, with his tariff policy in full swing, total imports of goods and services to the United States have grown by 1.4 percent compared to the same period in 2018, while exports have declined slightly by 0.2 percent. The overall trade deficit, year to date, has expanded by 8.2 percent, from $345.6 billion to $373.8 billion. The deficit in goods trade has grown by $12.5 billion while the surplus in services trade has shrunk by $15.8 …

A few observations from this morning’s Commerce Department report on the June trade numbers — a report that offers no support for President Trump’s confrontational trade policies:

We are witnessing the real-life confirmation of what trade experts (yours truly humbly included) have always told us: tariff levels are not the main determinant of the trade balance. The U.S. trade balance with the rest of the world is largely determined by underlying macroeconomic levels of national savings and investment. …

This morning’s monthly trade report from the U.S. Commerce Department contained mostly good news for the U.S. economy, but it offered no support for the Trump administration’s multi-front tariff war.

According to the report, the U.S. trade deficit in goods and services reached $55.5 billion in May, a five-month high. Year to date, the deficit has climbed to $261.4 billion, a 6.4 percent increase from the same period in 2018. U.S. exports have ticked up by 0.5 percent YTD and imports by 1.6 percent. President Trump can claim his fair share of credit for the robust U.S. …

My Mercatus colleague Don Boudreaux, at his indispensable blog Café Hayek this week, dismantled the arguments recently made at the website The Daily Reckoning in an article claiming that President Trump’s tariffs are “as American as apple pie.”

It’s a historical fact that tariffs were high during much of America’s first century and a half as a nation. But that doesn’t mean that tariffs were the right policy then or now. Slavery was also sanctioned by the U.S. …

As a self-proclaimed “tariff man,” President Trump often points to the billions of extra dollars he’s raised for the U.S. Treasury through his special tariffs. In fact, based on the U.S. Commerce Department’s monthly report on trade released this morning, the tariffs the president began imposing in 2018 on imported steel, aluminum, and goods from China have raised an extra $22 billion in the 12 months through this March.

Inside the Commerce Department’s report, in Supplemental Exhibit 1s, is a line for the “Calculated Duty” collected on imports for consumption for that month. From consistent monthly collections of $2.5 to $3.0 billion in 2016 and 2017 (or $32.8 billion a year), monthly duty collections have averaged $5.4 …

Is the boom in U.S. oil production and exports “masking the deterioration of the U.S. trade picture”? Yes it is, according to an article in Monday’s Wall Street Journal by reporter Spencer Jakab.

Under the headline, “Why the U.S. Trade Deficit Is Worse Than It Seems,” the author notes that the U.S. deficit in energy trade has shrunk by $233 billion in the past decade. You may think that would be good news, but the story then notes that the overall size of the U.S. trade deficit has remained stubbornly high, which means the non-energy portion of the deficit has “deteriorated.” Thus, the author concludes, “The U.S. …

In his address to Congress last night, President Trump quoted Abraham Lincoln, not in support of civil rights or a stronger union, but in support of trade protection. Here’s the passage:

The first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, warned that the “abandonment of the protective policy by the American Government [will] produce want and ruin among our people.”

Lincoln was right — and it is time we heeded his words. I am not going to let America and its great companies and workers, be taken advantage of anymore.

Lincoln was a good man and a great president during our fiery trial of Civil War, but he was wrong about the benefits of trade barriers. The Republican-backed protectionism that predominated U.S. trade policy after the Civil War was not the source of American prosperity, just as the freer trade policies that have been adopted by the United States and other countries today has not been the source of “want and ruin.” …