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- #121
Some Chomsky thoughts on tariffs.blah blah blah.. you'd call it a fucking mandate if the mob were spouting YOUR opinions.
Tax the rich and tariff imports on nations that don't trade evenly with the US.
We did that with the Smoot/Hawley tarriff tax. IT WAS AN ECONOMIC DISASTER!
No we didn't.
Per usual you don't really know what you're talking about.
Look it up, lad.
Smoot Hawley is a rather limited tariff.
It's effect on the economy was minor.
"Economic historians have argued that Egypt was well-placed to undertake rapid economic development at the same time that the U.S. was.
"Both had rich agriculture, including cotton, the fuel of the early industrial revolution—though unlike Egypt, the U.S. had to develop cotton production and a workforce by conquest, extermination and slavery, with consequences that are evident right now in the reservations for the survivors and the prisons that have rapidly expanded since the Reagan years to house the superfluous population left by deindustrialization.
"One fundamental difference was that the U.S. had gained independence and was therefore free to ignore the prescriptions of economic theory, delivered at the time by Adam Smith in terms rather like those preached to developing societies today...
"Having gained their independence, the colonies were free to ignore his advice and to follow England’s course of independent state-guided development, with high tariffs to protect industry from British exports, first textiles, later steel and others, and to adopt numerous other devices to accelerate industrial development.
"The independent Republic also sought to gain a monopoly of cotton so as to 'place all other nations at our feet,' particularly the British enemy, as the Jacksonian presidents announced when conquering Texas and half of Mexico."
Truthdig