The effort to control counterfeit goods is a lot like the effort to control the use of firearms in violent crime: Government is willing to try almost anything short of doing its job.
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It’s a funny old world: Federal agents will birth bovines if you try to bring a Diet Coke through airport security, but the vast majority — nearly the entirety — of the shipping containers entering U.S. ports do not get so much as a peek. We could hire a lot of port inspectors with what we’ve just pissed away on the trade war.
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In the mean time, we should understand that fighting counterfeiting with tariffs and other taxes is dancing about architecture. There are a lot of guns being put into the hands of felons because our police and prosecutors refuse to do the work of enforcing the law on straw-buyers, and deputizing some $8-an-hour clerk at a sporting-goods shop is no substitute for police work. Throwing memos at Amazon isn’t going to get it done when it comes to counterfeit goods, either.
How to Deal with the Counterfeit Goods Problem, by Kevin Williamson