What is it with tariffs?
President Donald Trump says they’re terrific.
“To me the most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariff; it’s my favorite word,” is his take on the effectiveness of slapping a costly consumer tax or duty on foreign goods entering the U.S.
“Will there be some pain? Yes, maybe (and maybe not!),” Trump all-capped later in a social media post. “But we will make America great again, and it will all be worth the price that must be paid.”
The European Union says Trump is overdrawn at the memory bank.
“Tariffs are not a good idea,” French President Emmanuel Macron warned.
“Tariffs. Wrong,” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz admonished.
“Tariffs are a very direct attack,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney added.
In the lands beyond America’s shores, tariffs are primarily reviled as the bulwark of the hoary mercantilist policies that greased the French Revolution in 1789; aggravated the Great Depression in 1930; and persuaded the Old Testament prophet Abraham to skedaddle the city state of Ur for the Mediterranean coast circa 1900 B.C.
“Now the Lord said unto Abraham,” according to Genesis, “get thee out of Ur.”
The Lord apparently knew His economics.
“Bad economic behavior contributed to Ur’s downfall,” ancient-economics analyst Steven Garfinkle, professor of Sumerian history at Western Washington University told me shortly after my 2003 stopover at the Great Ziggurat during Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Although the American-built berms and barbed-wire that protected Camp Dracula outside Nasiriya have now crumpled, the terraced stone ziggurat inside the old air base still stands 98-feet-tall as the capitol of the greatest business story ever told.
It was here where the Sumerian city state of Ur managed its economy, and whose ruins betray the lingering folly of the world’s earliest economic system to have left detailed records.
In 2021, even Pope Francis visited the Great Ziggurat seeking answers.
“This blessed place brings us back to our origins,” Francis said.
Now, with pundits and politicos shrieking praise and screaming scorn on Trump’s tariff tactics, it’s time to shake the skeletons found in and around the ziggurat. What you’ll hear is a genuine monetary horror story, the first known diagram of how to fall off a fiscal cliff.
“Ur is the origin of modern political economy, and it failed because of the irrationality of its governing system,” Garfinkle said.
“Ur collapsed because the system could not be controlled,” added Wojciech Jaworski, a Sumerian financial archeologist with a doctorate degree in computer science at the University of Warsaw Institute of Informatics. “Ur was bad management and corruption so rampant that individuals who produced goods lost all motivation to produce.”
The Polish professor spends his days using sophisticated computer models to probe the cryptic fiscal data Urian scribes some 4,000 years ago scratched on now fragile cuneiform tablets. The Sumerian Economic Corpus, Ur’s ersatz Bureau of Labor Statistics, contains over 45,000 of these tablets out of around 100,000 that archaeologists have dug up from that period, detailing everything from worker’s salaries to travel diets.
It’s no surprise that the lists of sacrificial lambs transferred to administration officials in the month of sze-kin-ku5 fail to appear on U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s roster of current economic indicators. Yet Jaworski and his colleagues maintain the statistics have a mighty depressing tale to tell.
Ur’s ruling class ignored the significant climate and environmental disruptions that advanced the kingdom’s disintegration. The tablets chronicle droughts, changing river patterns and a recognizably massive build-up of silt that barred ships from accessing the Persian Gulf.
Daily life, nonetheless, continued on a purely materialistic course and, historians say, focused on earning the maximum amount of wealth and enjoying the highest degree of comfort and luxury. Although the citizens of Ur were a religious people with many gods, their prayers exclusively pleaded for prosperity and commercial success.
“Everyone was very suspicious of everyone else,” Jaworski said. “They would complain and frequently resorted to royal courts to get their way. Ur was the most centralized and perhaps litigious state the world has ever known.”
It was a period of history when plutocrats were worshiped as priest kings.
“Ur’s politicians and merchants were one and the same, exercising power simultaneously in different sectors,” Garfinkle told this reporter a quarter century before Trump anointed the multibillionaire Elon Musk sovereign of the Department of Government Efficiency. “The people of Ur would have found resignations to avoid conflicts unfathomable.”
Tariffs on goods brought into the city were rampant. Insider trading was encouraged. “Entrepreneurs got ahead on the basis of their connections,” Garfinkle said. “Think of Walmart, Apple and Microsoft ruling the country as a combined family-controlled government business without shareholders. That’s how Ur was run. A kleptocracy.”
War was big business, a core sector, underwritten mostly by agriculture and precious metal trading.
“Fealty and the collection of tribute from military conquest created an elite caste accustomed to success,” Garfinkle said. “It’s naive to think that society at large profited from this.”
Owen said Ur ultimately collapsed into dust because the city state ran out of money.
“Actually, Ur ran out of sheep,” Garfinkle clarified. “Sheep and urban real estate were Ur’s principal fixed assets. The elite became too addicted to booty. All loans were guaranteed by oaths in the name of the king because it was the king – the government – who ultimately paid off all outstanding loans.”
The widely distinguished post-Keynesian wit and economist John Kenneth Galbraith would have likely considered the Ur indicator of little value when applied to the modern global economy. “The only function of economic forecasting,” Galbraith mischievously told his students, “is to make astrology look respectable.”
But if ancient Ur is indeed a harbinger of America’s future, Garfinkle urges executives of all stripes to not even think about taking a day off. “Managers who failed to appear,” Garfinkle warned, “were hunted down and thrown in work camps.”
A. Craig Copetas is an award-winning reporter, writer and author who has more than a half century covering news and politics for publications including Rolling Stone, Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal. He lives in Paris.
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