Edward Grey Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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.

Trade is injured when it is not allowed to follow its natural course, and when it is either hampered or diverted by artificial obstacles. ...We believe in free trade because we believe in the capacity of our countrymen. That at least is why I oppose protection root and branch, veiled and unveiled, one-sided or reciprocal. I oppose it in any form

There are some who want to move us back to the days when we were protectionists and keep all goods off our shores.

Consider trade protectionism. It's been tried - and found wanting - since the Great Depression.

I worry about protectionists, which is another way of saying less competition, less trade around the world. And I view those as twins of negativity.

[Donald Trump rhetoric]this is a common rhetorical line used by people who are against free trade that say, we're in favor of trade; we just don't like any of the free trade deals that America has actually signed onto.

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.

Protectionism has to be avoided. Protectionism is not only on goods but also in the area of services. Financial protectionism is also bad and should be avoided.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Tariffs! There are the politics of the future. Study them closely and make yourselves masters of them.

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

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

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

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

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.

It cannot be denied that a state of great national prosperity is quite consistent and compatible with legislation in favor of the protection of native industry. That proposition, years ago, was denied; but with the experience we have had of France and the United States of America—the two most flourishing communities probably in existence—it is now incontestable.