Stephen Moore Quotes

Every restriction of trade creates vested interests that are from then onward opposed to its removal.

Most states, for all their rhetoric in favour of free trade, are adept at trying to manipulate markets to protect and advantage their own producers.

A form of protectionism should be enforced at national level, at least on strategic areas such as agriculture.

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

The arguments of the protectionists in favor of creating home markets by protecting duties, operating to exclude the taxed foreign commodities, if addressed to the manufacturing and bountied States, would be impregnable. For these States pay but a small proportion of the costs, and enjoy nearly all the benefits of the home markets so created

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.

In almost every case, whenever a tariff or quota is imposed on imports, that tax is strongly supported by the domestic industry getting the protective shield from lower-priced foreign competition. The sugar industry supports sugar tariffs; textile mills lobby for tariffs on foreign clothing.

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.

The United States can't keep a completely open system if the rest of the world is less open. The United States may have to take a leaf out of the book of Japan, China, and Germany, and have protectionism inside the system.

When trade legislation seeks to protect one industry at the expense of another, then the economic well-being of everyone in this country is adversely affected.

I never was a free-trader. I never felt that we could ... do away with all protective devices, because we would have been flooded with imports which would have hurt our economy.

Unfair foreign trade practices are not isolated acts.

Protection to American Industry

No one likes to see redundancies at home at the same time as he sees a surge of imports from abroad. The temptation to succumb to political pressure, to make a special case or to give respite is often overwhelming. But to do so, except in response to clearly unfair trading practices, is to court disaster. The temporary measure frequently becomes the permanent fixture and the special case, a precedent for more. And by shielding industry from fair competition in the short-term, long term decline is guaranteed.

For the past quarter of a century, the predominant idea, which has successfully asserted itself at the polls and shaped the course of the government, has been to preserve the home market for the home industries. The employer and the workman have alike been taught to look at the various economical measures proposed from this point of view, to regard with hostility any step favoring the intrusion of the foreign producer upon their own domain, and rather to demand increasingly rigorous measures of exclusion than to acquiesce in any loosening of the chain that binds the consumer to them.

Too many business have successfully lobbied for special favors and treatment by seeking mandates for their products, subsidies (in the form of cash payments from the government), and regulations and tariffs to keep more efficient competitors at bay. Crony capitalism is much easier than competing in an open market. But it erodes our overall standard of living and stifles entrepreneurs by rewarding the politically favored rather than those who provide what consumers want.

We support U.S. jobs, especially when those jobs are facing off against foreign competition.

We can't have our industry progressively destroyed by cheap Chinese imports.

Let's not pretend we're in a global free market when it comes to agriculture. Every country protects, for good reason, its agricultural industries.

While never the darling of pure free traders, measures to combat dumping, subsidies, and injurious import surges have always been deemed essential by open economies like the United States to maintain support for trade.

Ask anybody on Main Street whether it makes any sense to allow foreign countries to charge higher tariffs than we charge them, and the answer will surely be a resounding 'heck no!'

Rich country protectionism - barriers, subsidies and support - mean that the world supply of agricultural goods is artificially increased and world prices depressed.

TARIFF, n. A scale of taxes on imports, designed to protect the domestic producer against the greed of his consumer.

Measures which serve to abridge the free competition of foreign Articles, have a tendency to occasion an enhancement of prices.

The E.U., China, and Japan all talk free trade, and they all practice protectionism.