Quotes about Protective Tariffs

Milton Friedman

The social and moral issues are all on the side of free trade. And it is you, and people like you, who introduce protection who are the ones who are violating fundamental moral and social issues. Tell me, what trade union represents the workers who are displaced because high tariffs reduce exports from this country, because high tariffs make steel and other goods more expensive, and as a result, those industries that use steel have to charge higher prices, they have fewer employees, the export industries that would grow up to balance the imports, tell me what union represents them? What moral and ethical view do you have about their interests?

A response to Richard Deason (a union official) when he challenged Milton on his proposal to eliminate tariffs over five years.

Charles Koch

Far from trying to rig the system, I have spent decades opposing cronyism and all political favors, including mandates, subsidies and protective tariffs - even when we benefit from them.

Richard Cobden

There are thousands of houses in England at this moment where wives, mothers and children are dying of hunger. When the first paroxysm of your grief is past ... come with me, and we will never rest until the Corn Law is repealed.

England had a high protective tariff called the "Corn Laws" which artificially maintained a high price of grain. Cobden had made a condolence call to a wealthy friend whose wife had just died. In a dramatic call to public service:. The friend joined Cobden and their team traveled throughout England arguing their case. As a result of their efforts the Corn Laws were repealed saving tens of thousands of lives and the friend became one of England's most illustrious politicians.

Benjamin Disraeli

I ask you to protect the rights and interests of labor generally in the first place, by allowing no free imports from countries which meet you with countervailing duties; and, in the second place, with respect to agricultural produce, to compensate the soil for the burdens from which other classes are free by an equivalent duty. This is my view of what is called "protection.

1st Earl of Beaconsfield

Abraham Lincoln

Abandonment of the protective policy [tariffs] ... must result in the increase in ... idleness, and so, in proportion, must produce want and ruin among our people.

Prescott Bush

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.

Father of President George W. Bush

Sasha Polakow-Suransky

Too many people on the European left scoff at nationalism, mistaking their own distaste for evidence that the phenomenon no longer exists or is somehow illegitimate. If 2016 and 2017 have proven anything, it is that this sort of visceral nationalism, or loyalty to one’s in-group, still exists and is not going away. Those who dismiss this sort of national sentiment as backward and immature do so at their own peril. What the globalists of the transnational elite miss is that not everyone has the luxury of leaving. Those who don’t have the education and skills to travel abroad often resent those who do. To compensate, they identify strongly with the place they come from and support politicians who promise to protect them from both genuine and imaginary threats. They do not have the luxury of voting with their feet, but their protest is felt at the polls.

Alfred E. Eckes Jr.

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

Protective Tariffs Quotes