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.
Byproviding only two choices you indicate you do not understand reality
I agree that income tax, like other taxes, tends to suppress creating those things it taxes, that is, incomes.
They paid for the whole of federal government for the first 140 years or so.
There was no income tax until just 100 years ago because of tariffs making them unnecessary.
America grew in wealth and size like a weed on steroids because of tariffs.
Conclusion: The status quo is progressive so if you support the status quo and not the tariffs then you are by default a progressive.
When you import a product you import the standard of living of that country.
Way to go Komrade Bert!
Most Communists think the truth is drivel.
You can't project the auto industry onto the ENTIRE US economy,. Nice spin. We are on to you Free Traitors™.
Unions are basically dead and only represent a paltry 9% of the manufacturing workforce.
That war is over. We won.
Free Traitors™ like you John support the evil income tax so there is that.
That is so preposterous! Question: When I buy a tariff'd good do I have to fill out form and tell the government if I turned 65 this years or went blind! LOL! What poppy cock stupidity!
That's good take one f'd up industry and trash the entire manufacturing sector which is 91% non union. This is what propagandist do, Free Traitors™ and the MSN are the best at it.
Yeah, Declaration of Independence, Louisiana Purchase, sending Marines against Muslim pirates, mere trifles. /s
“the proper amount of tariffs is no tariffs, which is exactly the president’s plan.”
Bears repeating. Washington was right to focus on national self sufficiency, but in 2018 two wrongs don’t make a right.
The US manufacturing base has long suffered from excessive taxation and regulation, and concessions to labor unions. The fact that it can’t compete internationally is the fault of the US government, and the way to remedy the problem is by reducing those taxes, regulations and labor concessions.
Trump, rightly, started with that. Now Trump, again rightly, is using tariffs and the threat of tariffs to force our trading partners to the negotiating table, with the aim of achieving zero tariffs.
“The proper amount of tariffs is no tariffs, which is exactly the president’s plan.”
“Like all taxes tariffs are bad...”
Can’t we just stop right there and admit the problem in 2018 is the gargantuan size of the government?
If we address that elephant in the room, and pare the government down to its proper size and scope, then I’ll concede that tariffs are a better form of taxation.
Until then, I refuse to choose between two poisons and say one is good and the other bad. Poison is poison, and as long as this swollen tick of a government continues to eclipse the private economy, ANY form of tax that enables that status quo is just that - poison.
I didn’t say he did nothing to deserve the title of Founding Father.
Often he was way too much the political theoretician, he did come up for reality at the right times as you pointed out. However even those examples are somewhat tainted. For example he almost abolished the US Navy. He thought coastal gunboats were all we needed. Someone at the last moment convinced him to keep those six super-advanced (for their time 6 (I think?)) frigates e.g, USS Constitution, USS United States, etc. For the Lousiana Territory purchase he also expected to be impeached and removed from office. He didn’t think he had the Constitutional power to do it. He used a Hamiltonian Constitutional interpretation to do it - meaning FedGov has the power to do something like that unless expressly forbidden by the Constitution. For that many of his Democrat-Republican colleagues called him a hypocrite as did his Federalist political foes.
You should read about his actions as Washington’s SOS. Using Phillip Freneau as his cat’s-paw he was undermining Washington! He & Freneau were constantly claiming through Freneau’s newspaper - the National Gazette that Washington wanted to be King. Really? How can anyone rational believe that? Even back then! Look at his actions concerning Citizen Genet! Also he was a complete flop (particularly when compared to say Patrick Henry) as Revolutionary War wartime governor of Virginia, some say to the point of cowardice.
He had flaws now completely glossed over in order to diminish the idea we are a republic and amplify the false notion we are something akin to absolute democracy. (Look what pure democracy did to Athens! The FFs knew their classical history!)
In my study of the Founding Fathers one thing I noticed, many (Certainly not all!) of the really significant FFs (At least the ones popularly quoted now!) who came from the colonial elites were very pro-democracy, however those from the “hoi polloi (and lower!)” were much more suspicious of pure democracy. In fact they were always using Rhode Island as the example, the mess pure democracy makes!
“Also, a tariff taxes everyone equally and is virtually invisible. So, who pays no taxes in America?”
Tariffs are like a national sales tax.
Everyone pays tax on what they use/buy, instead of about 40% of us carrying the tax load via income taxes. If you don’t buy something with a tariff, it doesn’t cost you. Income taxes are a mill stone around the necks of many of us.
Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, ignorant scoundrals like you.
You would have made a good isolationist Republican back in 1936. Your anachronist views that totally reject the president’s efforts to MAGA by the across the board tariffs are just plain foolish.
I don’t think you could recognize a communist if you met one face to face on the street because you obviously do not know what a communist is.
your last three idiotic posts are nothing but name-calling. I’d argue with you, but I don’t really care that you’re wrong. I suspect you’re used to it.
Well said.
With that being said, elimination of tariffs on both sides will benefit all companies in the countries they represent..........
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