Elliott Abrams Quotes

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.

I believe the Japanese set ceilings on what they will buy from foreign companies.

Now, what produces a want of demand? A refusal to take from other countries the commodities which they produce.

China has legally purchased high performance computers, advanced machine tools, and semiconductor-manufacturing equipment from several American companies.

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

The European conflict shall not be continued by economic war after the military operations have ceased. British policy shall be directed toward promoting free commercial intercourse between all nations …

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

A global economy is a fact of life .... No politician can promise to protect you from it.

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

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

Were our narrow and malignant politics [protectionism] to meet with success, we should reduce all our neighboring nations to the same state of sloth and ignorance that prevails in Morocco and the coast of Barbary.

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.

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.

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.

Free trade is always vulnerable to democratic politics.

It is difficult to overcome protectionism when times are bad.

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

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.

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

If Texas and Kansas were countries they wouldn't be admitted to the World Trade Organization. Their policies are congruent with North Korea, Somalia, Turkestan, several other countries I can't pronounce and Micronesia.

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

While other countries have been securing large export deals, American companies have been placed at a competitive disadvantage - forced to compete globally with one hand tied behind their back.