All Posts Tagged With: "tariffs"

Missing Samuel Tilden

If you’re under 50 you probably don’t remember when telephone “numbers” weren’t all numbers. From the 1920s until the mid-1960s most phone “numbers” began with two letters corresponding to certain digits on a common telephone dial. KL7-1234, for example, was read as “Klondike 7-1234.” My family’s number was TI3-8597. The letters were meant to honor [...]

26Oct2011 | Lawrence W. Reed | 0 comments | Continued

Civil War and the American Political Economy

The task before us is to assess in largely material terms the political-economic system arising during and after the American Civil War. Ideological issues existed, certainly, but much evidence suggests that pure idealism had a rather limited run. Antislavery was one of many themes generally serving as the stalking horse for more practical causes. Slavery [...]

23Mar2011 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 4 comments | Continued

Tariffs and Freedom

A historical episode that opponents of consumer sovereignty—that is, opponents of free trade—frequently cite to support their case for high tariffs is late nineteenth-century America. Pat Buchanan, for example, in his book The Great Betrayal asserts about the 1800s that “Behind a tariff wall . . . the United States had gone from an agrarian [...]

22Dec2010 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 19 comments | Continued

Mad About Trade: Why Main Street America Should Embrace Globalization

Free trade is the consumer’s best friend and a great contributor to peace. Pressing those ideas home is Cato Institute trade expert Daniel Griswold’s challenge in this book. He is mad for trade, while too many others are mad against trade. As an example of the latter, consider radio host and writer Lou Dobbs, who [...]

25Aug2010 | William H. Peterson | 1 comment | Continued

Why Globalization Works

Look at the foes of economic globalization and you’ll find a curious coalition. Some are left-wingers who oppose globalization because they oppose capitalism. But others are right-wing protectionists who don’t like foreign competition. The strength of the anti-globalist coalition has waxed and waned over time, but there is still a large number of people who [...]

13Jul2010 | Martin Morse Wooster | 0 comments | Continued

Tariffs are Legal Plunder

Everybody has an issue he reacts to most intensely. [Frederic] Bastiat’s was tariffs. And his most barbed comments were directed against those who favored governmental protection of national industry from foreign competition. He thought this legal method of cheating consumers by keeping prices above the market was a perfect example of how governments plunder their [...]

7Jul2010 | Dean Russell | 1 comment | Continued

Government Moonshine

From its minor role as an oxygenate additive for gasoline, ethanol has become the darling of Washington. Politicians embrace ethanol as a miracle elixir. All the fashionable energy buzzwords can be applied to it. It is “green power”; it’s “renewable” and will provide “energy independence” for America. Legislation has been promoting ethanol nonstop. The Energy [...]

24Mar2010 | Michael Heberling | 4 comments | Continued

FDR’s Lucky Timing

It’s not clear how any of FDR’s 1933 policies could have accounted for a 17 percent increase in GDP, even if they promoted expansion, because they wouldn’t have had time to ripple through the economy. It seems more likely that FDR had the good fortune to come into office near the bottom of the Depression, and enough adjustments in wages, prices, and other factors had occurred that the economy was ready to recover.

10Jun2009 | Jim Powell | 5 comments | Continued

From Good Samaritan to Robin Hood

The clamor from interventionists against inequality morphs into a clamor for a larger and larger state. This path leads to the loss of liberty and a distortion of both democracy and justice. It distorts democracy because, by attempting to solve inequality, it removes limits to power and expands the field of state action. It distorts justice because the only way to solve inequality politically is for the state to have the power to treat individuals unequally. Thus the struggle to eliminate inequality ends up destroying the most important form of equality for an open society: equality before the law.

10Jun2009 | Carlos Rodríguez Braun | 2 comments | Continued

Let’s Not Be Energy Independent

“Energy independence” is a term that sounds good but falls apart on closer examination. Although the United States could achieve energy independence, we could do so only at an enormous cost. Energy “dependence” is much cheaper and much more desirable. Before considering the costs and benefits of energy independence, I should define my terms. What [...]

1Oct2008 | David R. Henderson | 10 comments | Continued

Dry-Cleaning Economics in One Lesson

Another day, another news story about economic wackiness. Gas prices rise, the dollar sinks, and stores are limiting rice sales. What could be next? Clothes hangers. Yes, clothes hangers. Marie Sledge, co-owner of Rome (Georgia) Cleaners, states, “Hangers last year at this time were $28 a box, where now they are $56.” News reports indicate [...]

1Sep2008 | E. Frank Stephenson | 0 comments | Continued

The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time

By Jeffrey D. Sachs Reviewed by Jude Blanchette

1Mar2007 | FEE Admin | 1 comment | Continued

The Disconnect Between Political Promises and Performance

What can politicians do to create more higher paying jobs? Politicians must think that most of us believe the answer is: a lot. One of the most persistent campaign promises is the creation of good jobs at good wages. I shall argue that politicians can do quite a number of things to increase high-wage employment. [...]

1Apr2006 | Dwight R. Lee | 0 comments | Continued

Tariffs, Blockades, and Inflation: The Economics of the Civil War

In concise and clear prose Professors Mark Thornton and Robert Ekelund use basic economics to explain the causes, outcome, and consequences of the Civil War. Employing Public Choice theory—a subdiscipline of economics that focuses on how public officials and government bureaucracies make decisions—Thornton and Ekelund attempt to revise many standard accounts of the war. Although [...]

18Mar2006 | John Majewski | 0 comments | Continued

Africans Whom Westerners Should Heed

At the G8 Summit in Scotland last July, hosted by Britains Tony Blair, European and North American politicians (all of them white) cried crocodile tears for the plight of black Africans. Echoing a gaggle of actors, rock stars, socialist ideologues, Third World dictators, and other learned economic-development
experts, they called for another transfer of wealth from developed nations to the undeveloped ones of Africawhich, by most measures, would seem to exclude no country on the continent.

1Dec2005 | Lawrence W. Reed | 1 comment | Continued

The Unconstitutionality of Protectionism

Even the staunchest free trader might reluctantly concede that the apparatus of protectionism—tariffs, import quotas, and anti-dumping duties—is constitutional because clause 3 of Article I, Section 8, of the U.S. Constitution delegates to Congress “power . . . to regulate commerce with foreign nations. . . .” Before we make too hasty a concession, however, [...]

1Apr2005 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

Free Trade: Key to Peace and Prosperity

Contributing editor William Peterson (whpeterson@ aol.com) is an adjunct scholar with the Heritage Foundation. At a time of international tension and a so-so economy, we are fortunate that the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has issued its essay (online or in hard copy) “The Fruits of Free Trade.” It comes from the Dallas Fed’s 2002 [...]

1Jan2004 | William H. Peterson | 1 comment | Continued
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