[Once-Ler]

"We are infinitely better off without treaties of commerce with any nation."

--Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1815.

"Our people have a decided taste for navigation and commerce. They take this from their mother country, and their servants are in duty bound to calculate all their measures on this datum: we wish to do it by throwing open all the doors of commerce and knocking off its shackles."

--Thomas Jefferson to G.K. Van Hogendorp

"It is impossible the world should continue long insensible to so evident a truth as that the right to have commerce and intercourse with our neighbors, is a natural right. To suppress this neighborly intercourse is an exercise of force, which we shall have a just right to remove [with a] superior force."

--Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Mann Randolph

[Willie Green]

Yes, Jefferson was naively optimistic back in 1785 when he wrote to Van Hogendorp.
And he retained that naïveté in his 1790 letter to Randolph.
But that was well before his presidency.
His perspective changed with the wisdom of experience.

"The prohibiting duties we lay on all articles of foreign manufacture which prudence requires us to establish at home, with the patriotic determination of every good citizen to use no foreign article which can be made within ourselves without regard to difference of price, secures us against a relapse into foreign dependency."

--Thomas Jefferson to Jean Baptiste Say, 1815.

Dubya was a history major, wasn't he???
What were his grades again???
Oh, that's OK. Nevermind....
It's painfully obvious he didn't learn much from Jefferson anyway.