The Bailout... Another View

[William Joyce]

The Occidental Quarterly

 

[Kevin_Kennedy]

Continually typing out why tariffs will not help, and will only hurt, the economy is getting tiring. So here's what I wrote in another thread.

First and foremost, tariffs cause the consumers to have to pay more. If they have to pay more in one area then that means they have less money to pay for something else, which hurts that industry. Tariffs also hurt other industries that have to pay more for the product from the protected industry.

In the absence of competition innovation is unnecessary, because you know that the consumers will buy your product regardless. This means that the consumers are left paying more for an inferior product.

Do you think other nations will sit back and let us impose tariffs on their products? Absolutely not. They're going to retaliate with tariffs of their own, which will hurt American companies that export their products to other nations.

Now for a history lesson. The Confederate States originally seceded from the union in 1860 because of high tariffs that benefitted the industrial northern states at the expense of the agricultural southern states. In the Confederate Constitution tariffs were prohibited. Abraham Lincoln had to invade the south. If he allowed the Confederates to remain a nation then it would have been the end of his protectionist "American System," because the free trade south would have had much more trade than the northern states. Lincoln would have had to remove all the tariffs he so loved just to compete with the Confederates. So rather than do that, he decided to illegally invade the south and force them back into the union.

Protectionism always benefits a small portion of the country, at the expense of the rest. In no way shape or form is that helpful to our economy.