Replies

I emailed pro-capitalist professor Rudy Rummel in Hawaii and asked him as follows:

>I am a conservative and always beleived in free trade. I just read
>the following from Pat Buchanan:
>
>"But between 1860 and 1914, Great Britain, which began the era with
>an economy twice the size of ours, ended it with an economy not half
>the size of ours. Britain worshipped at the altar of free trade,
>while America practiced protectionism from Lincoln to McKinley to
>Teddy Roosevelt to Taft. Tariffs averaged 40 percent and U.S. growth
>4 percent a year for 50 years."
>
>Is he right?

His answer was as follows:

This is misplaced causation. He is saying the free trade caused the
decline of the GB with regard to the US. Nonsense. While GB was being
drained by its colonial wars, the need for a dominant navy and large
army re a threatening Germany, and had already maximized its
expansion, the US was expanding westward, consolidating a huge
continent, and integrating the resources and capability that GB could
only envy, without any threat abroad or significant colonies prior to
1900 to drain these resources.

While GB was being drained by its colonial wars, the need for a dominant navy and large army re a threatening Germany, and had already maximized its expansion, the US was expanding westward, consolidating a huge continent, and integrating the resources and capability that GB could only envy, without any threat abroad or significant colonies prior to 1900 to drain these resources.

Now USA is not expanding, follows the free trade and maintains vast and costly military presence in hundred countries. Does not look it like GB described by your professor?

The next time you trade email with Professor Rummel, send him Buchanan's complete article. I am curious to see if his response would be the same.

As far as I can tell in rereading the article several times, Buchanan is making no claim that free trade was wholly responsible for Britain's decline. Buchanan does argue that countries fared much much better under the cover of protective tariffs, which Professor Rummel does not really address in his reply. This is not a case of misplaced causation.

Reduced to single sentence, Buchanan's point is: "As China demonstrates, it is a mistake to assume free trade, or even democracy, is indispensable to growth."

And, as Buchanan claims and history confirms, while the United States was ". . . expanding westward, consolidating a huge continent, and integrating the resources and capability that GB could only envy, without any threat abroad or significant colonies prior to 1900 to drain these resources," its remarkable growth was achieved under the umbrella of protective policies and tariffs, not free trade. Wonder what the Republicans of that era would say about the free traders of today?