re: Has anyone opposing tariffs and is "of authority" offered a solution?

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So we are relegated to a pure consumer economy?

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We are the #2 manufacturing country

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This may ultimately work out to our benefit in the long run but this is not the action of a conservative leader.

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How would you protect important American industries that are taken advantage of

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illegally subsidize their competing industry,

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While, on a superficial level, it's very easy to see why we have had tariffs and other restrictive measures such as the maritime subsidies, such as the recent import quotas, because producer interest is concentrated and consumer interest is diffused, that alone is not really a fully satisfactory answer. Let me take another example of exactly the same thing. Why have we had price supports of farm products to take up a subject of special interest here where there are special interests? (We're all of us special interests; it's only the other fellow who's a special interest.) Why have we had farm price supports? You will find it very hard to find any economists who will support farm price supports. This is another case in which the consumer is simply being protected against low prices. Why do we have them? Because the agricultural interest has been concentrated and the consumer interest diffused and widespread. Because you have a relatively small group of people who regard themselves as having much at stake and therefore they are able to be more effective politically than the diffused consumer interest.

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So if we go below this superficial level to a deeper level, the question is, why is it that the economists have not been able to persuade the public of the virtues of free trade policy? After all, the argument for free trade is basically a very simple argument. Let me give you the argument which Adam Smith made two-hundred years ago. It's as persuasive now as it was then. And I quote, "In every country it always is and must be in the interest of the great body of the people to buy whatever they want of those who sell it cheapest. The proposition is so very manifest that it seems ridiculous to take any pains to prove it. Nor could it ever have been called in question had not the interested sophistry of merchants and manufacturers confounded the common sense of mankind. Their interest is in this respect, directly opposed to that of the great body of the people." That was the argument as he put it two-hundred years ago. And there is very little that needs to be added to it.

The basic reason I believe why economists have not been able to persuade the public is the one that I have already alluded to. It is suggested by the title of a famous essay which was written many years ago by a great economist, Wesley Mitchell. The title of his essay was "The Backward Art of Spending Money." And he asked, "Why is it that we are all of us so sophisticated about the activities in which we earn our living and tend to be so unsophisticated and backwards in the ways in which we spend our money?" And his answer was the one I have already mentioned: that each of us tends to be involved generally in only one kind of productive activity. We spend our working life, forty hours a week or sixty hours a week, whatever it may be, as a worker producing a product, as a merchant distributing a good, as a professor, well, forty hours a week teaching is a little long, but we're supposed to be putting in that much time on related ancillary activities and most of us do. On the other hand each of us buys a thousand and one things and it's perfectly understandable therefore that we devote far more attention and far more interest to the way we get our income than to the measures that affect how we spend it.

Unfortunately, this backward art of spending money leads to erroneous views in many directions and not only in the area of the tariff and of protection. For example, public discourse tends to be carried out in terms of jobs as if a great objective was to create jobs. That's not our objective at all. There's no problem about creating jobs. You can create any number of jobs by having people dig holes and fill them up again. Do we want jobs like that? No. Jobs are a price; we have to work to live, whereas if you listen to the terminology you would think that we live to work. Some of us do. There are workaholics, as there are alcoholics, and some of us do live to work. But in the main what we want are not jobs; we want productive jobs. We want jobs which will enable us to produce the goods and services we consume at a minimum expenditure of effort. In a way, the appropriate national objective is to have the fewest possible jobs, that is to say, the least amount of work for the greatest amount of product.

In the international trade area, the language is almost always about how we must export and what's really good is an industry that produces exports. If we buy from abroad and import, that's bad. But surely that's just upside down as well. What we send abroad we can't eat, we can't wear, we can't use for our houses. The goods and services we send abroad are goods and services not available to us. On the other hand, the goods and services we import provide us with TV sets we can watch, with automobiles we can drive, with all sorts of nice things for us to use. The gain from foreign trade is what we import. What we export is the cost of getting those imports. The proper objective for a nation, as Adam Smith put it, is to arrange things so we get as large a volume of imports as possible for as small a volume of exports as possible.

This carries over to the terminology we use. I have already referred to the misleading terminology of protection. But when people talk about a favorable balance of trade, what is that term taken to mean? It's taken to mean that we export more than we import. But from the point of view of our well-being that's an unfavorable balance. That means we are sending out more goods and getting fewer in. Each of you in your private household would know better than that. You don't regard it as a favorable balance when you have to send out more goods to get less coming in. It's favorable when you can get more by sending out less.

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What about the argument of unfair competition? What about the argument that the Japanese dump their goods below cost? As a consumer, all I can say is the more dumping the better. If the Japanese government is so ill-advised as to tax its taxpayers in order to send to us, at below cost, TV sets and other things, why should we as a nation refuse reverse foreign aid?

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and we go another 10-15 trillion into debt with even worse inflation?

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You're bringing up a different discussion here. Don't conflate the issues.

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