Word: protectionists
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...impulse to protect American products by tariffs and other means begins to seem irresistible. Politics comes lumbering in. The 1984 election is likely to turn upon the condition of the American economy. Walter Mondale, long a free trader, began sounding like a tough-guy protectionist as he toned up last fall for the presidential race. Congressmen heard the cries from home. The House passed a "domestic content" bill that would have required that American parts or labor must be involved in producing most foreign cars sold in the U.S. The Reagan Administration figured that the bill would prompt retaliation from...
What is wrong with protectionism? Americans for much of their history kept themselves snugly wrapped in protectionist laws. The famous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 set up the highest general tariff rate structure that the U.S. had ever had. One nation after another retaliated. The tariffs helped deepen the Great Depression worldwide and thus at least indirectly brought on World War II. Protectionists say that was an extreme case. No one wants to go back to Smoot-Hawley. Protectionists today want subtler, more modulated laws...
...some ways, the debate between free traders and protectionists is illusory, an argument about a world that does not exist. Free trade is merely a theoretical ideal. All trading nations protect themselves, more or less. West Germany is the nation that is most open, closely followed by the U.S. France is more protectionist than the U.S. Almost everyone except the Japanese regards the Japanese as the most protectionist, given to such elaborate nontariff barriers as the superzealous customs check and a cohesive, even collusive, partnership between business and government...
...real question, a hard and unsettling one, is whether the U.S. will yield to political temptation and become much more deeply protectionist than it is now. If it does, the results, for both the U.S. and the world economy, could be devastating. The principles of free trade remain essentially valid; the logic of protectionism remains beguiling and essentially self-destructive. Consider one example of how protections can subvert the economy. The American machine-tool industry recently joined the lineup of those seeking protection from foreign competition. The industry has been seriously hurt by the recession and by imports of cheaper...
...American machine tools. Inevitably, those American manufacturers would produce more expensive, or less modern, products. Their competitiveness would suffer. They would lose sales both in the U.S. and abroad. Then those manufacturers would also be traveling to Capitol Hill to demand protection against "unfair" foreign competition. That kind of protectionist spiral could suck the U.S. economy, and that of the entire free world, toward long-term stagnation and depression...