There’s been a great deal of bellyaching this week about the tariffs that President Trump has slapped on countries all over the world, friend and foe alike.  Indeed, even yours portly winced at the drop in his various retirement accounts.

But the pain is worth it—and, we must remember, temporary.  What is often forgotten in the discussion about tariffs is that we have been the suckers, often dropping our trade barriers while other countries—even allies!—have kept their trade barriers in place.  The net result is that our manufacturing base has been stripped away since the end of the Second World War, and we have shifted into a consumer economy.

Twenty years ago, we could say, “well, we’re a knowledge economy—we export high-tech knowledge and other specialized skills, which we can cultivate because we aren’t inefficiently focusing on manufacturing.”  That might have seemed true twenty years ago (it wasn’t), but mass immigration and H1B visa workers dispelled any whiff of reality that lingered in that illusion.  Suddenly, “learn to code” doesn’t work when you’re competing with every Rasheesh and Panjit for the chance to slave over a hot server farm for pennies an hour.

So not only did we gut our manufacturing base—we don’t even make most of our medicine!—we gutted our knowledge base as well.  Toss artificial intelligence into the mix, and even creative professions are no longer safe.

In this case, tariffs are an example of using a nineteenth-century solution to address twenty-first-century problems—but the solution will work.  Already, nations are flocking to the negotiating table to work out trade deals that are more favorable to the United States.

Tariffs are painful right now because they’re the end of the decades-long sugar high of the stock market.  The stock market has long been a measure of American economic health, but it’s a mirage.  With multiple presidential administrations spending like drunken sailors on shore leave and Fed printers buzzing like a swarm of African killer bees, the markets have popped off like a television executive in the 1980s at a coke party.  Now dad is home and the economy is heading to rehab to detox and ride horses in the desert.

But like most medicines, the long-term effects will be beneficial.  It will take time, but manufacturing will return to the United States.  Long-dormant plants will start to spin up again.  If we haven’t lost all of our manufacturing knowledge—we may need to import foreign specialists just for that, like Meiji Japan did in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to modernize its nation—we’ll be rebuilding a nation built on good jobs, not just the financialization of everything.

My advice:  ride out the market losses, and maybe toss in a few bucks to buy up stocks and/or mutual funds on the cheap.  Then get ready for the American Renaissance to begin.