The Long Way Home 4.18.25

In a recent recorded interview, President Trump said that “tariff” is the most beautiful word in the dictionary and that it is his favorite word. 

Some of my civics and history teachers in the 1960s may have tried to teach us about tariffs, but I don’t recall ever hearing the word until 1972, and it wasn’t used the way it is bandied about today. Trump’s effusive praise and defense of the word sent me on a mission to untangle the threads of misunderstanding surrounding the words "tariff," "traffic," and "cabotage." After reading this, you may think I have too much time on my hands, but I’d be delighted if my perspective could clarify things for you. It's important to note that tariffs have been a part of international trade for centuries, with their use and impact evolving over time.

Toward the end of 1972, I entered The College of Advanced Traffic course at Humboldt Institute in south Minneapolis. My dad thought I could become a rate clerk, a relatively stable and well-paid position at the time, and that further schooling could lead me to become an ICC Practioner, basically a lawyer without the JD who could represent shippers and carriers before the Interstate Commerce Commission. 

When Harold Faetz, our esteemed instructor and inveterate gossip at Humboldt, told us that we’d be learning “how to read and interpret tariffs,” I quickly realized what the word tariff means. One beautiful definition of this word in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary that set the course of my second-rate career is “A schedule of rates or charges of a business or public utility.” 

First, to clarify a point, the College of Advanced Traffic, which we called traffic school, is not a remedial program on how to prepare for left turns in traffic or parallel parking downtown. Again, using the dictionary, traffic is “the business of transporting passengers or freight.” 

In my first manufacturing job, I was a traffic coordinator, and my boss was the traffic manager. When asked what we did by most of society, throwing out the title meant we needed to explain further that we weren’t at street corners directing traffic.

The traffic/freight industry always had an inferiority complex. In the 1990s, when the “feel good” movement started, the industry changed titles to elevate our self-image in the management world to Logistics Coordinator and Logistics Manager, all reporting to the Director or VP of Logistics. Another beautiful word in the dictionary is logistics.

Back to tariffs.

At the time, Federal law required that transport companies (railroads, motor carriers, freight forwarders, water carriers, pipelines, and electric utilities) publish written volumes containing their pricing, procedures, rules, and regulations. The companies could form tariff bureaus, exempt from anti-trust laws, to bring general order to the system. But they also maintained individual company tariffs. The traffic coordinators of the world performed the logistical challenges of subscribing to the correct tariffs for their employer.

As my world of experience expanded beyond my wildest expectations and I worked in international transportation, a new definition of tariff emerged. Its synonym, customs duty, was more commonly used. But my trusty MW dictionary defined that tariff best. “A schedule of duties imposed by a government on imported goods.” Also, “A duty or rate of duty” and “a tax on imports.”

The only certainty in international freight movements is tariffs/duties/taxes, which are crucial factors that can significantly impact the flow of goods across borders. The other certainty is that something will almost always go wrong in transit. 

Finally, we need to look at cabotage, another beautiful word familiar in the world of transportation but not generally used in today’s verbose explosions of social media experts. 

Cabotage relates to trade or transport and who can perform it between two points in a country. Although initially focused on marine transport, cabotage laws expanded to include trucks and planes. For example, US law required shipments moving from one US port to another US port to be moved by a vessel built and flagged by a US company, regardless of the cost savings of using an international liner. 

Foreign-owned airlines that are allowed to fly into or out of the US are not allowed to fly routes between two domestic airports. 

Two old and beautiful words: tariff and Cabotage. The oldest, tariff, first appeared in 1592 from the Italian tariffa. Cabotage, of French origin, first appeared in 1802. You may be hard pressed to find elected officials who know the origin, much less the real world meaning of those words.