… is from page 123 of the 2005 reprint of Harvard economist Frank Taussig’s classic 1888 work, The Tariff History of the United States:
It is quite conceivable, and indeed on grounds of general reasoning at least probable, that any stimulus given to the protected industries indicated a loss in the productive powers of the community as a whole.
DBx: Protectionism can, and often does, cause protected industries to gain larger markets than these industries would gain absent protectionism. Protectionists never tire of pointing triumphantly to these ‘successes.’ But protectionists also never tire of steadfastly ignoring the economists who point out that the additional labor and other resources used to enlarge these protected industries are drawn away from other domestic industries. “Do you not care,” the economists ask protectionists, “about these other industries? Why are the industries that are damaged, or even destroyed, by your policies less important than are the industries that you present to the public as evidence of the success of a government policy that restricts people’s right to spend their incomes as they choose? And even on those rare occasions when you acknowledge that no industries can be enlarged by protectionism without diminishing other industries, what gives you confidence that the gains to the country as a whole from this artificial enlargement of some industries and artificial shrinkage of others are, on net, positive?”
Protectionists studiously ignore these, and other similarly probing, questions.
