Refuting the Global Mandarins
buchanan.org
by Patrick J. Buchanan
The Wall Street Journal
August 22, 2000
Let me try to sort out this rag-bag of non sequiturs. The Senate rejected Versailles in 1919. Harding took power in 1921 on a promise to "prosper America first." He cut Wilson's wartime income tax rate of 63% back to 25% and, with Fordney- McCumber, doubled tariff rates. Result: The Roaring Twenties. Growth hit 7% a year, fastest in history; and ten years later Versailles America was producing 42% of the world's manufactures, an all-time record.
As for the Smoot-Hawley myth, Prof. Odom should put in a call to Milton Friedman. When Smoot-Hawley passed, imports were only 4% of GDP; and two-thirds came in free. Perhaps Prof. Odom can explain how a marginal tax hike, on 1.3% of GDP, caused a 46% contraction of the U.S. economy, 25% unemployment, and a wipeout of 85% of stock values?
The cause of the depression was massive credit expansion by the Fed, creating a market bubble that, punctured in 1929, wiped out a third of the U.S. money supply. With America in shock from this loss of blood, a pair of chiropractors named Hoover and Roosevelt prescribed a "cure" of huge tax hikes and sweeping regulations. Smoot and Hawley were scapegoats, lynched by New Deal court historians to cover up FDR's complicity. Their tariff did not even pass until eight months after the 1929 Crash.
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Prof. Odom calls me a Jeffersonian agrarian. Has he read my book? My ideas are rooted in the economic nationalism of Washington, Hamilton, the Madison of the Tariff of 1816, Henry Clay, Friedrich List, Lincoln and the Republicans who, from 1865 to 1914, took the U.S. from half of Britain's manufacturing power to more than double her power -- a 50-year period where growth rates averaged 4%, with bursts under McKinley up to 7%. They all put America first.
As Hamilton insisted, U.S. trade policy should be designed to ensure the highest standard of living on earth for the American people, and the economic independence of the nation, so that, if need be, America could stand alone. Only thus could we stay out of Europe's wars.
"Independence Forever?" was Adams's deathbed toast. Men will die for the "ashes of their fathers and the temples of their gods," not for some New World Order created of, by, and for the greedy global mandarins who endlessly lust after America's wealth and power. |
