Watchman comment: Trump's tariffs will create and boost U.S. manufacturing via communist China. For example, if a Chinese big screen tv sells for $700.00 and a U.S. big screen tv sells for $500.00 who will sell more the U.S. or China? The Morrill Tariff was one of the main causes of the Civil War aka the War of Northern Aggression. High tariffs caused recessions and depressions in the South, an agricultural region dependent on exports like cotton and tobacco and hence the South needed low tariffs. The South Carolinians, in my opinion, attacked Ft. Sumter because it was a location where custom or tariff taxes were collected. Tariffs were the object of southern rage. By the way, Mr. Lincoln imposed a sea embargo on Virginia before the state seceded! Mr. Lincoln was a war monger who wanted war with the South.
Patrick J. Buchanan wrote the article below and is the author of "Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever."
A tariff may be
described as a sales or consumption tax the consumer pays, but tariffs are also
a discretionary and an optional tax.
If you choose not to purchase Chinese goods and instead buy
comparable goods made in other nations or the USA, then you do not pay the
tariff.
China loses the sale. This is why Beijing, which runs $350
billion to $400 billion in annual trade surpluses at our expense is howling
loudest. Should Donald Trump impose that 25% tariff on all $500 billion in
Chinese exports to the USA, it would cripple China's economy. Factories seeking
assured access to the U.S. market would flee in panic from the Middle Kingdom.
Tariffs were the taxes that made America great. They were the
taxes relied upon by the first and greatest of our early statesmen, before the
coming of the globalists Woodrow Wilson and FDR.
Tariffs, to protect manufacturers and jobs, were the Republican
Party's path to power and prosperity in the 19th and 20th centuries, before the
rise of the Rockefeller Eastern liberal establishment and its embrace of the
British-bred heresy of unfettered free trade.
The Tariff Act of 1789 was enacted with the declared purpose,
"the encouragement and protection of manufactures." It was the second
act passed by the first Congress led by Speaker James Madison. It was crafted
by Alexander Hamilton and signed by President Washington.
After the War of 1812, President Madison, backed by Henry Clay
and John Calhoun and ex-Presidents Jefferson and Adams, enacted the Tariff of
1816 to price British textiles out of competition, so Americans would build the
new factories and capture the booming U.S. market. It worked.
Tariffs financed Mr. Lincoln's War. The Tariff of 1890 bears the
name of Ohio Congressman and future President William McKinley, who said that a
foreign manufacturer "has no right or claim to equality with our own. ...
He pays no taxes. He performs no civil duties."
That is economic patriotism, putting America and Americans
first.
The Fordney-McCumber Tariff gave Presidents Warren Harding and
Calvin Coolidge the revenue to offset the slashing of Wilson's income taxes,
igniting that most dynamic of decades — the Roaring '20s.
That the Smoot-Hawley Tariff caused the Depression of the 1930s
is a New Deal myth in which America's schoolchildren have been indoctrinated
for decades.
The Depression began with the crash of the stock market in 1929,
nine months before Smoot-Hawley became law. The real villain: The Federal
Reserve, which failed to replenish that third of the money supply that had been
wiped out by thousands of bank failures.
Milton Friedman taught us that.
A tariff is a tax, but its purpose is not just to raise revenue
but to make a nation economically independent of others, and to bring its
citizens to rely upon each other rather than foreign entities.
The principle involved in a tariff is the same as that used by
U.S. colleges and universities that charge foreign students higher tuition than
their American counterparts.
What patriot would consign the economic independence of his
country to the "invisible hand" of Adam Smith in a system crafted by
intellectuals whose allegiance is to an ideology, not a people?
What great nation did free traders ever build?
Free trade is the policy of fading and failing powers, past
their prime. In the half-century following passage of the Corn Laws, the
British showed the folly of free trade.
They began the second half of the 19th century with an economy
twice that of the USA and ended it with an economy half of ours, and equaled by
a Germany, which had, under Bismarck, adopted what was known as the American
System.
Of the nations that have risen to economic preeminence in recent
centuries — the British before 1850, the United States between 1789 and 1914,
post-war Japan, China in recent decades — how many did so through free trade?
None. All practiced economic nationalism.
The problem for President Trump?
Once a nation is hooked on the cheap goods that are the narcotic
free trade provides, it is rarely able to break free. The loss of its economic
independence is followed by the loss of its political independence, the loss of
its greatness and, ultimately, the loss of its national identity.
Brexit was the strangled cry of a British people that had lost
its independence and desperately wanted it back.
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