Benjamin Disraeli Quotes

Will the shutting out of foreign goods increase the total amount of wealth in this country? Can foreign nations grow rich at our expense by selling us goods under cost price? Can a people tax themselves into prosperity? Can a man stand in a bucket and lift himself up by the handle?

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

Nothing has ever been made plainer at a general election than that the controlling principle in the raising of revenue from duties on imports is zealous care for American interests and American labor. The people have declared that such legislation should be had as will give ample protection and encouragement to the industries and the development of our country.

To protect our own great industries ... it is necessary to make some sacrifices.

Free trade economists have to explain how free trade can be an explanation for the economic success of today’s rich countries, when it simply had not been practiced very much before they became rich.

In the early colonial period the commerce of Mexico was monopolized by Spain, and this has been the explanation given by most writers for the backwardness of Mexico. They do not seem to know that England monopolized the commerce of her American colonies more strictly than ever Spain did hers. The problem, therefore, is to explain why, as soon as the English colonies were independent, they began sending their ships all over the world, while Mexico could not find any better use for her independence than closing the country to foreign trade by a prohibitive tariff.

As regards this country, in which protection has always to some extent existed, it is the best customer that England ever had, and our demands upon her grow most steadily and regularly under protection.

No nation was ever ruined by trade.

Free trade is not a principle, it is an expedient.

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.

We need some economists to say that [trade] protectionism is not as dangerous as most economists seem to think it is.

[We must] teach the advocates for an open trade the folly as well as degradation of their policy.

Free trade is the result of prosperity rather than the cause of prosperity .... Without growth over a long period of time you will not have a political commitment to free trade.

A protective tariff would be collected only from those whose pride, whose abundance of means, prompts them to spurn manufacturers of our own country ...

Protection to American Industry

A nation imports from a distance a manufactured commodity, which it is granted it could make as cheap, or cheaper, at home, were the manufacture introduced there. To introduce the manufacture is, however, too expensive a project to be carried into effect by any private individual. The whole society might do so, through the expenditure for a few years of a portion of its revenue, much less than what an equal number of years succeeding them will return to it in the diminished cost of the article.

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

What must be the character of that policy, which aims at national prosperity through the impoverishment of a large proportion of the home producers, with a view to supply foreigners at a cheaper rate, and give them all the benefit of the national privation and self denial?

I know of but one principle to make a nation great … Protectionism and patriotism are reciprocal. This is the road that all great nations have trod.

I have been much impressed in my experience at Washington, by the way, with the infernal selfishness which is so evident at the hearings on the tariff questions. Too many of our people are "after theirs" in the tariff problems, but equally insistent that other lines of business--producing materials they must buy--should get out on the free trade limb.

The prosperity created at home and overseas by free expansion [of foreign trade] was infinitely greater than could be coaxed by restrictive mercantilism.

You must remember that the Union saved Scotland. Scotland was bankrupt and the English opened us up to their American and Canadian markets, from which we just flowered

Free trade, far from protectionism, is the path that we should take to make Latin America a thriving actor in the global economy.

... a better government: more complete security of property; moderate taxes; a more permanent ... tenure of land ... the introduction of foreign arts ... and the introduction of foreign capital, which renders the increase of production no longer exclusively on the thrift or providence of the inhabitants themselves.