Protection or Free Trade

Henry George

[Quotations compiled by C. Lowell Harriss. Reprinted in the Wall Street Journal,
October 12, 1989. Originally published in the
American Journal of Economics & Sociology, July 1989]

Wall Street Journal introduction

Sept. 2 was the 150th anniversary of the birth of Henry George. George is best remembered today for his advocacy of the "single tax" on land -- a social reform that attracted a cult following a century ago. But he was also a brilliant propagandist for free trade, most notably in his 1886 work, "Protection or Free Trade". C. Lowell Harriss, emeritus professor of economics at Columbia, collected some of George's pithiest remarks in the July issue of the American Journal of Economics and Sociology:

It might be to the interests of [lighting] companies to restrict the number and size of windows, but hardly to the interests of a community. Broken limbs bring fees to surgeons, but would it profit a municipality to prohibit the removal of ice from sidewalks in order to encourage surgery? Economically, what difference is there between restricting the importation of iron to benefit iron-producers and restricting sanitary improvements to benefit undertakers?

To introduce a tariff bill into congress or parliament is like throwing a banana into a cage of monkeys. No sooner is it proposed to protect one industry than all the industries that are capable of protection begin to screech and scramble for it.

If to prevent trade were to stimulate industry and promote prosperity, then the localities where he was most isolated would show the first advances of man. The natural protection to home industry afforded by rugged mountains-chains, by burning deserts, or by seas too wide and tempestuous for the frail bark of the early mariner would have given us the first glimmerings of civilization and shown its most rapid growth. But, in fact, it is where trade could best be carried on that we find wealth first accumulating and civilization beginning. It is on accessible harbors, by navigable rivers and much traveled highways that we find cities arising and the arts and sciences developing.

The result [of trying to enact laws that would protect only those industries that it is theoretically justifiable to protect] is the enactment of a tariff which resembles the theoretical protectionist's ideas of what a tariff should be about as closely as a bucketful of paint thrown at a wall resembles the fresco of Raphael.

All experience shows that the policy of encouragement, once begun, leads to a scramble in which it is the strong, not the weak; the unscrupulous, not the deserving, that succeed. What are really infant industries have no more chance in the struggle for governmental encouragement than infant pigs have with full grown swine about a meal tub.

However protection may affect special forms of industry it must necessarily diminish the total return to industry--first by waste inseparable from encouragement by tariff, and, second by the loss due to transfer of capital and labor from occupations which they would choose for themselves to less profitable occupations which they must be bribed to engage in. If we do not see this without reflection, it is because our attention is engaged with but a part of the effects of protection. We see the large smelting-works and the massive mill without realizing that the same taxes which we are told have built them up have made more costly every nail driven and every needleful of thread used throughout the whole country.

To have all the ships that left each country sunk before they could reach any other country would, upon protectionist principles, be the quickest means of enriching the whole world, since all countries could then enjoy the maximum of exports with the minimum of imports.

What protection teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war.