The howls of disapproval from the cowboy-hat demographic have been loud this week, and for good reason. President Trump has announced plans to quadruple the import quota of Argentine beef to “bring beef prices down” at the grocery aisle. It was accompanied by a characteristically Trumpian broadside on Truth Social:
“The Cattle Ranchers, who I love, don’t understand that the only reason they are doing so well, for the first time in decades, is because I put Tariffs on cattle coming into the United States,” Trump said on Truth Social on Wednesday. “If it weren’t for me, they would be doing just as they’ve done for the past 20 years — Terrible! It would be nice if they would understand that, but they also have to get their prices down, because the consumer is a very big factor in my thinking, also!”
In a single post he managed to both praise and insult the very people who embody the mythos of American self-reliance. You don’t talk down to cowmen — as a rule they’re damn sensitive to being told their fortunes hinge on the beneficence of a politician. As an example of the pitfalls of dabbling in command economics, you can’t conjure a better case study.
Ranchers are no fools — they know that prosperity in a tenuous sector doesn’t come from tariffs, subsidies, or decrees. It comes from hard work and resilient management in the face of fickle weather and shifting markets. When a big-city billionaire — even one they’ve largely endorsed — tells them “you’re doing well because of me,” the reflexive response is basically what I heard from a cowboy buddy in Arizona: “Gaslight us harder, Mr. President.”
Trump is right: cattle prices have been astonishingly high the past few seasons, for a variety of extremely complicated factors mostly having to do with the size of the national cow herd. But Trump is laughably off base to attribute the recent high prices to his tariffs, which to the extent they had any effect at all, were applied long after the rise in cattle prices.
Trump’s maneuvering reflects the deepest problems of a command economy — you simply can’t foresee the knock-on effects of various market manipulations. Once you start tinkering — raising tariffs to curry favor with domestic producers, then slashing them to win over consumers, or allocating tariff revenues to those who are harmed by the tariffs — you trap yourself in the same contradictory logic that doomed the old Soviet planners. Every knob you twist sends vibrations through a market ecosystem too vastly complex to predict.
Take beef, which is a deceptively “simple” product. It isn’t. Its price is the result of feedlot margins, grazing leases, rail freight rates, hide buyer availability, veterinarian fees, hay producer margins, and farm credit, and a kaleidoscope of other factors. Like many industries, it is also heavily influenced by government regulations, including tariffs. Price signals ripple through this vast and interconnected network like nerve signals in a living body. Interference with one aspect risks numbing the whole. Beef, as a product of the modern integrated global market is no more “simple” than a semiconductor, and managing its price is a fool’s errand.
Ranchers can no more unilaterally “get their prices down” than they could unilaterally get their prices up over the 20 years when they were doing “Terrible.” Cow-calf producers (the foundational unit of the beef complex) take 400-600 pound calves to sale and pretty much take whatever price is being offered by the “buyers” (usually background/stocker/feedlot representatives). Those prices have, for decades, been marginal at best and were often lower than the input costs. In the absence of a vigorous small-scale meat processing complex (regulated largely out of existence), the options were limited. That has changed recently with the higher prices that come with lower inventories, and many ranchers are regaining some solvency lost over preceding years, but they all know it’s out of their control. Like the rain, they take it when they can get it.
Still, ranchers are right to feel whiplash. One day, they’re told tariffs are patriotic; the next day, they’re scolded for high prices. They are pawns in a political game that treats them alternately as mascots and villains. The message from Washington — sometimes in the same sentence — is: We love you, but you’re doing it wrong. This is the cultural insult buried at the heart of Trump’s missive. Rural America has long sensed that its independence is something to be managed, not respected. Trump insists that cowmen owe their good fortune to his tariff policy, but by doing so he adopts the same paternalism that ranchers despise in bureaucrats from either party. Whether the diktat comes from a Manhattan boardroom or the White House, it still smells like the city: clueless and smug, all at the same time.
The kind of economic nationalism Trump has unleashed pretends to restore dignity to the producers and manufacturers forgotten by globalization. But true dignity never comes from protection — it comes from freedom. Give ranchers open access to world markets, stable rules, reduced regulations, and the assurance that government won’t yank the reins every election cycle, and they’ll take care of the rest. The West was not won on quota systems.
What’s galling about this latest announcement isn’t just the inconsistency; it’s the presumption that prosperity can be engineered by presidential decree. Beef markets, like any living system, balance themselves through millions of daily decisions — when to calve, when to sell, when (or if) to buy feed, when to hold back heifers. That’s the invisible hand at work, and it’s far smarter than any White House staffer with a spreadsheet.
Politicians often say they “love” the rancher, the farmer, the working man. But love, in economics as in life, is best revealed by respectful restraint. Don’t interfere. Don’t pretend to know better. Don’t weaponize one group against another in the name of populist sympathy. Ronald Reagan, the cowboy president, said the nine most terrifying words one could hear was “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” As the cattle industry turns its back on Trump’s meddling, he is about to learn the political perils of a command economy as well. The best thing Washington could do for the beef industry is to stop helping it.