So you say.
I am suspicous of your motives because you applied the debate technique of introducing a Red Herring - that of slavery. Since slavery is allegedly a bad thing, tossing that in along with "tariffs" is supposed to also taint something totally irrelevant to slavery.
That's dishonest particularly when the burden of proof is on you to show that tariffs, compared to say, an income tax or property tax is a bad thing.
Bermuda gets along quite well on high tariffs.
Let me put it this way. You go on vacation to Finland and buy a Nokia cell phone with you own hard earned dollars.
Standing in line to re-enter the US a custom's agent snatches it out of your hand and refuses to return it until you make a donation to the Federal Government.
This is an up close and personal version of tarrifs. Essentially you place your citizens in a trading cage and dictate to them the terms of their private transactions.
If we were at war with China, they would send ships to blockade our ports. Today, if you try to import sugar into America, we send our OWN ships to blockade our ports.
We do to ourselves what our enemies would do to us in a time of War.
If you haven't noticed many of our candy manufacturers have laid off their American workers and left the country thanks to our sugar subsidies. According to the WSJ the special privileges Bush has granted the Steel companies have cost more non-steel manufacturing jobs than they have saved steel related jobs.
Why? AdamSelene235 could be sincere. Remember that free traders love the cheap labor, the cheaper the better. Slavery is the best in their mindset. It was the South which was against the tariffs! Unpaid slaves were picking the cotton
Actually, I was thinking of Bastiat's prediction of the Civil War some 10 years before it occurred. You can read The Law in one sitting, its in my profile, check it out.
Perverted Law Causes Conflict
As long as it is admitted that the law may be diverted from its true purpose — that it may violate property instead of protecting it — then everyone will want to participate in making the law, either to protect himself against plunder or to use it for plunder. Political questions will always be prejudicial, dominant, and all-absorbing. There will be fighting at the door of the Legislative Palace, and the struggle within will be no less furious. To know this, it is hardly necessary to examine what transpires in the French and English legislatures; merely to understand the issue is to know the answer.
Is there any need to offer proof that this odious perversion of the law is a perpetual source of hatred and discord; that it tends to destroy society itself? If such proof is needed, look at the United States [in 1850]. There is no country in the world where the law is kept more within its proper domain: the protection of every person's liberty and property. As a consequence of this, there appears to be no country in the world where the social order rests on a firmer foundation. But even in the United States, there are two issues — and only two — that have always endangered the public peace.
Slavery and Tariffs Are Plunder
What are these two issues? They are slavery and tariffs. These are the only two issues where, contrary to the general spirit of the republic of the United States, law has assumed the character of a plunderer.
Slavery is a violation, by law, of liberty. The protective tariff is a violation, by law, of property.
It is a most remarkable fact that this double legal crime — a sorrowful inheritance from the Old World — should be the only issue which can, and perhaps will, lead to the ruin of the Union. It is indeed impossible to imagine, at the very heart of a society, a more astounding fact than this: The law has come to be an instrument of injustice. And if this fact brings terrible consequences to the United States — where the proper purpose of the law has been perverted only in the instances of slavery and tariffs — what must be the consequences in Europe, where the perversion of the law is a principle; a system?
Not bad for a guy dying of TB.