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Fabius Minarchus's avatar

This is all *very* interesting, and I will need to put Fletcher's book on my to-read list!

But for any reader here who is not sold on Fletcher, let us keep in mind that in this age of welfare states and heavy income taxation, Free Trade Isn't! The United States has been under a system of subsidized outsourcing since the early Post War era. This was originally intentional. We were trying to keep what was left of the free world from going communist. Today, our policy subsidizes nominally communist (and actually national socialist) China.

Try this thought experiment: what would be the tax on a Chinese consumer product if we had the Fair Tax instead of our income and payroll tax system? Answer: 30%.

We would need 30% tariffs across the board just to have parity with what we tax domestic producers at the federal level. That's not being protectionist. That's just being neutral.

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Fabius Minarchus's avatar

In Britain during the time of Smith and Ricardo, a free trade policy was progressive. Taxing food imports subsidized the nobility at the expense of the working class.

In the United States, tariffs were progressive. Tariffs taxed southern slave owners and boosted wages of northern factory workers.

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