Tariffs are our Future. And our Past.
“The media are a corporate monopoly. They have the same point of view. The two parties are two factions of the business party.”-Noam Chomsky
Republicans and Democrats, Fox Business and CNN – they are all in agreement that Free Trade is good for the country.
They are all wrong. They know they are wrong. They are all being paid by the same billionaires to defend Free Trade and scare you about Tariffs.
The truth is transparently clear: Tariffs are good for the American worker. They have been since Day 1.
The Revolution was fought in part so Americans could control their own trade policy. Great Britain was dumping manufactured goods on the colonists and suppressing American industry.
The Tariff Act of 1789 – signed by President Washington – was the second bill signed by the US Congress. It placed a 5% tariff on imported goods. The miracle of American industrialization had begun.
As usual, tariffs worked their magic: protecting domestic industry, improving the job security of workers, and providing easy government funding without taxation. By 1820, tariffs on most imports was 40% and Washington DC was running on tariff revenue.
During the first 150 years of US history, protectionist tariffs helped create the largest and most self-sufficient industrial machine in the world. And it helped organized labor grab a share of power, too, since capitalists couldn’t just move their factories to the third world and export cheap goods back to us.
“Give us a protective tariff and we will have the greatest nation on earth,” Abraham Lincoln predicted. “The abandonment of the protective policy of the American government must produce want and ruin among our people.”
Mr. Lincoln was right. Twenty-five years ago, the leaders of both parties chose to abandon our history and the welfare their constituencies. Protectionism was tossed aside in favor of a bold new experiment in Free Trade.
Only Free Trade is just a clever propaganda term. There is nothing free or fair about it. Free Trade is intentionally stacked against the American worker.
Without sensible tariffs, other countries have a built-in advantage. Other countries pay their workers less, have lower corporate taxes, have fewer environmental standards to comply with, and have weaker currencies than the US dollar.
The movement of factories from the US to Asia and Mexico was not an honest mistake; it was the inevitable result of Free Trade agreements and the grand design of our globalist overlords. The only beneficiaries of these agreements were the stockholders and CEOs of multi-national companies.
Free Trade snuffed out the positive power of private sector unions. Free Trade left our once self-sufficient nation dangerously dependent on other countries for our basic material needs. Worst of all, Free Trade pushed millions of non-college-educated workers from the comfortable middle class into economic degradation and debt.
And what did blue collar America get in return? Dollar Stores full of Chinese junk, the TV show “Hoarders,” and piles of Amazon boxes full of empty dreams.
The Free Trade experiment in globalist evil is nearly at an end. Free Trade remains popular with the leaders of both parties, but increasingly unpopular with the both the populist Left and the populist Right.
The billionaire oligarchs who run our country want an honest debate about pretty much any issue except Free Trade. That’s because they know that the truth about protectionism is unavoidable. It protects workers and hurts Wall Street.
Our past is tariffs. And our future is tariffs.
