Bonus Quotation of the Day…

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… is from pages 197-198 of Douglas Irwin’s great 2017 book, Clashing Over Commerce (links added):

[M]any economic historians have argued that protective tariffs did not play a crucial role in America’s industrialization. “In the main, the changes in duties have had much less effect on the protected industries than is generally supposed,” [Harvard’s Frank] Taussig (1931, 152) concluded. “Their growth had been steady and continuous, and seems to have been little stimulated by the high duties of 1842, and little checked by the more moderate duties of 1846 and 1857.” Industrial production grew steadily and consistently throughout the antebellum period, regardless of the ups and downs of the tariff, according to [Joseph] Davis’s (2004) data.