THE RIGHT BOOKS

“Free trade” has been more or less a fetish of the American Right for most of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, in American Economic Pre-eminence: Goals for the 1990s (U.S. Industrial Council Educational Foundation, 220 National Press Building. Washington, D.C. 20045; $8.95), Anthony Harrigan and William R. Hawkins—old-fashioned conservatives both—make a persuasive argument for the adoption by the United States of modern mercantilist principles which, they aver, determine the economic policy of nearly every other nation in the world today. They are in agreement with Charles Wilson, the contemporary historian who has written of the period since World War II that the “tendency of international trade [has been] to revert to conditions which in some ways resemble those of the seventeenth century more than those of the nineteenth,” and with Robert H. Ballance of Purdue University and Stuart Sinclair of UCLA, who argue that the United States is “the only large affluent country that [still] believes in the sophistry of ‘free trade.’ ”

A major reason for this perceptual lag, the authors claim, is that “conservatives, who are normally the most sensitive to national threats and the most supportive of economic growth, have been paralyzed by the notion that any act of government involving the economy is a sign of socialism.” Another is the belief that the U.S. has historically been devoted to the principle of free trade—in fact, the opposite is more nearly the truth. Alexander Hamilton, as the country’s first Secretary of the Treasury, explicitly rejected free-trade theory, and “the United States advanced to first place among the industrial powers behind protective tariff walls.” Following the Civil War, protectionism was a hallowed tenet of the Republican Party: “Thank God,” exclaimed President Theodore Roosevelt, “I am not a free-trader.” American economic policy, Roosevelt explained, was based “on certain fixed and definite principles, the most important of [them] … an avowed determination to protect the interest of the American producer, be he businessman, wage-worker, or farmer.”

CW

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Chilton Williamson Jr.

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“Free trade” has been more or less a fetish of the American Right for most of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, in American Economic Pre-eminence: Goals for the 1990s (U.S. Industrial Council Educational Foundation, 220 National Press Building. Washington, D.C. 20045; $8.95), Anthony Harrigan and William R. Hawkins—old-fashioned conservatives both—make a persuasive argument for the adoption by the United States of modern mercantilist principles which, they aver, determine the economic policy of nearly every other nation in the world today. They are in agreement with Charles Wilson, the contemporary historian who has written of the period since World War II that the “tendency of international trade [has been] to revert to conditions which in some ways resemble those of the seventeenth century more than those of the nineteenth,” and with Robert H. Ballance of Purdue University and Stuart Sinclair of UCLA, who argue that the United States is “the only large affluent country that [still] believes in the sophistry of ‘free trade.’ ”

A major reason for this perceptual lag, the authors claim, is that “conservatives, who are normally the most sensitive to national threats and the most supportive of economic growth, have been paralyzed by the notion that any act of government involving the economy is a sign of socialism.” Another is the belief that the U.S. has historically been devoted to the principle of free trade—in fact, the opposite is more nearly the truth. Alexander Hamilton, as the country’s first Secretary of the Treasury, explicitly rejected free-trade theory, and “the United States advanced to first place among the industrial powers behind protective tariff walls.” Following the Civil War, protectionism was a hallowed tenet of the Republican Party: “Thank God,” exclaimed President Theodore Roosevelt, “I am not a free-trader.” American economic policy, Roosevelt explained, was based “on certain fixed and definite principles, the most important of [them] … an avowed determination to protect the interest of the American producer, be he businessman, wage-worker, or farmer.”