PROTECTIONISM
by William R. Carr
The debate between advocates of free trade and protectionism in America is as
old as the nation. From the birth of the nation, those who were for national
economic independence and broad-based prosperity for the people were for trade
protection, and those who were more interested in the trade dollar, even if it
meant continued dependence on England and Europe, were for free trade. To a
great degree, the Civil War was a contest between free traders and
protectionists — the south being for free trade, and the north for trade
protection. Free trade favors cheap labor. In the antebellum south, that meant
slave labor. Fortunately, the advocates of protectionism won out until the post
World War Two era. Under wise protectionist national policies, the United States
of America became the greatest national success story the world had ever known.
America attained the highest and broadest based national living standard the
world had ever seen. America developed and set the standard for the modern
industrial state wherein the people could attain what has always been referred
to as the American dream. Europeans never came close to American prosperity
until they began emulating American style capitalism after World War Two. Even
at that, it took the the Marshall plan and American capital to make post war
European prosperity possible. We were able to help remake the world after the
war because of the wealth our previous economic policies had helped produce.
There must have been something right in the national economic
policies that produced such a nation as the United States was and still is. Of
course, economic policy had suffered a breakdown and a serious setback in the
decade previous to the war. But the Great Depression was not caused by the
policies that had made America great and prosperous in the first place. Such an
idea would be ludicrous. Protectionism was not the cause of the Depression, as
obfuscators persist in claiming. More than anything else, the depression was
caused by a failure to understand the difference between what was real and what
was not. The true creators of real wealth, and real wealth itself, were being
discounted or destroyed while the gaseous investment bubble that grew up on Wall
Street was assumed to be the repository and creator of real wealth. Even the
experts — the astute manipulators of money, credit, and public opinion — had
miscalculated and lost control. They weren't about to admit their own failure,
however. When the New Deal socialization schemes failed, war was the only
corrective mechanism the money men were capable of envisioning, and in the
trauma and destruction of war, the American economy was once again corrected and
made whole, but at incalculable cost.
War also always results in economic perversions and
distortions. One of the results of World War Two (which itself was a direct
result to the first war to end all wars), was the perception that the answer to
the world's economic problems, and thus the key to global peace, was world
government over a global economy. Of course, to openly advocate any such thing
as world government would have gone over like a lead balloon — not only in the
then existent nations, but Europe's far flung colonies aspiring to national
independence and sovereign nationhood. Thus the United Nations was born,
supposedly as a parliamentary democracy comprised of sovereign nation states.
Unlike the case with the previous attempt at world governance (the League of
Nations), Congress signed us up, with several sovereignty saving reservations.
Since then, an increasing number of those reservations (to preserve national
sovereignty and the primacy of the American Constitution), have crumbled one by
one.
Congress and our national leaders came to have a new global
perspective — one which put them on a fatal collision course with the concepts
of limited government by the consent of the governed. Thenceforth, our national
government has been working not for the American people, but toward a Globalist
Corporate Utopia. Constitutionally limited government became an anachronistic
fiction.
A de facto world government could not evolve without a global
free market system, and America has been working toward this for some time. The
Soviet Union held things up for several decades, as international Communism vied
for the hearts and minds of the peoples of the Europe, undeveloped nations, and
former European colonies. This in hopes that the Communist model of global
Utopia would win out over the Capitalist model. When the Soviet Union
disintegrated, the capitalist model was set to rule the world. National trade
protectionism discriminated against the rest of the world, and it was clear that
world government could never come to pass if the world's largest and strongest
agricultural and industrial economy was closed in any way to the rest of the
world. Now our government advocates global free trade and disdains trade
protectionism as a national sin.
Trade barriers were selectively dropped from the end of World
War Two. First, in order to facilitate the rebuilding of Europe and Japan,
American markets were opened to those nations. Then, in the battle against
international communism, our markets were opened selectively to non-communist
nations.
Rest assured that (regardless of the terminology used) all
governments, including the American government of today, are protectionist. The
only question is whether they are protectionist rackets, designed to protect the
interests of only government officials and those who grease their palms, or they
pursue protectionist trade policy to serve the best interests of the people at
large. The American government today is all about tearing down trade barriers
and turning the world into one great big free trade zone. This is called the new
international economic order, or the New World Order, or Globalism. It favors
government officials and those who sweeten their palms at the expense of labor.
"Freedom" (as in "free markets" and "free
trade"), are the deceptive sales pitch for free trade. It is said
that the market, not the elected government, should rule our lives. Thus
"deregulation" is part and parcel of globalism. But here again we are
confronted with a deceptive travesty.
When deregulation started (to "get government off the
backs of the people"), Americans were already among the most highly
regulated people in the world. After twenty years of deregulation, they are even
more highly regulated than before. Deregulation didn't apply to people, it
applied only to "corporate citizens." It got government off the backs
of the nation's major corporations, unleashing a new capitalist free-for-all,
reminiscent of the robber baron era of the late nineteenth century, but with a
major difference. That difference is that the new robber baron era is global in
scope. As for individual liberties, the New World Order subjects Americans not
only to the growing regime of federal regulation, but an equally diabolical and
grandiose regime of international regulation under the auspices of the United
Nations and it sprawling international regulatory agencies. Thanks to the War on
Terror, the Office of Homeland Security, and the USA Patriot Act, we Americans
will not only continue to be the most highly regulated people in the world, but
the most tightly regulated.
The following is Quoted from Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899)
On Free Trade and ProtectionAnd I will tell you why I am for protection, too. If we were all farmers we would be stupid. If we were all shoemakers we would be stupid. If we all followed one business, no matter what it was, we would become stupid. Protection to American labor diversifies American industry, and to have it diversified touches and develops every part of the human brain. Protection protects ingenuity; it protects intelligence; and protection raises sense; and by protection we have greater men, better looking women and healthier children. Free trade means that our laborer is upon an equality with the poorest paid labor of this world. And allow me to tell you that for an empty stomach, "Hurrah for Hancock!" is a poor consolation. I do not think much of a Government where the people do not have enough to eat. I am a materialist to that extent; I want something to eat. I have been in countries where the laboring man had meat once a year; sometimes twice -- Christmas and Easter, And I have seen women carrying upon their heads a burden that no man in this audience could carry, and at the same time knitting busily with both hands, and those women lived without meat; and when I thought of the American laborer, I said to myself, "After all, my country is the best in the world." And when I came back to the sea and saw the old flag flying, it seemed to me as though the air from pure joy had burst into blossom.
Labor has more to eat and more to wear in the United States than in any other land of this earth. I want America to produce everything that Americans need. I want it so that if the whole world should declare war against us, if we were surrounded by walls of cannon and bayonets and swords, we could supply all our material wants in and of ourselves. I want to live to see the American woman dressed in American silk; the American man in everything, from hat to boots, produced in America by the cunning hand of American toil. I want to see the workingman have a good house, painted white, grass in the front yard, carpets on the floor, pictures on the wall. I want to see him a man, feeling that he is a king by the divine right of living in the Republic. And every man here is just a little bit a king, you know. Every man here is a part of the sovereign power. Every man wears a little of purple; every man has a little of crown and a little of scepter; and every man that will sell his vote for money or be ruled by prejudice is unfit to be an American citizen.
I believe in American labor, and I will tell you why. The other day a man told me that we had produced in the United States of America one million tons of steel rails. How much are they worth? Sixty dollars a ton. In other words, the million tons are worth sixty million dollars. How much is a ton of iron worth in the ground? Twenty-five cents. American labor takes twenty-five cents worth of iron in the ground and adds to it fifty-nine dollars and seventy-five cents. One million tons of rails, and the raw material not worth twenty-four thousand dollars! We build a ship in the United States worth five hundred thousand dollars, and the value of the ore in the earth, of the trees in the great forest, of all that enters into the composition of that ship bringing five hundred thousand dollars in gold is only twenty thousand dollars; four hundred and eighty thousand dollars by American labor, American muscle, coined into gold; American brains made a legal tender the world round.
I propose to stand by the Nation. I want the furnaces kept hot. I want the sky to be filled with the smoke of American industry, and upon that cloud of smoke will rest forever the bow of perpetual promise. That is what I am for. Where did this doctrine of a tariff for revenue only come from? From the South. The South would like to stab the prosperity of the North. They would rather trade with Old England than with New England. They would rather trade with the people who were willing to help them in war than with those who conquered the Rebellion. They knew what gave us our strength in war. They knew that all the brooks and creeks and rivers of New England were putting down the Rebellion. They knew that every wheel that turned, every spindle that revolved, was a soldier in the army of human progress. It won't do! They were so lured by the greed of office that they were willing to trade upon the misfortunes of a Nation. It won't do! I do not wish to belong to a party that succeeds only when my country fails. I do not wish to belong to a party whose banner went up with the banner of rebellion. I do not wish to belong to a party that was in partnership with defeat and -- disaster. I do not. And there is not a Democrat here who does not know that a failure of the crops this year would have helped his party. You know that an early frost would have been a godsend to them. You know that the potato-bug could have done them more good than all their speakers.
I wish to belong to that party which is prosperous when the country is prosperous. I belong to that party which is not poor when the golden billows are running over the seas of wheat. I belong to that party which is prosperous when there are oceans of corn, and when the cattle are upon the thousand hills. I belong to that party which is prosperous when the furnaces are aflame, and when you dig coal and iron and silver; when everybody has enough to eat; when everybody is happy; when the children are all going to school, and when joy covers my Nation as with a garment. That party which is prosperous then, is my party.
Now, then, I have been telling you what I am for. I am for free speech, and so ought you to be. I am for an honest ballot, and if you are not you ought to be. I am for the collection of the revenue. I am for honest money. I am for the idea that this is a Nation forever. I believe in protecting American labor. I want the shield of my country above every anvil, above every furnace, above every cunning head and above every deft hand of American labor.