Hamilton proposed a similar program, which was largely implemented by Congress and President Washington by 1793, putting America on course to become the richest country in the history of the world. His "American Plan" included:
"Protecting duties on those foreign articles which are the rivals of the domestic ones intended to be encouraged"
"Prohibition of rival articles, or duties equivalent to prohibitions"
"Prohibitions of the exportation of the materials of manufacturers"
"The exemption of the [raw] materials of manufactures from duty"
A system to regulate the quality of production for export: "Judicious regulations for the inspection of manufactured commodities"
And a banking system and navy to make trade easier and protect vessels at sea
From 1793 until 1981, Hamilton's system made America - and America's working class - the richest in the world. We imported iron ore from overseas, for example, turned it into steel, made that into cars and washing machines and a million other things, and sold them all over the world. And the money came to America, making us richer.
Our tariff system was so successful that it paid 100% of the cost of running the US federal government, from the salaries of Congress to the cost of the Army and Navy and everything in between, from the administrations of Washington to Lincoln. From Lincoln to WWI, tariffs paid between two-thirds and half of the total cost of government.
It's why we didn't even have an income tax until 1913, outside of a brief period during the Civil War. But the main benefit of Hamilton's system wasn't the tariff revenue: it was Smith's application of labor to raw materials - manufacturing - that built the "wealth of the nation" of the USA.
Then came neoliberal "free trade" ideology as the centerpiece of the Reagan Revolution. The CEOs of America's manufacturing companies were looking at the high cost of their mostly-unionized American labor force and saying, "But I can get people in Mexico or China to make this same product for $2 an hour!"
A major campaign began to "liberalize" American trade policy, complete with think-tanks and people like New York Times columnist and billionaire Thomas Friedman, who argued that no two nations with a MacDonald's had ever gone to war. Therefore, he said, we should simply throw open the doors of America to "free trade" imports while encouraging American manufacturing companies to move their production offshore.
As a result, we've lost 60,000 factories since the day Reagan was inaugurated. Not jobs - that's in the tens of millions, particularly when you count secondary jobs maintained in towns across America by the income of people with good union jobs - that's factories that were simply abandoned or moved, brick-by-brick, from the US to Mexico, China, Vietnam or other low-wage nations.
As the Council on Foreign Relations noted, "U.S. manufacturing employment dropped from 26 percent of the workforce in 1970 to 8.5 percent in 2016""
Keep in mind, manufacturing is the single most effective way to build the "wealth of a nation." Even when products are sold overseas, that wealth always comes back home.
When Reagan was sworn into office, Sam Walton's slogan for his Wal-Mart chain was "100% Made In America!" Today, it might as well be "Nothing but cheap junk made in China, where we send all your wealth except what we can skim off the top!"
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