[LibertyAndJusticeForAll]

"But the bottom line is that the Founding Fathers saw tariffs as revenue-producers."

No, "revenue-producers" was not the "bottom line" for the Founding Fathers. Steve Farrell explains this more eloquently and clearly.

"The Boston Tea Party: A Reality Check for "Free" Traders"
http://www.newsmax.com/commentarchive.shtml?a=2000/4/11/095631

[... This was done because the emergence of national sovereignty, and a representative government – one free to devise its own trade policy in a mixed world of friends and enemies (a better definition of free trade) – was a more weighty matter than money.

Freedom, lest we forget, includes the liberty to say no to enemies, or to say yes to measures which would protect our liberty and our self sufficiency. If you are dependent on another, and that person hates you and is fixed in his determination to destroy you, how then are you free? Like those controlled by debt, those caught dependent in the presence of enemies will learn first hand a hard lesson about blind trust in theory over reality.

National freedom of choice (or Sovereignty) includes the freedom to choose to sacrifice ourselves economically, if in the long run, that sacrifice makes our liberty more secure. Losing one’s "fortune," spoke John Hancock regarding the Tea Protest, was worth it, "in so good a cause."

Risking "lives and property," added a resolution, is a "risk" we are willing to take. The risk they collectively took did cost lives and property, but it was worth it.

Today, however, the legacy of sacrifice, has been replaced by a generation of spoiled brats, whose psychological fixture is but on one thing; self-interest, and not the enlightened self interest that Adam Smith spoke of, mind you, but the consuming and debasing self interest of Sodom and Gomorrah, Late Rome, and Revolutionary France.

And so, to justify their extreme liberty, they lie, or conveniently misinform themselves about the sources of American Liberty which were founded on Freedom of Trade between states of common history, law, tradition and morality, and of caution, restraint and protection with all others. ...]

[1rudeboy]

Other than the obvious ones, there are a number of things that must be acknowledged before one can go about claiming that the Founding Fathers believed that tariffs were the first step in regulating commerce. The Boston Tea Party is a good example (interesting link, by the way) of how relevant events are pulled-together to draw an irrelevant conclusion. Consider that the Boston Tea Party involved an import (tea) that:

1. was being forced down the colonists' throats,
2. the colonists were excessively taxed by the government doing the importing, and that
3. the colonists' response was to outlaw its consumption.

In other words, the colonists did not "protect" tea in order to raise revenue or protect jobs. The attempt by current-era protectionists to seize-upon what was essentially an common uprising as an example of enlightened economic policy falls short. To highlight this shortcoming, one must merely ask themselves: what is the current state of our domestic tea industry?

Apart from the matter of falsely "appropriating" the motives of the Founding Fathers in order to support various protectionist claims is the problem of finding justification in the language of the Constitution itself. Sure, Congress has the power to levy tariffs and regulate trade. But the Senate also has the authority to ratify a Treaty reducing tariffs or unregulating trade. Article II, Section 2. Yet another problem with the protectionists' selective interpretation.

Furthermore, if the actions of the Founding Fathers (and the actions of the fledgling Republic) exclusively are to be viewed through the prism of protectionism, how does one explain the Barbary War, which occurred shortly after the Revolution itself? Clearly, the U.S. was protecting its interest in free-trade by force. No free-trader dares therefore to claim that military action is the first step to unrestricted trade. Moreover, the Barbary pirates, it could be argued, were the ones "protecting" their domestic industry (essentially toll-based transport), although I find it unlikely that one or more of the pirates themselves were claiming that they needed to do so in order to protect their high-paying jobs.

So this is the crux of your dilemna. You are attempting to make a rational argument based on an appeal to emotion. Witness the howls of "it's for our national security," or "the Founding Fathers wouldn't approve," every time the free-market adversely affects a special-interest. Witness how many times the national-security argument then is subordinated to other factors.

Finally, I suggest that your best claim is not to the national-security exception to free-trade, but rather the fledgling-industry exception. Adam Smith understood that a newcomer to the market might need protection from its well-established rivals until it gets on-its-feet. The entire United States was a "fledgling-industry" during this period. The problem that Milton Friedman and others have pointed-out, and that current-era protectionists (maybe deliberately) overlook, is that the "until" never comes.