Prescott Bush Quotes

Immediate restrictions must be introduced to drastically reduce imports. We waste millions of dollars on provocative imported commodities, like dog food, nuts, and ice cream.

The thing that we have to worry about is this protectionist movement that has reared its head again in this country

These agreements should be free trade. They aren’t free trade.

A liberal economy doesn’t mean opening wide the doors for imports.

The closest we can come to free trade is illuminating the barriers to free trade.

From Abraham Lincoln in 1860 to Alf Landon in 1936, every Republican Presidential candidate ran on a platform endorsing high protective tariffs.

In 200 years when the United States will get all that it can from protectionism, it too will adopt free trade.

The arguments for protection are more easily made attractive than those for free trade.

Demanding freedom of access to other markets isn't protectionism, it's free trade.

While protectionism doesn’t work, pure free trade doesn’t work either.

I personally do not believe in protection mechanisms. It’s like a false friend. It makes you believe that you can compete, but you can’t compete and as the protection mechanisms fall away—the world is going for this—then you are in trouble.

While foreign competitors, French or Japanese or German, merrily bid for contracts abroad, American companies find themselves tangled in a web of legislation designed to express disapproval, block trade in certain commodities, or perhaps deny resources to disfavored or hostile regimes.

I have long been a vocal advocate of reciprocal free trade though that position did not endear me to my own political party. And I continue to strongly believe in free and fair international trade.

Thank God I am not a free-trader. In this country pernicious indulgence in the doctrine of free trade seems inevitably to produce fatty degeneration of the moral fibre.

Whence comes this demand for tariff tinkering. Aren't all our fellows happy?

I am utterly opposed to anything which will alter the Free Trade character of this country.

How can you have free trade when you don't even have a free government?

There has always been a temptation, at times of economic difficulty, to turn inward and put up the shutters. That is when we need free trade most.

You cannot close down free trade. What you've got to do is open up markets.

I denounce the policy of protection as bondage.

Protection to American Industry

After so many historical illustrations of the evil effects of abandoning the policy of protection for that of a revenue tariff, we are again confronted by the suggestion that the principle of protection shall be eliminated from our tariff legislation. Have we not had enough of such experiments?

It has been proved again and again that we cannot, while throwing our markets open to the world, maintain American standards of living and opportunity, and hold our industrial eminence in such unequal competition. There is a luring fallacy in the theory of banished barriers of trade, but preserved American standards require our higher production costs to be reflected in our tariffs on imports.

There is nothing inconsistent between standing up for free trade and standing up for American workers.

Petitions poured in upon Congress urging the imposition of discriminating duties that should encourage the production of needed things at home.