+++Note–this is going to be another short days for posting for I return to the doctor for blood letting, scans and consultation….in the last week I have been stuck so many times I am starting to feel like a pin cushion. I will be checking when I can on IST using my phone so please bear with me for I may miss something. Thanx for your time and understanding+++
You guys know me I do like to inject history into the conversation whenever I can….and what better subject for that injection than tariff wars?
Tariffs are nothing new, nothing Donny came up with on his own….nope they have been with us since the very beginning of this nation….
President Donald J. Trump claims that “tariffs are going to make our country rich.” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer counters that “Trump’s tariffs are going to raise prices on American families by as much as $1,200 a year.” Debate rages on amid American tariff measures and other nations’ counter-measures. This debate over who wins and who loses from tariffs is not new. It’s not even particularly populist. As it turns out, arguing about tariffs has a long American pedigree, dating back to the administration of the first president, George Washington.
There are three important lessons we can learn from this early American tariff debate. The first and most important lesson is that each system proposed in the 1790s, like all centralized systems of industrial policy and tariffs, allowed government to choose winners and losers. Second, at a time when some form of mercantilism was still the default position for nearly all Americans, there was still vigorous debate. And third, tariffs are fundamentally a moral issue.
Americans would like to believe that the most contentious moral and political issue in the United States before the Civil War was slavery. Sadly, it was not. Until 1857, slavery often took a backseat to questions that we tend to overlook today, things like the national bank, transportation infrastructure, and immigration. The most contentious issue in early America, however, was the tariff, especially a protective tariff designed not to raise revenue but to discourage foreign trade altogether.
Why did tariffs arouse such strong opinions? To answer this question, we need to look at the major tariff debates in the early American republic. The first such debate, between the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans during the 1790s, set many of the terms for the later debates occasioned by Henry Clay’s “American System” during the populist Age of Jackson, as well as the high tariffs implemented by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War.
What the tariff fight of the 1790s reveals is not the clash of free market liberalism vs. dirigisme—indeed, no one in the late 1700s promoted total free trade—but rather the clash of two different industrial policies, each of which wanted to grant the US Government coercive power over the marketplace.
You see nothing new.
In case you, my reader, would like to learn more about the early tariff wars then this may help.
A Brief History of Tariffs in the United States and the Dangers of their Use Today
Now hopefully you will have a better grasp on just what a tariff war is about and make a rational decision if they are good or bad.
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