Rensselaer Republican, Volume 22, Number 22, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 January 1890 — Business Facts vs. Free Trade Theories. [ARTICLE]

Business Facts vs. Free Trade Theories.

Just now the advocate of. free foreign trade finds it especially difficult to uphold the claim that a protective tariff is a tax to be paid by those who buy the products of the protected industry. The facts stand out in contradiction of his theory in figures so plain that he who runs can read them.

With steel rails, on which there is a tariff of sl7 per ton, selling at the same price in the United States as iu England; while United States manufacturers, notwithstanding their protection by a tariff averaging forty per cent, are selling to Canada eighty per cent, of her hardware and machinery; with a suit of good serviceable clothes selling as low in Chicago or New York as in notwithstanding the tariff on woolens equal to fifty per cent, advalorem; with some lin'es of cotton goods selling for no more than 'the tariff charged on similar imported fabrics; "with an export trade of more than $23,000,000 worth of lumber and manufactures from wood in 188 S, notwithstanding* the $2 per thousand feet tariff on the former and thir-ty-five per-cent, on the latter;with all these there comes an array of facts beside which the threadbare speculations of the theorist seem as but a hill of sand. While every line’ of business is furnishing such fucts as these what becorhes of n prominent reform apostle's contention that our tariff enhances “prices to consumers of articles imported and subject to duty by precisely the Bum paid for such duties?” In 1889 we imported more than $20,000,000 value of iron and steel manufactures, not including tin-plates, which we do not manufafcture. With prices so nearly equal here and in Europe, who believes that these could be bought for forty per cent, less money in the absence

of the' tariff? j It would require very liille more credulity to believe f lint in the whs**pee of a tariff oil cotton goods English uhtuiifaptnrers would giv6 us our calicoes.