… is from page 437 of Phil Magness’s new paper “Old Lessons for the New Protectionists,” which is a chapter in the collection Free Trade in the Twenty-First Century (edited by Max Rangeley & Daniel Hannan, 2025):
Tariffs are a product of a political world inhabited by vested interests and pressure groups that cannot be casually brushed aside.
DBx: Shown in this 1897 poster by J.S. Pughe, new U.S. president William McKinley and other politicians look on in distress and horror as a monstrous creature, fattened and stuffed to its jowls with pork-barrel lard, carries a petition that reads “We demand a prohibitory tariff on all importations, in the interest of the suffering laborer, the down-trodden farmer, and the struggling infant industries of the country.”
