> > > > Hi Leland! > > > > What if Paul is a petter himself? > > > > > >> to Pay Paul > >> > > > > Don't you think Bob's international import tariff is a good idea? > > > No, I believe in free trade. A tariff is a tax that is paid by the > foreign country to allow their goods and service into the USA for sale. > The foreign country must pay the tax even though they receive no > benefit > from the Federal Government in the form of USA national defense, > military, branches of government, Supreme Court, Agriculturalist > Programs, etc. It's a kind of taxation without representation.
And what did our Founders do when they had a chance to implement a system of taxation with representation? Newsflash: Our Founders instituted the ad valorem tariff revenue system with the Tariff Act of 1789. If anybody knew about taxation without representation, it was them, and they chose a model that imposed no tax burden on Americans whatsoever, unless they chose to purchase foreign goods. For the first 150 years of our existence, the entire revenue of the federal government was obtained by ad valorem tariffs, the explicit economic purpose of which being to protect the domestic wage and price structure and encourage capital investment in domestic labor. This policy was entirely in line with Smith's economic understanding described in the Wealth of Nations, published the same year we declared our independence, 1776. Our Founders, especially Hamilton, knew about and were well acquainted with his economic doctrine and his criticism of things like tariffs and quotas, and they set up the _ad valorem_ system not to make the same mistakes of the mercantilists that Smith criticized, but rather as a totally new way to fund government without taxing the people and yet promote peace commercial trade, correctly understood. Since 1913, we have switched to a confiscatory income tax system, and decimated the old tariff revenue system of Washington, Hamilton, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt. Since then we have grown in our foreign entanglements and global ambitions, and consequently bankrupted/enslaved our people, the prevention of which was part of the Founders' political rationale for the tariff revenue model. > > I believe their should be a strong relationship between the source of > the tax revenues and the people that receive the benefits from the > government spending, and that would be you and I, not some foreign > country. > > Also, a tariff paid by a foreign country could damage international > trade and put the USA in a disadvantage there. Newsflash: The Chinese are following our former taxation model in some important respects, and it's paying off for them, big time. They have pretty relatively huge tariffs on anything we export to them, but they pay next to nothing to bring their products into our market. Oddly enough this doesn't prevent anybody, least of all us, from doing business with them. They offer huge tax breaks to foreign companies employing Chinese labor, including American corporations, which delight in the slave labor system that the Chicoms impose on their own workers. We, by contrast, give those same American companies huge foreign tax credits, so that they are highly incentivized to invest in foreign labor -- all in the name of free trade and the "global economy" and cheaper consumer goods. Meanwhile we make it harder to employ Americans, with minimum wage laws, several layers of taxation on businesses, and a punishing regulatory regime, etc. And China is growing 10+% a year. Meanwhile, we are going deeper into both federal and personal debt and have gutted our manufacturing base with our unilateral "free trade" economic disarmament policies. Free trade is a huge pig in a poke on purely free market grounds. My eventual book will present the complete case. - Bob > > Regards, > > LelandJ _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[EMAIL PROTECTED] ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
