The 19th Century Thinker Who Touted Tariffs

Historians retrace the origins of protectionist thinking during the early war period during which the United States went to a more industrial capitalist society. The protectionists presented the prices as the essential policy to accelerate the development of manufacturers as well as as a remedy for social ailments that have afflicted the emerging industrial working class. Supporters argued that the prices would protect American workers from the socially deleterious consequences of the industrial revolution who were already observable at the beginning of the 19th century in Europe, in particular in Great Britain.

By imagining prices as a paternalistic response to the State to the legitimate concerns of workers, protectionists assured that industrialization in the United States would not take the same decrease in Great Britain. Instead, protectionists argued that the prices would house American workers in cheap foreign workforce by supporting domestic wages and creating socio-economic mobility opportunities if necessary for what has become the American dream.

But at the end of the 19th century, the industrial socio-economic order that the prices helped to favor were very different from what previous protectionists had promised. To help distinguish the promises of reality, we must remember the work of the thinker who has shaped lasting beliefs on prices in the United States: Henry Carey.

Although the Alexander Hamilton's publication of 1791 Manufacturers' report Launched the support of America at the prices, it was Henry Carey (1793-1879), a printer in Philadelphia who later became the economic advisor of President Abraham Lincoln, who united what had been a set of disparate ideas on commercial policy in a global ideology. Carey has concentrated various strains of American economic, political, social and cultural values ​​towards a single principle: protectionism. And in the process, Carey has become the most influential economic thinker in the United States.

A bit like the way Trump did China a key bogyman In his trade war, protectionists like Carey have linked prices to a patriotic and nationalist disdain for Great Britain. American English -speaking was palpable for years after the American revolution, swelling during the War of 1812, and aggravated again by the Panic of 1819First major economic crisis in America. Modern economists Attribute panic to the economic cycle and reckless monetary expansionism. But the protectionists of the time argued that it was a conspiracy orchestrated by British merchants to “pour” cheap English goods in American ports, crushing “the infant industry” and impoverished American workers. A few supported that Great Britain waged an economic “extermination war” against the United States

According to protectionists, the United States restoration conspiracy with British colonial dependence has combined commercial and intellectual assault. American protectionists are wary of those who distribute the propaganda of free trade. This included southerners who were the biggest defenders of the United States negotiations, lest their cotton trade with Great Britain will be disrupted. The strongest attacks, however, were leveled against Adam Smith, the Scottish economist who became the perfect straw man for the first American protectionists.

Smith had promoted the Economy of the Neisse-Faire which supported a wide range of things, in particular the individual pursuit of personal interest, the minimum intervention of the government in the economy, the value of competition, belief in the free markets of self-regulation and free trade. Combined with David Ricardo (1772-1823), another influential British economist who exposed the advantages of free trade with his theory of comparative advantageIn the middle of the 19th century, Lissez-Faire became the central principle of what was then a booming discipline: the economy. And Smith Wealth of nations (1776) has become his favorite text.

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To counter the growing free trade movement, Carey led a framework of American protectionist writers, politicians and industry lobbyists to transform the nation into a pricing fortress. Carey stressed that Hamilton Manufacturers' report Build what appeared as a theoretical and political mastodon: the argument of the domestic market. Hamilton aimed to unite the Americans under a single national economic interest. With the price, farms and factories could coexist as complementary sectors – rather than rivals. Instead of relying on the commercial whims of foreign markets, Carey estimated that the prices would direct interior agriculture to feed industrial workers and provide factories with raw materials. Manufacturers have been promised a job thanks to regular demand from local consumers. Worry believed This would allow “the loom and the anvil to take their natural place alongside the plow and the harrow”.

He argued that protectionism was a “truly American policy”, released from the vestiges and authorities of the old world. To develop America first, protectionists turned inward, encouraged economic isolation and presented the United States as the only nation capable of real economic self-sufficiency.

But Carey’s main interest was how prices would protect the working class from prejudicial trends in free trade. Carey has criticized the economy of a faire for the degradation of the British working class. In his eyes, Great Britain stored its “satanic factories” with “salary slaves”, devoid workers in poor and exacerbating class conflicts. On the other hand, the prices would differentiate the American industrialization from the British experience, protected the domestic work of subsistence wages and ensuring the opportunities of workers for socio-economic mobility. With this rhetoric, protectionists defended prices as the political instrument to alleviate class divisions and promote “harmony of interests” between workers and capitalists.

Carey and his protectionist colleagues have found a receptive audience in the Republican Party, known as the “Price Party” since its creation in 1854. Morrill price (1861), which Carey helped write, launched decades of commercial restrictions that cultivated MCKINLEY price (1890) and the Dingley rate (1899). The latter has effectively increased the rates to 50% on more than a thousand imported goods, solidifying America as one of the most protected markets in the world. In the battle of ideas between free trade and protectionism, protectionism has won. And in the early 1900s, the United States had become an industrial giant.

And yet, despite more than a century of protectionist feelings and high pricing policies, accompanied by apparently real and tangible economic results, many Americans realized that the price was not the Silver Fulture Carey and other promised protectionists. Carey's promises to American workers have not been tense. In fact, working conditions have considerably decreased, as captured in popular writings of Upton SinclairThe photographs of Jacob Riisand the speeches of a Emerging left class.

The prices had transformed into vehicles of particular interests, raising barons of monopolistic thieves who broke organized work and ignored the statistics and interventionist elements of protectionism while simultaneously preaching social Darwinism as a gospel. The corruption of pricing legislation has become so cheeky and shamelessly that, in 1913, voters ratified the 16th amendment Granting the powers of the federal government to personal income in exchange for the drop in prices.

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Carey and the first generation of American protectionist were not apologists for industrial capitalism. Carey rather appreciated the way in which industrialization had fundamentally changed society. His hope was that the prices would ease the socially harmful effects of the combined forces of the economy and libertarian industrialization to reduce the planned degradation of the working class. What the contemporaries of Carey call “the economy of change” have promised to transform society. For Carey, prices could smooth this transition. But in reality, the American version of the industrial revolution would amount to reflecting that of the British experience, which is precisely what the first protectionists sought to avoid.