Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Bill Becomes a Protectionist


I remember taking a discussion and debate class in high school. In one of the debates, I was assigned the task of defending the concept of free trade. I lost the class vote and the protectionists won.

For some reason I was recently thinking about the claims that have been drilled into my head that at the beginning of the Depression, policymakers adopted protectionist policies that made things far worse than they would have been otherwise. My internet search yielded the above graph. It appears that the ‘Protectionists’ are getting a bad rap; customs duties were higher in the 19th Century that they were during the Depression.

It struck me as strange that, just about the time that the multiculturalism crowd started Balkanizing our society, customs duties dropped to next to nothing. I suspect that the same forces that pushed for unchecked immigration to lower their labor costs also pushed to drop customs duties for the same reason.

It looks to me like the American people lost control of their Country sometime in the 1960s. That is when the interlocking-corporate-directorship crowd seems to have come to power. Taxes on the population had to be raised to make up for the lost customs duties.

So I now reverse my high school position and declare myself a Protectionist.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You are an opportunist shiteating coldhearted thickheaded fuckwit who deserves to die in a way only an imagination as diseased as your own can imagine.

Fuck you, fuck your family, fuck any offspring that have been unfortunate enough to have sprung from your pestilent loins, and fuck the memory of you that will linger for moments after as people joke about the paltry impact you made on this world.