Free Trade

Pat Buchanan tells us that is Why Trump Is Routing the Free Traders. Pat makes lotsa sense; he always does.

We had a policy, #Mercantilism, which served us well when we were leading the world in manufacturing. Now they are exporting to us; bad news. We need to lead with innovation.

Camel Trade
The Rashaida are an Islamic tribe in Eritrea who breed racing camels. They are also keen on smuggling blacks into Israel, kidnapping et cetera. The Mail has some nice pictures of them.

 

Drugs
Various drugs were something of a non-issue, apart from the health aspect until various busybodies decided to meddle by outlawing them. They created what is literally a growth industry. Cannabis growing is an exciting area of modern arable farming; one with splendid profits, an eager market and significant tax advantages. Which drugs are verboten, proscribed, illegal? It depends on where and when. Prohibition was against alcohol in America. It failed. Now the same kind of fool has done it to various narcotics. One of the biggest wholesalers is the CIA. They use the profits to fund their criminal operations. It was run by George HW Bush, who was later the President of America.

 

Informal Economy
Is another name for Free Trade, a policy advanced by Adam Smith, the author of The Wealth of Nations.

 

Mercantilism ex Wiki  
Mercantilism is a national economic policy designed to maximize the trade of a nation and, historically, to maximize the accumulation of gold and silver.^{[citation needed]} Mercantilism was dominant in modernized parts of Europe from the 16th to the 18th centuries^[1] before falling into decline, although some commentators argue ^[2] that it is still practised in the economies of industrializing countries, in the form of neomercantilism.

It promotes governmental regulation of a nation's economy for the purpose of augmenting state power at the expense of rival national powers. Mercantilism includes a national economic policy aimed at accumulating monetary reserves through a positive balance-of-trade, especially of finished goods. Historically, such policies frequently led to war and also motivated colonial expansion.^[3]

Mercantilist theory varies in sophistication from one writer to another and has evolved over time. High tariffs, especially on manufactured goods, were an almost universal feature of mercantilist policy. Even if mercantilism and protectionism are applied through the same economic measures, they have opposite aims. Mercantilism is an offensive policy aimed at accumulating the largest trade surplus. Conversely, protectionism is a defensive policy aimed at reducing the trade deficit and restoring a trade balance in equilibrium to protect the economy^[4][5].

With the efforts of supranational organizations such as the World Trade Organization to reduce tariffs globally, non-tariff barriers to trade have assumed a greater importance in neomercantilism.

 

Spice Trade
The spice trade was interesting, stimulating, challenging, exciting, dangerous, an excuse for murder, invasions, fraud and very profitable for the lucky, vigorous, unscrupulous or lucky. It was also Free Trade.

 

Why Trump Is Routing the Free Traders
In Tuesday’s indictment of free trade as virtual economic treason, The Donald has really set the cat down among the pigeons.

For, in denouncing NAFTA, the WTO, MFN for China and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, all backed by Bush I and II, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, Trump is all but calling his own party leaders dunderheads and losers.

And he seems to be winning the argument.

As he calls for the repudiation of “globalism” and a return to “Americanism,” a Republican Congress renders itself mute on whether it will even vote on the TPP this year.

On trade, Bernie Sanders is closer to Trump. Even Hillary Clinton has begun to renounce a TPP she once called the “gold standard” of trade deals.

Where have all the troubadours of free trade gone? Why do economic patriots seem ascendant? Is this like the Cold War, where the other side gets up and goes home?

Answer. As Trump pointed out in Monessen in the Mon Valley of Pennsylvania, the returns from free trade are in, and the results are rotten.

Since Bush I, we have run $12 trillion in trade deficits, $4 trillion with China. Once a Maoist dump, China has become the greatest manufacturing power on earth. Meanwhile, the U.S. has lost 50,000 factories and a third of its manufacturing jobs.

Trump is going to start a “trade war,” wail the critics.

But the damage wreaked upon U.S. industry by free traders already rivals what Arthur “Bomber” Harris did for German industry in the Ruhr.

In recent decades, every major U.S. trade partner — China, Japan, Canada, Mexico, EU — has run annual trade surpluses at our expense. How do 40 years of trade deficits in goods, run by a nation that rarely ran one for a century before, make us stronger or wealthier?

Or is what is best for the world now more important than what is best for America?

And here we come to the heart of the argument.

Washington, Hamilton, and Henry Clay, father of the “#American System,” and Lincoln and every Republican president up to Eisenhower, crafted trade policies to promote manufacturing to grow the wealth of the USA.

They were patriots not globalists.

They knew that America’s political independence required economic independence of all other nations. They wanted to build an economy where Americans would cut their bonds to foreign lands and come to rely upon one another for the needs and necessities of their national life. They sought to make us independent, so that we could not be dragged by economic ties into the inevitable wars of the Old World.

And they succeeded magnificently.

Britain, which embraced free trade in the 1840s, became so reliant on imports that a few dozen German submarines almost knocked her out of World War I. Protectionist America had to come pull her chestnuts out of the fire.

Free trade ideology is not America-made. It is an alien faith, a cargo cult, smuggled in from the old continent, the work of men Edmund Burke called “sophisters, economists, and calculators.”

David Ricardo, James and John Stuart Mill, Richard Cobden, all chatterers and scribblers, none of whom ever built a great nation, declared free trade to be the new New Testament, the salvation of mankind.

These men in whose souls the old faith was dying seized on a utopian belief that world government and free trade would be the salvation of mankind. The Economist magazine was founded to preach the heresy.

Before the modern era, Americans never bought into it. But now, our elites have. And, undeniably, there are beneficiaries to free trade.

There are first the owners, operators and shareholders of companies who, to be rid of high-wage American labor, moved production to China or Mexico or where the costs are lower and regulations near nonexistent. [ In other words Capitalist Swine - Editor ]

Transnational companies, their K Street lobbyists, and media that survive on their advertising dollars, are the biggest boosters of free trade, as they are the biggest beneficiaries.

Consumers, too, at least initially, see more products down at the mall, selling at lower prices. Cheap consumer goods are the bribes free traders proffer to patriots to sell out their country and countrymen to capitalists who have no country.

But we are not simply consumers. We are Americans. We are fellow citizens. We are neighbors. We have duties to one another.

When a factory shuts down and a town begins to die, workers are laid off. The local tax base shrinks, education and social services are cut. Folks go on unemployment and food stamps. We all pay for that.

Wives go to work and kids come home from school to empty houses, and families break up, and move away. Social disintegration follows.

“Creative destruction” is the antiseptic term free traders use to describe what they have done and are doing to the America we grew up in.

Southeast of the old Steel City, in the Mon Valley of Pennsylvania, where my mother and her six brothers and her sister grew up, folks describe what happened more poignantly and graphically.

 

American System ex Wiki
QUOTE
The American System was an economic plan that played a prominent role in American policy during the first half of the 19th century. Rooted in the "American School" ideas of Alexander Hamilton, the plan "consisted of three mutually reinforcing parts: a tariff to protect and promote American industry; a national bank to foster commerce; and federal subsidies for roads, canals, and other 'internal improvements' to develop profitable markets for agriculture".^{[attribution needed][1]} Congressman Henry Clay was the plan's foremost proponent and the first to refer to it as the "American System".

A plan to strengthen and unify the nation, the American System, was advanced by the Whig Party and a number of leading politicians including Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun and John Quincy Adams. The System ran counter to federalism and included:

• Support for a high tariff to protect American industries and generate revenue for the federal government
• Maintenance of high public land prices to generate federal revenue
• Preservation of the Bank of the United States to stabilize the currency and rein in risky state and local banks
• Development of a system of internal improvements (such as roads and canals) which would knit the nation together and be financed by the tariff and land sales

Clay protested that the West, which opposed the tariff, should support it since urban factory workers would be consumers of western foods. In Clay’s view, the South (which also opposed high tariffs) should support them because of the ready market for cotton in northern mills. This last argument was the weak link. The South never strongly supported the American System and had access to plenty of markets for its cotton exports.

Portions of the American System were enacted by the United States Congress. The Second Bank of the United States was rechartered in 1816 for 20 years. High tariffs were first suggested by Alexander Hamilton in his 1791 Report on Manufactures but were not approved by Congress until the Tariff of 1816. Tariffs were subsequently raised until they peaked in 1828 after the so-called Tariff of Abominations. After the Nullification Crisis in 1833, tariffs remained the same rate until the Civil War. However, the national system of internal improvements was never adequately funded; the failure to do so was due in part to sectional jealousies and constitutional squabbles about such expenditures.

The American System did not enjoy universal success, however; in 1830, President Jackson vetoed a bill which would allow the federal government to purchase stock in the Maysville, Washington, Paris, and Lexington Turnpike Road Company, which had been organized to construct a road linking Lexington and the Ohio River, the entirety of which would be in the state of Kentucky. Jackson's Maysville Road veto was due to both his personal conflict with Clay and his ideological objections.
UNQUOTE
The system was good in parts. High tax is bad news when greed gets involved; it always does.