Excerpt from The Destructive Influence: Of the Tariff Upon Manufacture and Commerce and the Figures and Facts Relating Thereto
The tariff laws of the United States all bear one and the same characteristic feature, namely, the absence of a rational foundation for their claim of "protecting" American manufacturing industries. The word "Protection" presupposes the existence of a foreign power against which protection is desired. It would be reasonable to infer that those attempting this protection should inquire into the composition of that foreign power, to wit, the industries of foreign nations, and the tariffs upon which these foreign industries are based. Had the framers of our tariff laws made such inquiry, they would have found that the starting-point of all industrial nations, from whom our industries are to find protection, is that of free raw materials. The strongest protective tariffs, like those of Germany and France, make no exception to this rule. The United States, on the other hand, commence their industrial production with rates ranging from twenty to sixty percent, on raw materials, with rates so much above the starting-point of all competing nations, that the benefits intended to accrue from protection to our industries are usually spent before they have left the raw material, and provided slight protection to crude - or half - manufactures. Nay, the raw material and half-manufacture frequently have higher rates than the article of which they form the component material. Our manufacturers in consequence of this inverted application of the protective principle are sufferers to the extent which must necessarily follow in the train of such a mistaken policy: glutted home-markets in American manufactures of lower grades and continued large importations of foreign fabrics of higher grades. The immediate aim of reform must be to right this anomaly, to place all raw materials upon the free-list (thus to gain an even starting-point with foreign competitors), and then to reduce the tariff proportionally, so as to reserve the higher protective rate for more developed and the lower rate for cruder branches.
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