We are speaking of macro-economics here not micro invalidating your objection.
And many sources of economic growth are known while the growth is proceeding not only after. When cotton growing became profitable after the gin it was obvious to many then not merely after. Besides if your contention were true it only underlines my point and makes the choice of any policy a blind shot.
It is no inanity to point to the lack of replicatibility in economic history as a weakness in trying to make economics a science like chemistry. Nor is it an inanity to point to the fact that a different set of people using the same goals and tools will arrive at a different result.
To take the highly refined assumptions of an econometric study as productive of indisputable truth is inanity.
Communism, as theorized by Marx, was not what was seen in the USSR since his theory was to be applied in an advance capitalist society not a backward one. Its fall was the result of political issues as much as economic just as the American Revolution came about because of political issues more than economic.
Tariff issues are NOT just economic but often primarily political. Economists arguing that they don't work economically ignore the political aspects. Also ignored is the fact that there was NO Free Market for the Americans to compete in. They faced closed markets in most commodities in a world divided into Empires. Nor do they consider the willingness and ability of the older nations to glut the American markets and destroy the competition. One writer in the 19th described the process in the following words: "...it is notorious that great sums of money were expended by the British to destroy our flocks of sheep, that they might thereby ruin our manufactories. They bought up and immediately slaughtered great numbers of sheep; they bought our best machinery and sent it off to England, and hired our best mechanics and most skillful workment to go to England, simply to get them out of this country, and so hinder and destroy our existing and prospective manufactures."
You used Taussig to support your argument that the tariffs were counterproductive wrt iron but why don't we see what he said about cotton manufacture? After 1808 a period of restriction began which impeded then entirely prevented the importation of cotton goods. "In 1809 the number of mills built shot up... During the War (of 1812) the same rapid growth continued,.... These figures cannot be supposed to be at all accurate; but they indicate clearly an enormously rapid development of the manufacture of cotton." After the war ended and foreign competition began again domestic manufactures collapsed and many mills were abandoned. Congress responded with a tariff including a minimum valuation proviso which once again returned the sector to profitability. Taussig did NOT conclude the tariff was counterproductive as you implied in your iron example but merely that it was of mixed result helping some protected industries but not others.
Another statement he makes also supports my argument: "Conjecture as to what might have been is dangerous, especially in economic history, but it seems without a jar, the eager competition of well-established English manufacturers, the lack of familiarity with the processes, and the long-continued habit, especially in New England, of almost exclusive attention to agriculture, commerce, and the carrying trade, might have rendered slow and difficult the change, however inevitable it might have been, to greater attention to manufactures. Under such circumstances there might have been room for the legitimate application of protection to the cotton manufacture as a young industry."
I know you keynesians and other interventionists like to pretend otherwise, but macroeconomics, as a "field" separated from fundamentally micro concepts, is bunk. It bastardizes Say's Law into a strawman the rejects that phony product, discarding micro principles (and all rationality) with it.
Put another way, if you don't like the micro devices that are being used to demonstrate the failure of of Hamiltonian interventionism, then by all means challenge them. Simply asserting "well, this is macro and micro doesn't apply" though and dismissing them out of hand won't cut it.
And many sources of economic growth are known while the growth is proceeding not only after.
That's concurrent knowledge, not ex ante.
Besides if your contention were true it only underlines my point and makes the choice of any policy a blind shot.
Garbage. The entire notion of economically-guided policy making is built upon relationships and observations derived from experience. We derived a theory of price, for example, after observing prices work in practice. Same holds for policy in that having seen what works and what does not work in the past, we can make highly educated predictions about what will work and what will not work now.
It is no inanity to point to the lack of replicatibility in economic history as a weakness in trying to make economics a science like chemistry.
Why does it have to be a science like chemistry in order to assert valid truthful relationships, fakeit? There is more to life than experimentation in a laboratory and to suggest otherwise while simultaneously rejecting all that falls outside of the laboratory is, by definition, an inanity.
To take the highly refined assumptions of an econometric study as productive of indisputable truth is inanity.
If the sources I referenced are as disputable as you content, then why can't you refute so much as a single word of any of them nor produce the names of anybody else who has credibly done so?
Communism, as theorized by Marx, was not what was seen in the USSR since his theory was to be applied in an advance capitalist society not a backward one.
Letting your true colors (pink) show again, eh fakeit? You are mistaken as well in that you ascribe Soviet communism's failure to the difference of its relative hegelian stage model along side the one predicted by Marx. The soviet failure had nothing to do with that and everything to do with the simple irrefutable fact that Marx himself screwed up big time on the core underlying assumption of his system: a labor theory of value which is, quite simply, impossible and unrealized in the existing world.
Tariff issues are NOT just economic but often primarily political.
Indeed. And as such they are subject to political pressures by rent seeking interests pursuing illicit personal gains through the power of the state and at the expense of everybody else.
Economists arguing that they don't work economically ignore the political aspects.
Garbage. An entire school of economic thought - public choice - is devoted to the economic comprehension of political factors and interactions. But being a Keynesian/marxian/interventionist of some sort, you probably have no interest in hearing what they have to say.
Also ignored is the fact that there was NO Free Market for the Americans to compete in.
That claim is of no consequence to my position as economists have long recognized and compensated for the fact that other countries engage in non-free forms of trade, finding that conventional attempts to counter it by equal and opposite intervention only exacerbates the problem. Read Friedman.
You used Taussig to support your argument that the tariffs were counterproductive wrt iron but why don't we see what he said about cotton manufacture?
Why don't we? Here's an interesting passage from his concluding remarks on cotton textiles:
It has appeared that the introduction of the cotton manufacture took place before the era of protection, and that—looking aside from the anomalous conditions of the period of restriction from 1808 to 1815—its early progress, though perhaps somewhat promoted by the minimum duty of 1816, would hardly have been much retarded in the absence of protective duties
Of course his study of the cotton textile industry has been augmented in modern times by Paul David who employed empirical evidence and concluded that no discernable gain was reached to the producers in terms of advancing the industry, all the gain having been in personal profits they reaped off the state policy.
Taussig did NOT conclude the tariff was counterproductive as you implied in your iron example but merely that it was of mixed result helping some protected industries but not others.
Are you blind, stupid, or both? 1812 was BEFORE the period of heavy protection. Look at Taussig's CONCLUSION about cotton:
It has appeared that the introduction of the cotton manufacture took place before the era of protection, and that—looking aside from the anomalous conditions of the period of restriction from 1808 to 1815—its early progress, though perhaps somewhat promoted by the minimum duty of 1816, would hardly have been much retarded in the absence of protective duties.
See that, fakeit? He makes two points: 1. Cotton textiles industrialed before the protectionist tariffs were put in place and 2. subsequent industrialization was NOT helped by protective duties. To suggest anything else is to lie.