🚀 go-pugleaf

"brit am" <brit_am@home.net> wrote in message
news:kSh9e.78194$UW6.22810@bignews5.bellsouth.net...
> Riding the Free Trade Raft Over the Falls
>
> by Patrick J. Buchanan
> April 18, 2005
>
> These are not the halcyon days of the Republicans' champion of open
borders
> and free trade, Jack Kemp.
>
> The "Minutemen," who appeared in Cochise County, Ariz., April 1 to
highlight
> the invasion President Bush will not halt, are being hailed by
conservative
> media and congressmen as patriots, as they are dismissed by the president
as
> "irrational vigilantes."
>
> Comes now the trade shocker for February. The deficit hit an all-time
> monthly record: $61 billion. The annual U.S. trade deficit is now running
at
> $717 billion, $100 billion above the 2004 record.
>
> Smelling political capital, Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer are
> co-sponsoring a 27 percent tariff on goods from China. Beijing ran a $162
> billion trade surplus with us in 2004 in what trade expert Charles
McMillion
> calls "The World's Most Unequal Trading Relationship."
>
> The waters are rising around the Kemp Republicans. For these gargantuan
> deficits are sinking the dollar, denuding us of industry and increasing
our
> dependence on imports for the components of our weapons, the necessities
of
> our national life and the $2 billion in borrowed money we need daily now -
> to continue consuming beyond our capacity to pay.
>
> Brother Kemp is correct in his Washington Times column in saying Beijing
has
> not been manipulating its currency. China fixed the value of the renminbi
at
> eight to the dollar in 1994, just as we once tied the dollar to gold.
> Beijing rightly objects, "It is not our fault your dollar is sinking."
>
> But here, the free-traders enter a cul de sac. They recoil at tariffs like
> Lucifer from holy water, but have no idea how to stop the hemorrhaging of
> jobs, technology, factories and dollars, except exhortation and prayer.
For
> as 19th-century liberals, they believe free trade is "God's Diplomacy."
> Whoever rejects it sins in the heart. True believers all, they will ride
> this raft right over the falls and take us with them. This unyielding
belief
> in the salvific power of free trade is, like socialism, one of modernity's
> secular religions.
>
> As Kemp's column testifies, these folks are as light on history as they
are
> long on ideology. Kemp claims "there is no demonstrable instance in
economic
> history where nations were made worse off by free and open trade. There
are
> only the doomsday scenarios spun out of the imagination of half-baked
> economists ..."
>
> But between 1860 and 1914, Great Britain, which began the era with an
> economy twice the size of ours, ended it with an economy not half the size
> of ours. Britain worshipped at the altar of free trade, while America
> practiced protectionism from Lincoln to McKinley to Teddy Roosevelt to
Taft.
> Tariffs averaged 40 percent and U.S. growth 4 percent a year for 50 years.
>
> Bismarckian Germany did not exist in 1860. But by 1914, by imitating
> protectionist America, she had an economy larger than Great Britain's.
Were
> it not for protectionist America shipping free-trade Britain the
necessities
> of national survival from 1914 to 1917, Britain would have lost the war to
> Germany, so great was her dependence on imports. A real-life "doomsday
> scenario," thanks to a few dozen German U-boats.
>
> Jack Kemp notwithstanding, protectionism has been behind the rise of every
> great power in modern history: Great Britain under the Acts of Navigation
up
> to 1850, the America of 1860 to 1914, Germany from 1870 to 1914, Japan
from
> 1950 to 1990 and China, which has grown at 9 percent a year for a decade.
As
> China demonstrates, it is a mistake to assume free trade, or even
democracy,
> is indispensable to growth.
>
> Kemp trots out Smoot-Hawley, the 1930 tariff law, for a ritual scourging,
> suggesting it caused the Depression. But this, too, is hoary myth. In the
> 1940s and 1950s, schoolchildren and college students were indoctrinated in
> such nonsense by FDR-worshipping teachers whose life's vocation was to
> discredit the tariff hikes and tax cuts of Harding and Coolidge that led
to
> the most spectacular growth in U.S. history - 7 percent a year in the
> Roaring Twenties. Under high-tariff Harding-Coolidge, the feds' tax take
> shrank to 3 percent of GNP.
>
> As high tariffs and low or no income taxes made the GOP America's Party
from
> 1860 to 1932, the Wilsonianism of Bush I and Bush II - open borders, free
> trade, wars for global democracy - has destroyed the Nixon-Reagan New
> Majority that used to give the GOP 49-state landslides. Bush carried 31
> states in his re-election bid. He would have lost had Democrats
capitalized
> on the free-trade folly that put in play, until the final hours, the
> indispensable Republican state of Ohio.
>
> Kemp calls China our trade partner - surely a polite way to describe a
> regime that persecutes Catholics, brutalizes dissidents, targets 600
rockets
> on Taiwan, lets North Korea use its bases to ship missile and nuclear
> technology to anti-American regimes, and refuses to denounce racist riots
> designed to intimidate our Japanese allies.
>
> As some on the Old Right have said since Bush I succeeded Reagan, open
> borders, free-trade globalism and wars for democracy are not conservatism,
> but its antithesis. And they will drown the GOP.
>
> The Republicans jumping off the raft into the river and swimming
desperately
> for shore testify to it more eloquently than words.

Both major parties are dying. But the stench from a degenerate GOP fills the
air. Bush's failure to enforce border security is grounds for indictment.

Hank

http://www.fairus.org/
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