Saturday, March 10, 2018

Tariff Supporters: Nazis and Marxists All!!

In a lighthearted but very pointed post on the topic of tariffs, Bob Calco quotes from the Marxists and/or Nazis who pioneered tariffs in the US.

A free people… should promote such manufactures as would render them independent on others for essentials. I shall give every encouragement in my power to the manufactures of my country.--George Washington, Ur-Marxist

Let the thirteen states be bound together in a strict and indissoluble union, concur in erecting one great American system superior to all transatlantic force or influence. --Al Hamilton, Notorious Russian Spy and Elections-Influencer

The prohibiting duties we lay on all articles of foreign manufacture which prudence requires us to establish at home, with the patriotic determination of every good citizen to use no foreign articles which can be made within ourselves, without regard to difference of price, secures us against a relapse into foreign dependency.--"Terrible" Tommy Jefferson, Community Organizer

In its (Congress’) first act, a national revenue must be obtained; but the system must be such a one, that while it secures the object of revenue, it shall not be oppressive to our constituents. Happy it is for us that such a system is in our power; for I apprehend that both these object may be obtained from an impost on articles imported into the United States.---Jimmy Madison, Father of Leninist School of Economics

There are more.  And--obviously--LOTS of statues to be smashed, and towns to be re-named   according to the US Chamber of Commerce, Paul Ryan, Mark Levin, Danny-Boy WISN, and Ron Johnson.

Yup.


A little further down the essay we have this:


[F]ree traders... conflat[e] the goal with the means to achieve it, so that any other goal than “free trade” itself is seen as “not economic.” All pure nonsense to anyone who really gets what Mises is really saying. If your goal is national economic independence, as ours at least used to be, global “free trade” is the last policy an economist would advise; but a “free trader” would tell you that you’re just not thinking economically to seek national independence in the first place.
 
So, setting aside the usual sophisms that make free trade both the means and the end itself, the adult question here for those who seek national independence is this: through which economic policies can we intentionally become independent and self-sufficient (dare I say “great”?) again?...

von Mises nodded approval to the US capital-formation regime (in Milwaukee, at the University Club, now populated with globaloney-spouters.)  This is what he said there, in 1952:

...as the prosperity of the nation and the height of wage rates depend on a continual increase in the capital invested in its plants, mines and farms, it is one of the foremost tasks of good government to remove all obstacles that hinder the accumulation and investment of new capital....

"Hindering" is exactly what happens when one advocates--or encourages--investing capital in OTHER countries.  And the Globaloney Regimes of Bush, Bush, Clinton, and Obozo have done exactly that through NAFTA and MFN concessions.  The purchases made by the Chamber of Commerce have paid off--but not for the Rust Belt populace.

Another insight here:

...“free trade,” like “free love,” seeks to have the benefits of physical union with none of the responsibilities of cultural or political marriage, and that is the formula for cultural and systemic disaster. We have seen it wreak havoc on our dying industries and their declining communities. 
 
The combination of falling wages resulting from the law of equilibrium performing its inexorable leveling function, and an income tax regime made necessary because tariffs were eliminated in the interest of global division of labor is the truly “unpatriotic tax” levied on all Americans by ideological free trade...

We had made the point of "community" earlier, but the above goes exactly to that point.  As the (Marxist/Nazi?) Founders knew, "free trade" works only in a cohesive union--in our instance, of the States.  That is the glue of community, which is really a moral imperative.  

There's more at the link.  


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