I remember my daughter at six. Those tiny fingers of hers—Lord, how they worked!—arranging Easter chocolates into meticulous piles across our sun-splashed kitchen table, each foil-wrapped square a miniature monument to her hunger and ingenuity. The light caught those crinkled wrappers just so, transforming cocoa and sugar into something more than sweetness—something sacred, almost sacramental. Lines of concentration etched themselves across her furrowed brow and button nose, as if she were solving equations that only children and economists dare to attempt

She was all concentration. All purpose. All judgment.

Or perhaps none of these things—just hunger wearing the mask of order.

The chocolate distribution wasn't exactly democratic—when has allocation ever been? One modest pile for her grandfather, another for me, but smaller. And then—here's where meritocracy meets original sin—a landslide of sweetness claimed for herself. When her grandfather raised an eyebrow (that ancient semaphore of this is how systems collapse), she glanced up with the serene certainty of central bankers adjusting interest rates: "I want it more than you do, oupa."

The words hung there—sticky, irreducible. Want as currency. Want as calculus. Want as the first and last argument of kings and children. His eyebrow didn't lower. The mountain didn't shrink. Somewhere between finger-painting and early-childood logic, her oupa was just another competitor in a zero-sum game.

Her logic wrapped around itself like a snake swallowing its tail—perfect in its circularity, a liturgy of want disguised as generosity. Perhaps what struck me most—though the words remained unformed, caught somewhere between throat and tongue—was how her desire wasn't hidden but sanctified through the very act of giving. Her sharing carried its own commission, a tax collected in advance, a transparent sleight of hand that fooled no one yet held us captive like a familiar psalm whose meaning has long since separated from its music.

Don't we all, in our fractured economies of desire, create elaborate cathedrals to house and consecrate what we dare not name as greed?

This memory returns to me now as I watch Trump's tariff formula unfold—a strange economic exegesis that divides the U.S. trade deficit with a country by their total imports, then halves the resulting percentage to determine what justice apparently requires. The numbers arrive like revelation scratched in sand: 50% for Lesotho, 49% for Cambodia, 48% for Laos, and 47% for Madagascar. What pierces me is that these percentages fall like artillery shells on nations where a single week's American grocery bill might feed a family for months. Trump's kitchen table calculations emerge from a child-like logic that claims to target dragons but will surely crush sparrows.

"It's such a disaster," says Deborah Elms of the Hinrich Foundation, her words hanging in the air like smoke after fire. "Tariffs of nearly 50% overnight will be impossible to manage." For nations like Madagascar and Laos—places where the day's bread depends on yesterday's labour and tomorrow remains perpetually uncertain—these tariffs promise not abstract "economic setbacks" but flesh-and-blood devastation. The theological crack widens: a policy baptised in fairness systematically crucifies the very people whose feet scripture commands us to wash…

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