On Fri, Jan 25, 2008 at 11:53:18AM -0700, Bryan Sant wrote: > On Jan 24, 2008 6:29 PM, Charles Curley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I can understand that. Free trade != "fair trade". "Fair trade" is a > > euphemism for massive government intervention into international (and > > hence domestic) trade, which a free trader would oppose. As The > > Economist has pointed out for over a century, you are better off > > dropping your own trade barriers whether your trading partners do so > > or not. > > Although I've been defending the need for a tariff on foreign goods, I > can absolutely see the abuse that could happen with that. > Being genuinely naive about this topic, do you have any links?
No, I don't, sorry. I can't even thing of an article on The Economist's web site. One place to check might be mises.org. The Foundation for Economic Education has much good material at the intelligent layman level; you might check there. One of the things that drove a wedge between the North and South early in the XIXth Century was the use of the tariff. To grossly over simplify, the South was largely agricultural, and wanted to be able to import goods, especially manufactured goods, from Europe. The North was industrializing and saw the tariff as a means to force the South to buy (much more expensive) goods from the North. So the North raised tariffs again and again. The South (Calhoun, e.g.) called it the Tariff of Abominations. You might google on that. That was one of the precursor issues that lead to the War of Northern Aggression. One effect of the high tariff was to drive the South away from machinery and from mechanizing their farms. They turned to alternative sources of mechanical power, one of which, unfortunately, was slavery. This is not to say that a very low tariff would not be acceptable even to staunch free traders. But it should be low, universal and uniformly applied. And its sole purpose should be to fund federal operations. But the "tariff of abominations" clearly was none of those things. -- Charles Curley /"\ ASCII Ribbon Campaign Looking for fine software \ / Respect for open standards and/or writing? X No HTML/RTF in email http://www.charlescurley.com / \ No M$ Word docs in email Key fingerprint = CE5C 6645 A45A 64E4 94C0 809C FFF6 4C48 4ECD DFDB
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