Tariff Related Quotes

Large-scale commercial exchange and long-distance trade tend to promote common standards of measurement. For relatively smallscale trade, grain dealers could transact with several suppliers as long as they knew the measure each was using. They might actually profit from their superior grasp of the profusion of units, much as smugglers take advantage of small differences in taxes and tariffs. Beyond a certain point, however, much of commerce is composed of long chains of transactions, often over great distances, between anonymous buyers and sellers. Such trade is greatly simplified and made legible by standard weights and measures.

I have often been asked why I maintained such a non-compromising antagonism to government and in what way I have found myself oppressed by it. In my opinion every individual is hampered by it. It exacts taxes from production. It creates tariffs, which prevent free exchange. It stands ever for the status quo and traditional conduct and belief. It comes into private lives and into most intimate personal relations, enabling the superstitious, puritanical, and distorted ones to impose their ignorant prejudice and moral servitudes upon the sensitive, the imaginative, and the free spirits. Government does this by its divorce laws, its moral censorships, and by a thousand petty persecutions of those who are too honest to wear the moral mask of respectability. In addition, government protects the strong at the expense of the weak, provides courts and laws which the rich may scorn and the poor must obey. It enables the predatory rich to make wars to provide foreign markets for the favored ones, with prosperity for the rulers and wholesale death for the ruled. However, it is not only government in the sense of the state which is destructive of every individual value and quality. It is the whole complex of authority and institutional domination which strangles life. It is the superstition, myth, pretense, evasions, and subservience which support authority and institutional domination. It is the reverence for these institutions instilled in the school, the church and the home in order that man may believe and obey without protest. Such a process of devitalizing and distorting personalities of the individual and of whole communities may have been a part of historical evolution; but it should be strenuously combated by every honest and independent mind in an age which has any pretense to enlightenment.

Another view of the Constitution was put forward early in the twentieth century by the historian Charles Beard (arousing anger and indignation, including a denunciatory editorial in the New York Times). He wrote in his book An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution: Inasmuch as the primary object of a government, beyond the mere repression of physical violence, is the making of the rules which determine the property relations of members of society, the dominant classes whose rights are thus to be determined must perforce obtain from the government such rules as are consonant with the larger interests necessary to the continuance of their economic processes, or they must themselves control the organs of government. In short, Beard said, the rich must, in their own interest, either control the government directly or control the laws by which government operates. Beard applied this general idea to the Constitution, by studying the economic backgrounds and political ideas of the fifty-five men who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to draw up the Constitution. He found that a majority of them were lawyers by profession, that most of them were men of wealth, in land, slaves, manufacturing, or shipping, that half of them had money loaned out at interest, and that forty of the fifty-five held government bonds, according to the records of the Treasury Department. Thus, Beard found that most of the makers of the Constitution had some direct economic interest in establishing a strong federal government: the manufacturers needed protective tariffs; the moneylenders wanted to stop the use of paper money to pay off debts; the land speculators wanted protection as they invaded Indian lands; slaveowners needed federal security against slave revolts and runaways; bondholders wanted a government able to raise money by nationwide taxation, to pay off those bonds. Four groups, Beard noted, were not represented in the Constitutional Convention: slaves, indentured servants, women, men without property. And so the Constitution did not reflect the interests of those groups. He wanted to make it clear that he did not think the Constitution was written merely to benefit the Founding Fathers personally, although one could not ignore the $150,000 fortune of Benjamin Franklin, the connections of Alexander Hamilton to wealthy interests through his father-in-law and brother-in-law, the great slave plantations of James Madison, the enormous landholdings of George Washington. Rather, it was to benefit the groups the Founders represented, the “economic interests they understood and felt in concrete, definite form through their own personal experience.

But the conclusion of the HOS theory critically depends on the assumption that productive resources can move freely across economic activities. This assumption means that capital and labour released from any one activity can immediately and without cost be asbsorbed by other activities. With this assumption-known as the assumption of 'perfect factor mobility' among economists-adjustments to changing trade patterns pose no problem. If a steel mill shuts down due to an increase in imports because, say the government reduces tariffs, the resources employed in the industry (the workers, the buildings, the blast furnaces) will be employed (at the same or higher levels of productivity and thus higher returns) by another industry that has become relatively more profitable, say, the computer industry. No one loses from the process.

Mattis and Gary Cohn had several quiet conversations about The Big Problem: The president did not understand the importance of allies overseas, the value of diplomacy or the relationship between the military, the economy and intelligence partnerships with foreign governments. They met for lunch at the Pentagon to develop an action plan. One cause of the problem was the president’s fervent belief that annual trade deficits of about $500 billion harmed the American economy. He was on a crusade to impose tariffs and quotas despite Cohn’s best efforts to educate him about the benefits of free trade. How could they convince and, in their frank view, educate the president? Cohn and Mattis realized they were nowhere close to persuading him. The Groundhog Day–like meetings on trade continued and the acrimony only grew. “Let’s get him over here to the Tank,” Mattis proposed. The Tank is the Pentagon’s secure meeting room for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It might focus him. “Great idea,” Cohn said. “Let’s get him out of the White House.” No press; no TVs; no Madeleine Westerhout, Trump’s personal secretary, who worked within shouting distance of the Oval Office. There wouldn’t even be any looking out the window, because there were no windows in the Tank. Getting Trump out of his natural environment could do the trick. The idea was straight from the corporate playbook—a retreat or off-site meeting. They would get Trump to the Tank with his key national security and economic team to discuss worldwide strategic relations. Mattis and Cohn agreed. Together they would fight Trump on this. Trade wars or disruptions in the global markets could savage and undermine the precarious stability in the world. The threat could spill over to the military and intelligence community. Mattis couldn’t understand why the U.S. would want to pick a fight with allies, whether it was NATO, or friends in the Middle East, or Japan—or particularly with South Korea.

The Jews have made it relatively safe for patriots who agree tacitly to remain in the official Jewish playpen. And the boundaries of that Jewish playpen consist of avoiding mention of just two things: RACE and JEWS... You are allowed to be an economic conservative; you are allowed to be against all sorts of pet hates of "conservatives", such as "big government", Earl Warren, low tariffs, taxes, unions, etc. But let any conservative mention the Jews publicly and he will promptly find himself attacked with maximum Jew terrorism. Let him say that he thinks there is some evidence that perhaps Negroes are not biologically equal to White People-and the floodgates of Jewish hate and sewage will be opened to pour upon his head such a torrent of abuse and smear that he will run like a rabbit. He will be termed a "racist", a "bigot", a "hater", a "fascist"-and finally, a "NAZI"!

To fit into the Golden Straitjacket a country must either adopt, or be seen as moving toward, the following golden rules: making the private sector the primary engine of its economic growth, maintaining a low rate of inflation and price stability, shrinking the size of its state bureaucracy, maintaining as close to a balanced budget as possible, if not a surplus, eliminating and lowering tariffs on imported goods, removing restrictions on foreign investment, getting rid of quotas and domestic monopolies, increasing exports, privatizing state-owned industries and utilities, deregulating capital markets, making its currency convertible, opening its industries, stock and bond markets to direct foreign ownership and investment, deregulating its economy to promote as much domestic competition as possible, eliminating government corruption, subsidies and kickbacks as much as possible, opening its banking and telecommunications systems to private ownership and competition and allowing its citizens to choose from an array of competing pension options and foreign-run pension and mutual funds. When you stitch all of these pieces together you have the Golden Straitjacket. . . . As your country puts on the Golden Straitjacket, two things tend to happen: your economy grows and your politics shrinks. That is, on the economic front the Golden Straitjacket usually fosters more growth and higher average incomes—through more trade, foreign investment, privatization and more efficient use of resources under the pressure of global competition. But on the political front, the Golden Straitjacket narrows the political and economic policy choices of those in power to relatively tight parameters. . . . Governments—be they led by Democrats or Republicans, Conservatives or Labourites, Gaullists or Socialists, Christian Democrats or Social Democrats—that deviate too far from the core rules will see their investors stampede away, interest rates rise and stock market valuations fall.36

The U.S. Treasury Department has issued at least four licenses to companies that want to establish ferry service to Cuba from Key West, Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Tampa. Baleària, a Spanish company, presently owns the Baleària Bahamas Express ferry service from Fort Lauderdale to Freeport, Grand Bahamas, and is now considering a ferry to operate between Florida and Cuba. United Caribbean and Havana Partners have expressed an interest in a service from Tampa to Havana and Mexico. Baja Ferries USA wants to open routes between the Port of Miami and Port Everglades to Cuba. Some of the ferries will offer duty-free shopping, restaurants, bars and even swimming pools. The details regarding feasibility depends on government restrictions and tariffs placed on them by the countries, as well as the ports involved. Tampa would be a straight run 331 miles due south, but some of the other ports would be closer. In the end it will come down to money, availability of cargo and logistics. As of the summer of 2016, perspective ferry operators are awaiting final approval and licensing from the Cuban government. Because of this the ferry companies are on hold and are still waiting to begin operations. Tampa and The Port of Tampa have expressed their enthusiasm to become fully involved in these new ventures. Bob Rohrlack, President of the Greater Tampa Chamber of Commerce, has been to Cuba several times, taking corporate delegates in preparation for improved, open relations with Cuba.

Both the immigration legislation and the draconian regime of high tariffs (the Ford–McCumber tariff of 1922 and the Smoot–Hawley tariff of 1930) converted the U.S. into a relatively closed economy during the three decades between 1930 and 1960. The lack of competition for jobs from recent immigrants made it easier for unions to organize and push up wages in the 1930s. The high tariff wall allowed American manufacturing to introduce all available innovations into U.S.-based factories without the outsourcing that has become common in the last several decades. The lack of competition from immigrants and imports boosted the wages of workers at the bottom and contributed to the remarkable “great compression” of the income distribution during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.36 Thus the closing of the American economy through restrictive immigration legislation and high tariffs may indirectly have contributed to the rise of real wages in the 1930s, the focus of innovative investment in the domestic economy, and the general reduction of inequality from the 1920s to the 1950s.

Political power converts into economic benefit. That problem has only worsened in the Trump years, with the Trump tax cut and the Trump tariffs the leading culprits. In December 2019, the Federal Reserve released the first close study of the impact of Trump’s economic policies on consumer welfare. The language of the study was delicate, but the conclusions were damning. “We find that tariff increases enacted in 2018 are associated with relative reductions in manufacturing employment and relative increases in producer prices.” And while some might argue that hurting consumers is an acceptable price to pay to revive US manufacturing, “our results suggest that the tariffs have not boosted manufacturing employment or output, even as they increased producer prices.”27

[Warren] Harding diligently worked the knots of America's body politic from the moment he took office, soothing conservatives by resizing the federal government for peacetime and adopting a pro-business outlook, soothing his Republican base by raising tariffs and lowering taxes, soothing the left by releasing from prison the socialist icon Eugene Debs and other radicals rounded up during Palmer's Red Scare, soothing the battered farm belt with an emergency tariff and federal protection for farm cooperatives, soothing labor with public works programs to ease unemployment and by cajoling the steel industry into abandoning its inhumane practice of twelve-hour shifts. Harding soothed the isolationist and nativist majority in America with tighter immigration policies and a foreign policy emphasizing legitimate national interests over crusading idealism. He soothed international tensions by normalizing relations with Germany and other former enemy states, and by convincing the world's leading naval powers to reduce tonnage at his Washington Disarmament Conference, the first gathering of its kind and a remarkable, unexpected success.

The drama of the final collapse of the gold-exchange standard would poison Anglo-American relations for decades. To the British way of thinking, Britain had been ignominiously forced off gold by selfish and short-sighted American and French policies: the Americans with their abominable import tariffs, and the French with their wretched devaluations. The Americans, for their part, saw themselves as innocent victims of an odious British default.

tax collector’s booth. Most people in the Roman Empire did not like tax collectors; Jewish people viewed them as traitors. For assessment purposes, tax collectors were allowed to search anything except the person of a Roman lady; any property not properly declared was subject to seizure. In Egypt, tax collectors were sometimes so brutal that they were known to beat up aged women in an attempt to learn where their tax-owing relatives were hiding. Ancient documents reveal that when harvests were bad, on occasion an entire village, hearing that a tax collector was coming, would leave town and start a village somewhere else. People sometimes paid tax collectors bribes to prevent even higher fees being extorted. Some scholars consider Levi a customs officer who would charge tariffs on goods passing through Capernaum. Such tariffs were small by themselves (often less than 3 percent) but drove up the cost of goods because they were multiplied by all the borders they passed through. Customs officers could search possessions; customs income normally went to local governments run by elites who were cooperative with Rome. Others regard Levi as collecting taxes from local residents, likely working especially for agents of Galilee’s ruler, Herod Antipas.

Countries like Finland, Norway, Italy and Austria-which were relatively backward at the end of the Second World War and saw the need for rapid industrial development-also used strategies similar to those used by France and Japan to promote their industrie. All of them had relatively high tariffs until the 1960s. They all actively used SOEs to upgrade their industries. This was particularly successful in Finland and Norway. In Finland, Norway and Austria, the government was very much involved in directing the flow of bank credit to strategic industries. Finland heavily controlled foreign investment. In many parts of Italy, local government provided support for marketing and R&D to small and medium-sized firms in the locality.

These days, nearly everyone claims to be democratic. I have even heard it claimed that the Chinese Communist Party is democratic. ‘Capitalist’, by contrast, is a word too often used as a term of abuse to be much heard in polite company. How do the institutions of the democratic state and those of the market economy relate to one another? Do corporations play an active part in politics, through lobbyists and campaign contributions? Do governments play an active part in economic life, through subsidies, tariffs and other market-distorting devices, or through regulation? What is the right balance to be struck