Posted on 07/27/2018 12:40:48 PM PDT by xzins
“Make America Great Again” will, given the astonishing victory it produced for Donald Trump, be recorded among the most successful slogans in political history.
Yet it raises a question: how did America first become the world’s greatest economic power?
In 1998, in The Great Betrayal: How American Sovereignty and Social Justice Are Being Sacrificed to the Gods of the Global Economy, this writer sought to explain.
However, as the blazing issue of that day was Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton, it was no easy task to steer interviewers around to the McKinley Tariff.
Free Trade Shouldn't Be a Litmus Test for Conservatives The Moral Case Against Trump's Import Tariffs Free trade propaganda aside, what is the historical truth?
As our Revolution was about political independence, the first words and acts of our constitutional republic were about ensuring America’s economic independence.
“A free people should promote such manufactures as tend to render them independent on others for essentials, especially military supplies,” said President Washington in his first message to Congress.
The first major bill passed by Congress was the Tariff Act of 1789.
Weeks later, Washington imposed tonnage taxes on all foreign shipping. The U.S. Merchant Marine was born.
In 1791, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton wrote in his famous Report on Manufactures: “The wealth…independence, and security of a Country, appear to be materially connected with the prosperity of manufactures. Every nation…ought to endeavor to possess within itself all the essentials of national supply. These compromise the means of subsistence, habitation, clothing, and defence.”
During the War of 1812, British merchants lost their American markets. When peace came, flotillas of British ships arrived at U.S. ports to dump underpriced goods and to recapture the markets they’d lost.
Henry Clay and John Calhoun backed James Madison’s Tariff of 1816, as did ex-free traders Jefferson and John Adams. It worked.
In 1816, the U.S. produced 840,000 yards of cloth. By 1820, it was 13,874 thousand yards. America had become self-sufficient.
Financing “internal improvements” with tariffs on foreign goods would become known abroad as “The American System.”
Said Daniel Webster, “Protection of our own labor against the cheaper, ill-paid, half-fed, and pauper labor of Europe is…a duty which the country owes to its own citizens.”
This is economic patriotism, a conservatism of the heart. Globalists, cosmopolites, and one-worlders recoil at phrases like “America First.”
Campaigning for Henry Clay, “The Father of the American System,” in 1844, Abe Lincoln issued an impassioned plea: “Give us a protective tariff and we will have the greatest nation on earth.”
Battling free trade during the Polk presidency, Congressman Lincoln said, “Abandonment of the protective policy by the American Government must result in the increase of both useless labor and idleness and…must produce want and ruin among our people.”
In our time, the abandonment of economic patriotism produced in Middle America what Lincoln predicted, and what got Trump elected.
From the Civil War to the 20th century, U.S. economic policy was grounded in the Morrill Tariffs, named for Vermont congressman and senator Justin Morrill who, as early as 1857, had declared: “I am for ruling America for the benefit, first, of Americans, and, for the ‘rest of mankind’ afterwards.”
William McKinley, the veteran of Antietam who gave his name to the McKinley Tariff, declared four years before being elected president: “Free trade results in our giving our money…our manufactures and our markets to other nations. …It will bring widespread discontent. It will revolutionize our values.”
Campaigning in 1892, McKinley said, “Open competition between high-paid American labor and poorly paid European labor will either drive out of existence American industry or lower American wages.”
Substitute “Asian labor” for “European labor,” and is this not a fair description of what free trade did to U.S. manufacturing these last 25 years? The results have been some $12 trillion in trade deficits, arrested wages for our workers, six million manufacturing jobs lost, 55,000 factories, and plants shut down.
McKinley’s future vice president Teddy Roosevelt agreed with him: “Thank God I am not a free trader.”
What did the Protectionists produce?
From 1869 to 1900, GDP quadrupled. Budget surpluses ran for 27 straight years. The U.S. debt was cut two-thirds to 7 percent of GDP. Commodity prices fell 58 percent. America’s population doubled, but real wages rose 53 percent. Economic growth averaged 4 percent a year.
And the United States, which began this era with half of Britain’s production, ended it with twice Britain’s production.
Under Warren Harding, Cal Coolidge, and the Fordney-McCumber Tariff, GDP growth between 1922 and 1927 hit 7 percent, an all-time record.
Economic patriotism put America first, and made America first.
Of GOP free traders, the steel magnate Joseph Wharton, whose name graces the college Trump attended, said it well: “Republicans who are shaky on protection are shaky all over.”
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of a new book, Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever. To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.
a response to tariffs is whatever destroys the tariffs. building a plant in the country imposing the tariffs simply because of the tariffs is utter capitulation.
You see what’s going on.
Buying slave labor goods from overseas undercuts jobs here, depresses wages, and guts the middle class.
“I’m skeptical that tariffs made America great, and Hamilton was a big-gov’t liberal.”
Are you skeptical of the statistics?
Northern industrialists feared the Southern slave owners would one day build factories and man them with slaves, which was probably true. They knew they could not compete with slave labor. That was the main reason the Civil War was orchestrated.
Of course that motive was hidden away by historians, and replaced with the idealistic stuff everyone chants now.
There is a reason mobile phones are made in China by American companies. Cheaper labor. Huge number of jobs that could be here.
What added to the cost of making motorcycles here that made production overseas a better deal?
Exactly. And our tariffs will lead those companies to build more plants here.
That’s why the EU blinked.
And what about the 50% of untaxed Americans?
Shouldn’t they be paying something so they have skin in the game?
hamilton was a high federalist, but you get a big F- in history, too.
how can you call a guy a big gov’t liberal when he predated government? you’re committing a howler of chronological error, and you’re also saying something that’s really just stupid when properly placed back into it’s historical context.
people confuse an advance supply network distribution as industry. tariffs prevent are product distribution system from being exploited by other companies outside the united states and there partners that import into the united state to resell. an across the board 5 % tarif on goods would protect all industry with in the united states and restart industries like textiles that have left the united states only to be imported from third world countries that employ a population that works at slave wages.
Labor costs are a tiny component of the cost of producing a mobile phone. The biggest reason to manufacture mobile phones in Asia is that the size of the Asian consumer market is staggering. The land area you can reach within a 5-hour flight from Singapore probably has 3+ billion people living in it.
The reason mobiles are made in Asia is because 8 of the 10 biggest mobile markets in the world are partly or fully in Asia. Us and Brazil at 3 and 4 is it. With China at #1 with 1.3 billion cellphones and India at #2 with 1.1 billion US (with only 327 million cellphones) labor could be free and they still wouldn’t be building them here.
And here are quotes indicating he changed his mind. I'm certain there is a better more direct quote out there, but can't find it. Nevertheless, these should suffice....
-—I don’t understand your argument. you seem to be supporting draconian tariffs because you think that will compel foreign industry to manufacture their bamboo baby cradles in the US.
-—the EU “blinked” because DJT was f**king their stock markets up; that was the whole point of the tariffs to begin with.
-—and I don’t even partially understand what your point is about “untaxed americans” or skin in the game.
“The biggest reason to manufacture mobile phones in Asia is that the size of the Asian consumer market is staggering.”
That is laughable. Companies export their products now, as they have been doing so for thousands of years. It doesn’t really cost that much to freight mobile phones.
He more one studies Jefferson the less impressed one is.
You got it. Dependents make for Democrats. LBJ even said so.
“Labor costs are a tiny component of the cost of producing a mobile phone.”
Slave labor, over there, probably isn’t very costly.
At least he learned.
The War of 1812 make it very clear that America needed to have it’s own manufacturing.
That’s why import tariffs are important.
Offshoring as much industry as we have done, is foolish. It’s “Fool trade” as Trump pointed out.
Pat knocks it out of the park—again. Spot on.
“A free people should promote such manufactures as tend to render them independent on others for essentials, especially military supplies,” said President Washington...
It can’t be said enough: “What a man!”.
“Essentials”
That's why U.S. industrial output is higher than ever before, but we are heavily involved in the manufacture of products that are sold to governments or wealthy consumers -- aircraft, cars, machinery, weapons, etc.
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