Tariff War Quotes

They" hate us because they feel--and "they" are not wrong--that it is within our power to do so much more, and that we practice a kind of passive-aggressive violence on the Third World. We do this by, for example, demonizing tobacco as poison here while promoting cigarettes in Asia; inflating produce prices by paying farmers not to grow food as millions go hungry worldwide; skimping on quality and then imposing tariffs on foreign products made better or cheaper than our own; padding corporate profits through Third World sweatshops; letting drug companies stand by as millions die of AIDS in Africa to keep prices up on lifesaving drugs; and on and on. We do, upon reaching a very high comfort level, mostly choose to go from ten to eleven instead of helping another guy far away go from zero to one. We even do it in our own country. Barbara Ehrenreich's brilliant book Nickel and Dimed describes the impossibility of living with dignity or comfort as one of the millions of minimum-wage workers in fast food, aisle-stocking and table-waiting jobs. Their labor for next to nothing ensures that well-off people can be a little more pampered. So if we do it to our own, what chance do foreigners have?

The mythology serves purposes darker than sentiment, nothing more so than the currently popular, and arrantly nonsensical, assertion that Lee freed his inherited slaves in 1862 before the war was over, while Grant kept his until the Thirteenth Amendment freed them in 1865. The subtext is transparent. If Southerner Lee freed his slaves while Northerner Grant kept his, then secession and the war that followed can hardly have had anything to do with slavery and must instead have been over the tariff or state rights, or some other handy pretext invented to cloak slavery’s pivotal role.

Printing dollars at home means higher inflation in China, higher food prices in Egypt and stock bubbles in Brazil. Printing money means that U.S. debt is devalued so foreign creditors get paid back in cheaper dollars. The devaluation means higher unemployment in developing economies as their exports become more expensive for Americans. The resulting inflation also means higher prices for inputs needed in developing economies like copper, corn, oil and wheat. Foreign countries have begun to fight back against U.S.-caused inflation through subsidies, tariffs and capital controls; the currency war is expanding fast.

So we Europeans are shocked by the blind, uncomprehending hard-heartedness that certain American government policies imply. I am thinking of the terrible tariff walls erected against Europe and the ironfisted efforts to secure payment of Europe’s war debt. As a layman, as a man in the street, I reason like this: Though America, for the moment, gains the most from its financial policy, what about the future, all the years to come, all the generations to be born? No more than any other country on the planet can America stand alone. America is not the world. America is a part of the world and must live its life together with all the other parts.

The treaty terms were atrocious. The Hesperians got their trade rights—we’ve waived our rights to any tariffs, but they get to keep theirs. They also won the right to build military bases anywhere they want on Nikara soil.

As the great nineteenth-century abolitionist and libertarian Lysander Spooner pointed out, the primary motive of Lincoln and the war party was to preserve and consolidate Northern control of the Southern economy. The Southern states could not be allowed to evade the tariff, a key element of the mercantilist American system that Lincoln favored.

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.

Yet as one senior administration official noted to me, 'People who blithely say that we'd win a trade war because China obviously couldn't sustain the damage caused by cutting off their goods are just naive and silly.' Any significant trade restrictions the United States imposed on China would swiftly lead to an equally harmful retaliation on the United States. That is why the most effective lobbyists against tariffs on Chinese goods are American companies that buy from China, do business in China, or have ventures with Chinese firms. So as Obama's outburst [of 'I need leverage!' to staff on a visit to Asia in 2011] underscored, the form of leverage threatened most often by Washington politicians looking for an easy applause line actually offers little leverage at all.

The Book of Sand ("El libro de arena"), the character Eudoro Acevedo asks, "What happened to governments? "Tradition says they gradually fell into disuse. They would call elections, declare war, set tariffs, confiscate fortunes, order arrests and seek to impose censorship, but nobody on the planet obeyed them. "The press stopped publishing their contributions and pictures. Politicians had to look for an honest job; some found their talent in comedy or as witch doctors. The reality was very likely fuller than this brief account.

The German economic system as it existed before the war depended on three main factors: I. Overseas commerce as represented by her mercantile marine, her colonies, her foreign investments, her exports, and the overseas connections of her merchants; II. The exploitation of her coal and iron and the industries built upon them; III. Her transport and tariff system. Of these the first, while not the least important, was certainly the most vulnerable. The Treaty aims at the systematic destruction of all three, but principally of the first two. I (1) Germany has ceded to the Allies all the vessels of her mercantile marine exceeding 1600 tons gross, half the vessels between 1000 tons and 1600 tons, and one quarter of her trawlers and other fishing boats.[9] The cession is comprehensive, including not only vessels flying the German flag, but also all vessels owned by Germans but flying other flags, and all vessels under construction as well as those afloat.[10] Further, Germany undertakes, if required, to build for the Allies such types of ships as they may specify up to 200,000 tons[11] annually for five years, the value of these ships being credited to Germany against what is due from her for Reparation.[12]

Lincoln labored mightily in the political trenches of the Whig and Republican parties for nearly three decades on behalf of this economic agenda, but with only minor success. The Constitution stood in the way of the Whig economic agenda as one American president after another vetoed internal improvement and national bank bills. Beginning with Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, Southern statesmen were always in the forefront of the opposition to this economic agenda. According to Lincoln scholar Mark Neely, Jr., Lincoln seethed in frustration for many years over how the Constitution stood in the way of his political ambitions. Lincoln thought of himself as the heir to the Hamiltonian political tradition, which sought a much more centralized governmental system, one that would plan economic development with corporate subsidies financed by protectionist tariffs and the printing of money by the central government. This

It took a long time—at least a year, if not more—for me to start questioning that narrative. But by the time Trump started ticking off items on democratic socialist Bernie Sanders’s economic wish list—get rid of NAFTA, enforce the border, start a trade war with China, impose tariffs—it was impossible not to see what was going on. Americans living in industrial communities that had been devastated by NAFTA and globalization—those most likely to have lost friends and family members, men in the prime of their lives, to overdose deaths—had seen in Trump a tribune: a man as reviled by the elites as they were, a man who talked about jobs endlessly, who hated NAFTA and NATO as much as they did. The same voters who were endlessly asked by leftist elites why they bucked their economic interests by voting Republican had in fact voted in their economic interests—and the Left called them racist for it. I called them racist for it.

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.

If the global pie stayed the same size, there was no margin for credit. Credit is the difference between today’s pie and tomorrow’s pie. If the pie stays the same, why extend credit? It would be an unacceptable risk unless you believed that the baker or king asking for your money might be able to steal a slice from a competitor. So it was hard to get a loan in the premodern world, and when you got one it was usually small, short-term, and subject to high interest rates. Upstart entrepreneurs thus found it difficult to open new bakeries and great kings who wanted to build palaces or wage wars had no choice but to raise the necessary funds through high taxes and tariffs. That was fine for kings (as long as their subjects remained docile), but a scullery maid who had a great idea for a bakery and wanted to move up in the world generally could only dream of wealth while scrubbing down the royal kitchen’s floors. The Magic Circle of the Modern Economy It was lose-lose. Because credit was limited, people had trouble financing new businesses. Because there were few new businesses, the economy did not grow. Because it did not grow, people assumed it never would, and those who had capital were wary of extending credit. The expectation of stagnation fulfilled itself.

times had changed. The chief impetus for rethinking the value of colonies was the global Depression. It had triggered a desperate scramble among the world’s powers to prop up their flagging economies with protective tariffs. This was an individual solution with excruciating collective consequences. As those trade barriers rose, global trade collapsed, falling by two-thirds between 1929 and 1932. This was exactly the nightmare Alfred Thayer Mahan had predicted back in the 1890s. As international trade doors slammed shut, large economies were forced to subsist largely on their own domestic produce. Domestic, in this context, included colonies, though, since one of empire’s chief benefits was the unrestricted economic access it brought to faraway lands. It mattered to major imperial powers—the Dutch, the French, the British—that they could still get tropical products such as rubber from their colonies in Asia. And it mattered to the industrial countries without large empires—Germany, Italy, Japan—that they couldn’t. The United States was in a peculiar position. It had colonies, but they weren’t its lifeline. Oil, cotton, iron, coal, and many of the important minerals that other industrial economies found hard to secure—the United States had these in abundance on its enormous mainland. Rubber and tin it could still purchase from Malaya via its ally Britain. It did take a few useful goods from its tropical colonies, such as coconut oil from the Philippines and Guam and “Manila hemp” from the Philippines (used to make rope and sturdy paper, hence “manila envelopes” and “manila folders”). Yet the United States didn’t depend on its colonies in the same way that other empires did. It was, an expert in the 1930s declared, “infinitely more self-contained” than its rivals. Most of what the United States got from its colonies was sugar, grown on plantations in Hawai‘i, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Philippines. Yet even in sugar, the United States wasn’t dependent. Sugarcane grew in the subtropical South, in Louisiana and Florida. It could also be made from beets, and in the interwar years the United States bought more sugar from mainland beet farmers than it did from any of its territories. What the Depression drove home was that, three decades after the war with Spain, the United States still hadn’t done much with its empire. The colonies had their uses: as naval bases and zones of experimentation for men such as Daniel Burnham and Cornelius Rhoads. But colonial products weren’t integral to the U.S. economy. In fact, they were potentially a threat.

Hong Kong became a British colony after the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, the result of the Opium War. This was a particularly shameful episode, even by the standards of 19th-century imperialism. The growing British taste for tea had created a huge trade deficit with China. In a desperate attempt to plug the gap, Britain started exporting opium produced in India to China. The mere detail that selling opium was illegal in China could not possibly be allowed to obstruct the noble cause of balancing the books. When a Chinese official seized an illicit cargo of opium in 1841, the British government used it as an excuse to fix the problem once and for all by declaring war. China was heavily defeated in the war and forced to sign the Treaty of Nanking, which made China 'lease' Hong Kong to Britain and give up its right to set its own tariffs. So there it was-the self-proclaimed leader of the 'liberal' world declaring war on another country because the latter was getting in the way of its illegal trade in narcotics. The truth is that the free movement of goods, people, and money that developed under British hegemony between 1870 and 1913-the first episode of globalization-was made possible, in large part, by military might, rather than market forces. Apart from Britain itself, the practitioners of free trade during this period were mostly weaker countries that had been forced into, rather than had voluntarily adopted, it as a result of colonial rule or 'unequal treaties' (like the Nanking Treaty), which, among other things, deprived them of the right to set tariffs and imposed externally determined low, flat-rate tariffs (3-5%) on them.

The world is in the midst of a war, but it is not the kind of war you may be imagining. It is a currency war in which nations compete to lower the value of their currency in order to help their industries gain greater profits from exports. The currency disputes have arisen from a conflict of interest between the United States and China. The U.S. has been struggling against a massive fiscal deficit and foreign debt in recent years, especially since the global financial crisis. With so much at stake, the era of U.S. dollar hegemony seems to be ending. China has been raking in profits from its biggest export market, the U.S., by keeping its yuan, also known as the renminbi, undervalued. China has also been purchasing U.S. treasury bonds to add to its foreign reserves, worth more than $2 trillion. In September, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Currency Reform for Fair Trade Act with a vote of 348 to 79. Under the bill, the U.S. is allowed to slap tariffs on goods from China and other countries with currencies that are perceived to be undervalued. Basically, the U.S. is pushing China to allow the yuan to appreciate. “For so many years, we have watched the China-U.S. trade deficit grow and grow and grow,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on the day of the vote, which was on Sept. 29 local time. “Today, we are finally doing something about it by recognizing that China’s manipulation of the currency represents a subsidy for Chinese exports coming to the United States and elsewhere.” But China does not want the value of its currency to increase because a stronger yuan will hurt Chinese exporters who will see a decline in exports to the U.S. once the currency’s value rises.

On the eve of Fort Sumter, the governor of South Carolina, Francis Pickens, reportedly acknowledged the clash of realities in a private conversation with a U.S. Army officer in Charleston. Pickens told the army man about “the whole plan and secret of the Southern conspiracy,” admitting that “the South had never been wronged, and that all their pretenses of grievance in the matter of tariffs, or anything else, were invalid. ‘But,’ said [Pickens], ‘we must carry the people with us; and we allege these things, as all statesmen do many things that they do not believe, because they are the only instruments by which the people can be managed.’ He then and there declared that the two sections of the country were so antagonistic in ideas and policies that they could not live together, that it was foreordained that Northern and Southern men must keep apart…and that all the pretenses of the South about wrongs suffered were but pretenses, as they very well knew.” As news of the attack reached Washington—it had rained all night in the national capital as Friday became Saturday—the president of the United States pithily but unmistakably made himself clear. “And, in every event,” Lincoln wrote on Saturday, April 13, “I shall, to the extent of my ability, repel force by force.” His initial policy to hold the nation together had failed. “The last ray of hope for preserving the Union peaceably expired at the assault upon Fort Sumter,” Lincoln remarked. To his friend Orville Browning, the president confided, “Browning, of all the trials I have had since I came here, none begin to compare with those I had between the inauguration and the fall of Fort Sumter. They were so great that could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive them.” The rebel South would not be convinced. The Union would not hold. War had come.

In the contemporary world there are two classes of bad plans-the plans invented and put into practice by men who do not accept our ideal postulates, and the plans invented and put into practice by the men who accept them, but imagine that the ends proposed by the prophets can be achieved by wicked or unsuitable means. Hell is paved with good intentions, and it is probable that plans made by well-meaning people of the second class may have results no less disastrous than plans made by evil-intentioned people of the first class. Which only shows, yet once more, how right the Buddha was in classing unawareness and stupidity among the deadly sins. Let us consider a few examples of bad plans belonging to these two classes. In the first class we must place all Fascist and all specifically militaristic plans. Fascism, in the words of Mussolini, believes that "war alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to meet it." Again, "a doctrine which is founded upon the harmful postulate of peace is hostile to Fascism." The Fascist, then, is one who believes that the bombardment of open towns with fire, poison and explosives (in other words, modern war) is intrinsically good. He is one who rejects the teaching of the prophets and believes that the best society is a national society living in a state of chronic hostility towards other national societies and preoccupied with ideas of rapine and slaughter. He is one who despises the non-attached individual and holds up for admiration the person who, in obedience to the boss who happens at the moment to have grabbed political power, systematically cultivates all the passions (pride, anger, envy, hatred) which the philosophers and the founders of religions have unanimously condemned as the most maleficent, the least worthy of human beings. All fascist planning has one ultimate aim: to make the national society more efficient as a war machine. Industry, commerce and finance are controlled for this purpose. The manufacture of substitutes is encouraged in order that the country may be self-sufficient in time of war. Tariffs and quotas are imposed, export bounties distributed, exchanges depreciated for the sake of gaining a momentary advantage or inflicting loss upon some rival. Foreign policy is conducted on avowedly Machiavellian principles; solemn engagements are entered into with the knowledge that they will be broken the moment it seems advantageous to do so; international law is invoked when it happens to be convenient, repudiated when it imposes the least restraint on the nation's imperialistic designs. Meanwhile the dictator's subjects are systematically educated to be good citizens of the Fascist state. Children are subjected to authoritarian discipline that they may grow up to be simultaneously obedient to superiors and brutal to those below them. On leaving the kindergarten, they begin that military training which culminates in the years of conscription and continues until the individual is too decrepit to be an efficient soldier. In school they are taught extravagant lies about the achievements of their ancestors, while the truth about other peoples is either distorted or completely suppressed. the press is controlled, so that adults may learn only what it suits the dictator that they should learn. Any one expressing un-orthodox opinions is ruthlessly persecuted. Elaborate systems of police espionage are organized to investigate the private life and opinions of even the humblest individual. Delation is encouraged, tale-telling rewarded. Terrorism is legalized. Justice is administered in secret; the procedure is unfair, the penalties barbarously cruel. Brutality and torture are regularly employed.

These tariffs were a public slap in the face to America’s most loyal friend, delivered with a private wink that it was really just a charade. This decision, Meyer fumed, was reprehensible.

At first, the American war effort faced financial difficulties. In 1842, the government, in an effort to protect growing American industries and, as Southerners would say, to force them to buy eastern goods, set a high tariff on imports. While the tariff was successful in stifling foreign competition, it also drastically reduced government revenues and put severe limitations on the extension of international credit to American entrepreneurs. Coupled with currency inflation and a slowing of the business cycle, the United States Treasury was hard put to finance a war. At the beginning of hostilities, the treasury held only a small surplus of $7 million. When Polk recommended that the Congress place additional taxes on coffee and tea, the House of Representatives indignantly refused. Polk, however, was able to have passed a new bill lowering tariffs, and by the beginning of 1847 revenues began to increase. The Congress also voted to issue $10 million in new Treasury notes and bonds. Technical

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.

Lincoln started the war over tariffs but in no way can tariffs justify what has happened. So Lincoln has transformed the war into an epic moral struggle of biblical proportions. If that moral struggle had been his initial concern, though, all he had to do was let that original Deep South fringe secede.

I love the Constitution, but it placed ridiculously small limits on the power of the federal government. Taken literally, our total powers include coining money, raising money, budgeting for the various federal departments and agencies, declaring war, controlling federal elections, controlling and taxing imports and exports, and a few other minor things I can’t recall at the moment. We can also regulate commerce. But even that probably just meant making commerce regular between the states—prohibiting tariffs between states, which had been a problem before the Constitution, and establishing standards to be common for all states.” “That’s it?” Harlowe smiled, knowing how this would sound. “Taken literally, almost everything we do here is unconstitutional—education, healthcare, social security, housing, labor laws, minimum wages.

When the Planters fled from Haiti, they established coffee farms or cafetales, as part of their newly formed Plantation. Generally, coffee profits were about 5%, whereas sugar gave them a 10% return, but much was dependent on the economy and local conditions. Cafetales were easier to start and with as little as 10 slaves, a planter could begin his enterprise. Most of the French plantation owners took great pride in their holdings and beautified their plantations with magnificent palms lining grand entryways and spectacular wrought iron gates. The eastern end of Cuba was still available for development and many big plantations started in this modest way, but eventually the coffee plants were replaced with sugar cane due to the greater profit margin. Though blamed by many as the sole cause for the decline of Cuba’s coffee industry, the U.S. Import Tariff of 1835 was only partially to blame for the fall in coffee production. From the beginning, the prices of sugar fluctuated and prevented the Cuban economy from ever becoming stable. The first time was when the prices reached a high, during the Peace of Amiens in 1802. The treaty only survived for a year and shortly thereafter prices plunged, when the supply exceeded demand. During the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, the price of sugar soared again, until the British conquest of Martinique and Guadeloupe brought the price tumbling down. The following year during the War of 1812 prices rose again, and by 1814 they reached another all-time high. This continued into modern times, creating a feast or famine economy.

restaurant, nicknamed "The Municipal Crib" for the number of city officials who dallied there. Margaritte and the owner of Marchand's, Pierre, had contacted Fremont Older after Rolf had raised the tariff for each ninety-day liquor license renewal to $10,000. They offered to testify before a grand jury. And so the war began. We settled in for The Dictator, featuring the emerging legend in American theater, John Barrymore. The door opened behind us and the light from the hallway caught my attention. A tree-stump of a man moved next to Adam Rolf, close enough that I could hear his labored breathing. "Annalisa, I'm not sure you've ever met Mr. John Kelly," Rolf said. The broken-nosed thug plunged into the seat next to Rolf, looking as though meat packers had stuffed him into his tuxedo. "Mr. Kelly here represents our interests along the waterfront. I'm about to announce his candidacy for a supervisor's seat next election." "Miss Passarella," he growled with whiskey breath. "Mr. Kelly. Excuse my ignorance, but are you the one they call Shanghai Kelly?" "We try not to use that nickname," Rolf laughed. I was gratefully distracted when Barrymore arrived on stage to a thunderous reception. From the corner of my eye, I noticed Rolf click open his pocket watch and offer a peek to Kelly, who smiled. The seemingly innocuous gesture disturbed me greatly. The room seemed to tilt and the chair wavered beneath me. The end could not come soon enough.

These three Rs—revenue, restriction, and reciprocity—have been the main purposes of US trade policy. While all three have been important throughout history, US trade policy can be divided into three eras in which one of them has taken priority. In the first era, from the establishment of the federal government until the Civil War, revenue was the key objective of trade policy. In the second era, from the Civil War until the Great Depression, the restriction of imports to protect domestic producers was the primary goal of trade policy. In the third era, from the Great Depression to the present, reciprocal trade agreements to reduce tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade have been the main priority.

Far from the political limelight, however, on the National Security Council, a handful of discreet officials led by Matt Pottinger, a former journalist and Marine, who eventually rose to become Trump’s deputy national security advisor, were transforming America’s policy toward China, casting off several decades of technology policy in the process. Rather than tariffs, the China hawks on the NSC were fixated on Beijing’s geopolitical agenda and its technological foundation. They thought America’s position had weakened dangerously and Washington’s inaction was to blame. “This is really important,” one Trump appointee reported an Obama official telling him during the presidential transition, regarding China’s technological advances, “but there’s nothing you can do.” The new administration’s China team didn’t agree. They concluded, as one senior official put it, “that everything we’re competing on in the twenty-first century… all of it rests on the cornerstone of semiconductor mastery.” Inaction wasn’t a viable option, they believed. Nor was “running faster”—which they saw as code for inaction. “It would be great for us to run faster,” one NSC official put it, but the strategy didn’t work because of China’s “enormous leverage in forcing the turnover of technology.” The new NSC adopted a much more combative, zero-sum approach to technology policy. From the officials in the Treasury Department’s investment screening unit to those managing the Pentagon’s supply chains for military systems, key elements of the government began focusing on semiconductors as part of their strategy for dealing with China.

The Book of Sand ("El libro de arena"), the character Eudoro Acevedo asks, "What happened to governments? Tradition says they gradually fell into disuse. "They would call elections, declare war, set tariffs, confiscate fortunes, order arrests and seek to impose censorship, but nobody on the planet obeyed them. The press stopped publishing their contributions and pictures. "Politicians had to look for an honest job; some found their talent in comedy or as witch doctors. The reality was very likely fuller than this brief account.

In a long essay of about thirty thousand words, analyzing the philosophical and political underpinnings of the conflict, Adams surveyed the full range and implications of the tariff, the nullification controversy, and other administration policies: the end of a federal role in internal improvements; the elimination of the public lands as a source of revenue; the termination of the national bank; the refusal of fair protection for industry; the twisting and evasion of the words of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence; the preference for slave rather than free labor; and the privileging of those engaged in agriculture as an expression of the belief that the country was divided into superior and inferior people by occupation, geography, and birth. This “is the fundamental axiom of all landed aristocracies . . . holding in oppressive servitude the real cultivators of the soil, and ruling, with a hand of iron, over all the other occupations and professions of men. . . . The assumption of such a principle . . . for the future government of these United States, is an occurrence of the most dangerous and alarming tendency; as threatening . . . not only the prosperity but the peace of the country, and as directly leading to the most fatal of catastrophes—the dissolution of the Union by a complicated, civil, and servile war.

On the other hand, if you have been worried or frightened by what you have read, that’s good, you should be, especially on behalf of your children and their children. But don’t let fear feed inertia. Fear does not have to be paralysing. Indeed, it is often the driver of effective action. No one ever won a war while knowing no fear, and make no mistake, this is a war. Wherever we live on this magnificent planet, we all need to do our utmost to try to keep it that way. The fact that the future looks dismal is not an excuse to do nothing, to imagine it’s all too late. On the contrary, it is a call to arms. So, if you feel the need to glue yourself to a motorway or blockade an oil refinery, then do it. In his book How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Andreas Malm argues convincingly that, such is the scale of the climate crisis, sabotage and property damage are absolutely justified in the battle against fossil fuel companies and others working against the public good. I understand that this is not to everyone’s taste, but there is plenty more you can do. Drive an electric car or, even better, use public transport, walk or cycle; stop flying; switch to a green energy tariff; eat less meat; spread the word about the predicament we find ourselves in among your friends and family; lobby your elected representatives at both local and national level; and use your vote wisely to put in power a government that walks the talk on the climate emergency.

Loudon replied: “When President Trump put tariffs on Chinese goods, the Chinese declared a ‘People’s War.’ This is a Maoist concept. It means a war of attrition on every front. It is harassment to exhaust the United States. They want to take over areas around cities and starve the cities. What they do in an urban setting is attack police stations and set up their own police. They are trying to use these areas as Maoist bases to eliminate the Republican Party in those states.

Like Nemesis of Greek tragedy, the central problem of America after the Civil War, as before, was the Black man: those four million souls whom the nation had used and degraded, and on whom the south had built an oligarchy similar to the colonial imperialism of today, erected of cheap colored labor and raising raw material for manufacture. If northern industry before the war had secured a monopoly of raw material raised in the south for its new manufactures; and if northern and western labor could have maintained their wage scale against slave competition, the north would not have touched the slave system. But this the south had frustrated. It had threatened labor with nation wide slave competition and had sent its cotton abroad to buy cheap manufactures, and had resisted the protected tariff demanded by the north. It was this specific situation that had given the voice of freedom the chance to be heard: freedom for new-come peasants who feared the competition of slave labor; peasants from Europe, New England and the poor white south; freedom for all Black men and white through that dream of democracy in which the best of the nation still believed

Whigs and Republicans supported all kinds of “improvements” to promote economic growth and upward mobility—"internal improvements” in the form of roads, canals, railroads, and the like; tariffs to protect American industry and labor from low-wage foreign competition; a centralized, rationalized banking system.

The party’s moderate leaders fanned out across New York and Pennsylvania, talking busily about tariffs, about railroads—about anything except slavery.

It seems the First Order is here on a diplomatic mission.” He bit off those last words as if they pained him, the sarcasm in his voice thick. “It seems they’ve lost some very expensive ships recently and need to levy some taxes to raise revenue. They’ve given us five days for the Ryloth shipping guild to voluntarily tithe to them before they blockade the shipping lanes in and out of the system and start leveraging tariffs.

The great divergence 1. Some questions arise from why we need to study economic history: 'why are some countries rich and others poor?'/ 'why did the Industrial Revolution happen in England rather than France' 2. time span of history 1500-1800: the mercantilist era. The leading European countries sought to increase their trade by acquring colonies and using tariffs and war to prevent other countries from trading with them. European manufacturing was promoted at the expense of the colonies, but economic development, as such, was not the objective 19th century: Western Europe and the USA made economic development a priority and tried to achieve it with a standard set of four policies: creation of a unified national market by eliminating internal tariffs and building transportation infrastructure; the erection of an external tariff to protect their industries from British competition; the chartering of banks to stablise the currency and finance industrial investment; the establishment of mass education to upgrade the labour force. --> the government play a critical role in promoting economic. and we can get to know that European countries had used the tarrif protection to thrive their economic before. also by boosting the transportation infrastructure and education section, along with the function of bank, economic can proliferate 20th century: the policies above proved less effective in countries that had not yet developed. most new technology is not cost-effective in low-wage countries, but it is what they need in order to catch up to the West. Most countries have adopted modern technology to some degree, but not rapidly enough to overtake the rich countries. the coutries that have closed the gap with West have done so with Big Push that has used planning and investment coordination to jump ahead. --> that can explain the Mattew Effect: as the rich will be richer, poor will get poorer.

On a different plane there were the less idealistic, less publicized aims of Northern policy during the war and the period following. These aims centered in the protection of a sectional economy and numerous privileged interests, and were reflected in new statutes regarding taxes, money, tariffs, banks, land, railroads, subsidies, all placed upon the law books while the South was out of the Union.

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.

It was only after the Second World War that the US-with its industrial supremacy now unchallenged- liberalized its trade and started championing the cause of free trade. But the US has never practised free trade to the same degree as Britain did during its free trade period (1860 to 1932). It has never had a zero-tariff regime like Britain. It has also been much more aggressive in using non-tariff protectionist measures when necessary. Morever, even when it shifted to freer (if not absolutely free) trade, the US government promoted key industries by another means, namely, public funding of R&D. Between the 1950s and the mid-1990s, US federal government funding accounted for 50-70% of the country's total R&D funding, which is far above the figure of around 20%, found in such 'governemen-led' countries as Japan and Korea. Without federal government funding for R&D, the US would not have been able to maintain its technological lead over the rest of the world in key industries like computers, semiconductors, life sciences, the internet and aerospace.

The immediate cause of the Civil War lay in the derangement of the nation’s two political systems—the constitutional system of the 1780s and the party system of the 1830s—and in their interaction with each other. Both these systems rested on an intricate set of balances: the constitutional, on a balance between federal and state power and among the three branches of the federal government; the party, on a competitive balance between party organizations at the national and state levels. The genius of this double system lay in its ability to morselize sectional and economic and other conflicts before they became flammable, and then through incremental adjustment and accommodations to keep the great mobiles of ideological, regional, and other political energies in balance until the next adjustment had to be made. This system worked well for decades, as the great compromises of 1820 and 1850 attested. The system was flexible too; when a measure of executive leadership was needed—to make great decisions about the West, as with Jefferson, or to adjust and overcome a tariff rebellion, as with Jackson—enough presidential authority could be exerted within the system to meet the need. But the essence of the system lay in balances, adjustment, compromise. Then, in the 1850s, this system crumbled. The centrifugal forces besetting it were so powerful that perhaps no polity could have overcome them; yet European and other political systems had encountered enormously divisive forces and survived. What happened in the United States was a fateful combination: a powerful ideology of states’ rights, defense of slavery, and “southern way of life” arose in the South, with South Carolina as the cutting edge; this was met by a counter-ideology in the urbanizing, industrializing, modernizing states, with Illinois as the cutting edge in the West.

the mainland secured economic relief while the colonies paid the cost. Beet growers in Colorado weren’t the only ones worried about the colonies. West Coast labor unions nervously eyed the tens of thousands of Filipinos who competed with whites for agricultural jobs—since Filipinos were U.S. nationals, no law stopped them from moving to the mainland. Then there was the military situation to consider. Japan had invaded Manchuria in 1931 and seemed poised to advance on Southeast Asia in pursuit of colonies. The Philippines and Guam stood right in its path. Would the United States really go to war over these faraway, barely known, and not-very-profitable possessions? Maybe it wouldn’t have to. Two years into the Depression, Calvin Coolidge noted a “reversal of opinion” about Philippine independence. A number of politicians, FDR included, were coming around on the issue. Rather than absorbing the Philippines’ trade and migrants and defending it against Japan, the new thinking went, why not just get rid of it? The 1930s are known as a decade of protectionism, when the United States put up hefty tariffs to barricade itself against the world. Now it seemed that this spirit was going to change the very borders of the country. The Philippines was going to be dumped over the castle walls.

the CCP can influence senior politicians. This ‘corruption by proxy’, in which top leaders keep their hands clean while their family members exploit their association to make fortunes, has been perfected by the ‘red aristocracy’ in Beijing. In the crucial years 2014 and 2015, Beijing was aggressively expanding into the South China Sea while Obama, Kerry and Biden were sitting on their hands. The billionaire businessman and former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg was a late entrant in the contest to become the 2020 Democratic Party candidate for US president. He is the most Beijing-friendly of all aspirants. With extensive investments in China, he opposes the tariff war and often speaks up for the CCP regime.

the war should be understood as a kind of backlash against globalization, heralded by rising tariffs and immigration restrictions in the decade before 1914, and welcomed most ardently by Europe’s agrarian elites, whose position had been undermined for decades by the decline in agricultural prices and emigration of surplus rural labour to the New World.14

The findings were—and still are today—alarming. Based on the USTR report and research on technology transfers and intellectual property, Trump further restricted Chinese access to investment in the high-tech sector. In response, China retaliated with its own tariffs, and accused the United States government both of triggering the trade war and trying to slow China’s growth. This makes the continuation of the decoupling policy during Joe Biden’s administration all the more surprising. United States rhetoric and diplomacy have become milder and more authoritative, but their strategic substance in this area is strikingly similar to Biden’s predecessor: Punitive tariffs against China have remained almost unchanged. Biden even stepped up the pace slightly by compiling a blacklist of sixty Chinese companies in 2020—which he has continuously updated since then—that United States firms may no longer do business with. Shortly afterward, the United States joined the EU, Canada, and the UK in imposing sanctions on Chinese officials in connection with human rights abuses in Xinjiang. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the United States called on China to condemn the attack. China in turn blamed the United States for the war. A few weeks later, in May 2022, Chinese authorities and state-affiliated companies were told to replace American-made computers with domestic brands. Around fifty million computers were affected.

War—whether waged with weapons or tariffs—brings only loss. Civilization thrives on cooperation, not conflict.

Under the deafening noise of the war, Congress was passing and Lincoln was signing into law a whole series of acts to give business interests what they wanted, and what the agrarian South had blocked before secession. The Republican platform of 1860 had been a clear appeal to businessmen. Now Congress in 1861 passed the Morrill Tariff. This made foreign goods more expensive, allowed American manufacturers to raise their prices, and forced American consumers to pay more.