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If I'm a "freking socialist" (can't even spell "freaking" right?) then so were the founding fathers. Look it up. We had tariffs in place for a long time before this whole "free trade uber alles" movement came along. Are you sure you're a conservative? What is conservative about allowing every single industry in this country to be shipped overseas?

BTW, there is a concept called "disagreeing without being disagreeable". Perhaps you should look into it. My position on tariffs has been arrived at after studying the works of Adam Smith, Ludwig Von Mises, Hernando De Soto and the founding fathers.

Hernando De Soto is an especially interesting case study, a former Marxist who discovered the real cause of poverty is when a society lacks the social and legal infrastructure necessary for the creation and protection of wealth. If you never develop this infrastructure then your wealth making efforts are doomed. Furthermore, socialism destroys the ability to create wealth by imposing artificial roadblocks in the path of those trying to create weath, by forcing productive people to spend their energies complying with onerous laws and regulations that have little practical value, if any.

Thanks to the lessons learned from these writings, I have learned the importance of free enterprise, private property and rule of law. However, I cannot discern any advantage to a society in allowing their industries to be shipped overseas to countries that don't really have private property, that don't have any social or legal infrastructure and who don't have an effective legal system. This only sets us up to send our wealth over to countries that don't have our best interests at heart, and who might be inclined to do us harm someday.

Of course, writing several paragraphs defining and defending my position isn't as much fun as calling those who disagree with me names, but some of us have to be grown ups after all.

Amen. I'm not a "freking socialist" either :-), and you're right "conservatives" used to be ok with tariffs a long time ago. If there were a conservative who was ok with using "small goverment intervetion" (if that's possible) to deal with this issue, what would he suggest?

How do you deal with companies moving departments overseas? How would you put a tariff on a service being transfered internally in a company? How would you do it without turning it into a burocratic nightmare? Is there any nice new idea besides tariffs?

Look it up. We had tariffs in place for a long time before this whole "free trade uber alles" movement came along

Indeed we did, in fact they made up the majority of the revenues of the federal government, along with a few exise taxes, such as on cigarets, booze, and so forth, until WW-II and at a few other times, the civil war period and WW-I for example, when we had an unconstitutionally imposed income tax.