Frederic Bastiat Quotes

I'm not talking about autarky. I'm not crazy. We need an intelligent protectionism.

Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama all used temporarily targeted tariffs on specific industries.

Protectionism is the institutionalization of economic failure.

According to the Institute for International Economics, trade barriers cost American consumers $80 billion a year or more than $1,200 per family.

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.

Internal protectionism in Europe would be deadly, really a disaster for European economies.

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

When a nation devalues its currency, it, in effect, increases its tariffs.

What protectionism teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war.

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

When the new states of Europe were created by the Treaty of Versailles their new governments, lacking revenue and not daring to impose direct taxes on their people, resorted to the dangerous expedient of imposing high taxes at the border on merchandise seeking to enter their markets from abroad. An immediate slowing down of commerce resulted.

Protectionism is something that will hurt everybody, but especially the United States.

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

The problem with tariffs is they shift higher costs onto the backs of non-protected industries and consumers.

As the Bank of England has noted, Brexit is a unique experiment in the reimposition of protectionist barriers to trade.

We can do a much better job free of protectionist Europeans.

What you do is you say, fine, you want to go to Mexico or some other country, good luck. We wish you a lot of luck. But if you think you're going to make your air conditioners or your cars or your cookies or whatever you make and bring them into our country without a tax, you're wrong.

Nobody is more conservative when it comes to trade than I am.

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.

The benefits of a tariff are visible. Union workers can see they are "protected". The harm which a tariff does is invisible. It's spread widely. There are people that don't have jobs because of tariffs but they don't know it.

Trade has suddenly become massively unpopular. I think that's massively unjust. I think free trade has been wonderful for America on balance.

When America closes its doors, so does everybody else.

Trade barriers constitute isolation; isolation gives rise to hatred, hatred to war, and war to invasion.

The philosophy of protectionism is a philosophy of war. The wars of our age are not at variance with popular economic doctrines; they are, on the contrary, the inescapable result of a consistent application of these doctrines.

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