The government's job is to protect Americans from predatory and monopolistic business practices. It is OK for American to compete against American. It is not ok to pit American against third world coolie.
Smoot Hawley did not cause the Great Depression. That meme/myth is a hilarious lie.
“Smoot Hawley did not cause the Great Depression. That meme/myth is a hilarious lie. “
At eh.net you can find write-ups on the Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922, the rates of which were very close to the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930.
The F-M Tariff was followed by the Roaring 20s, something that the S-H Tariff boogieman crowd can’t explain. Maybe the words “Smoot-Hawley” contain some magic that “Fordney-McCumber” lacks because otherwise the two tariffs weren’t much different.
Anyway economic data shows that the Great Depression began around August of 1929 and Smoot-Hawley wasn’t signed into law until nearly a full year later. The tariff didn’t help things but it wasn’t the cause of the Depression, the cause generally believed to be the massive cascading failure in the American banking system. Friedman and Schwartz devote a long chapter to this in their A Monetary History of the United States, and Schumpeter wrote about the role of American bank failures and the Depression as well.