The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) posted an excellent quote from Henry George’s 1905 book entitled “Protection or Free Trade.” It is something that United States President-Elect Donald Trump must read as he decides to impose protectionist measures, like tariffs, on millions of U.S. consumers and businesses.
Here is the quote:
“Civilized nations do not use their armies and fleets to open one another’s ports to trade. What they use their armies and fleets for, is, when they quarrel, to close one another’s ports. And their effort then is to prevent the carrying in of things even more than the bringing out of things—importing rather than exporting. For a people can be more quickly injured by preventing them from getting things than by preventing them from sending things away.
“Trade does not require force. Free trade consists simply in letting people buy and sell as they want to buy and sell. It is protection that requires force, for it consists in preventing people from doing what they want to do. Protective tariffs are as much applications of force as are blockading squadrons, and their object is the same—to prevent trade. The difference between the two is that blockading squadrons are a means whereby nations seek to prevent their enemies from trading; protective tariffs are a means whereby nations attempt to prevent their own people from trading. What protection teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war.”
What happens when another country imposes the same type of protectionist policies? Well, as legendary free market economist Walter Block recently said, if you’re on a boat with someone who shoots a hole in it, you don’t respond by also shooting a hole in the boat.
Free trade is a Ivory Tower theory protected by a bodyguard of lies. For most of our history we were protected by tariffs and experienced none of the bad things the American Enterprise Institute is trying to scare us with.