Former POTUS favours reciprocity vs tariffs and protectionism

On 5 September 1901, William McKinley, 25th President of the United States of America, was in Buffalo NY, speaking at the Pan-American Exposition. The Republican president surprised many by shifting his stance on tariffs to favor reciprocity -- a system of mutual exchange with other nations. 

Lest the current POTUS challenge the summary that follows, or accuse Walt of making the whole thing up, we have a transcript of his speech, from the University of Virginia Miller Center.

President McKinley argued that the United States, as a manufacturing powerhouse, needed to export its surplus goods and, in turn, should be willing to import foreign products that could benefit its own industries and labour force. 

This speech marked a significant change from his earlier protectionist policies, which had been known as the McKinley Tariff.  He proposed a policy where the US of A would lower tariffs on certain foreign goods in exchange for other countries reducing their tariffs on American products.

President McKinley recognized that the nation's growing production capacity required foreign markets to absorb its excess goods, as it could not rely on domestic consumption alone. And he stated that this system of receiprocity would be mutually beneficial, enabling America to sell more abroad and make domestic purchases that would create greater demand for American labour. 

The speech signalled that the era of pure protectionism was ending, so the United States needed to engage in "friendly trade relations" to avoid commercial wars and reprisal. The high tariffs of 1890 had led to price increases for consumers and were blamed for Republican losses in the 1890 mid-term elections. 

President McKinley was never able to implement his new reciprocity policy, owing to his having been assassinated the following day by Leon Czolgosz, a young anarchist, who shot him at close range. The President died eight days later, to be replaced by Theodore Roosevelt.

Is economic suicide President Trump's wish for the US of A?

Apparently Walt is not the only one who thinks that President Trump is sailing the USS America into waters which are not only uncharted but downright dangerous. As I wrote earlier today (scroll down to previous post), picking fights with your friends -- with whom you have a free trade agreement, remember -- is certainly not a proven way to make your country better, let alone great.

Recommended reading: "You Can’t Make America Great Again With Tariffs", by Ian Haworth, The Patriot Post, 5/3/25. Key excerpts:

"...for some unfathomable reason, Trump is risking his own legacy by pushing through an entirely unnecessary and counterproductive strategy that hinges on tariffs, sparking a tariff trade war with multiple countries — including our ally, Canada — and causing stock markets to plummet.

"...what we need is for Donald Trump to find a way to pull us back from the brink of yet another round of voluntary economic mutilation and focus on the principles that have dragged more people out of poverty than any other political ideology in human history: free trade capitalism."

Wise words. Will the Donald listen to anyone other than Elon Musk?

What's all this nonsense about making Canada the 51st state?

News travels slowly to this corner of the forest, especially in winter. It has just come to the attention of this dual citizen that President Trump, in a meeting with Blackie McBlackface, Emperor of Canuckistan, that the latter's country would be better off joining the Excited States of America as the 51st state. Why, he said to Junior, you could even be the first governor. Or if not you, then Wayne Gretsky.

Chief Walking Goose allowed as how the frostbacks he rules might not want to join a country where everyone has a gun for self-defence, but not everyone has health insurance coverage provided by the government. But, said the Donald, if you don't join us voluntarily, we have ways of making you see reason (read: the way I see things).

Did he mean another invasion? As President James Madison said way back in 1812, "it would only be a matter of marching." Even President Trump, who ignores history that he doesn't like, knows how that turned out. So he assured M Trudeau and his minions that he wasn't talking about an armed invasion. Goodness, no! A 25% tariff on all Canadian goods and services would do just as well, or even better.

Since he said that, Canadians of all political stripes have had their knickers* in a twist over how to respond to the threatened tariffs. Some argue for a tit-for-tat tariff. [DJT sez: "OK then. Tat!"] Others say maybe joining the US of A isn't such a bad idea. It would cure their government's terminal wokeness once and for all, without an election, let alone an assassination.

What they are forgetting is that Canada and the US of A have been arguing about, threatening, negotiating and renegotiating tariffs since before Canada was even a country. In fact, it was the threat of American tariffs against Canada that forced the assorted provinces to unite as one country (more or less), beginning in 1867. What follows is adapted from Stone Country, by George Bowering, Canada's first poet laureate, Penguin Canada 2003. 

The US war with the Confederate States of America complicated Canadian politics greatly. A lot of Canadians joined the Blue Coats to fight against the slave economy. But the British, still smarting from bad experiences with their former colonies, built warships that wound up in Grey Coat hands. 

These ships made a great nuisance of themselves in the Union shipping lanes, and when the war was all but over, President Lincoln started talking about reprisals, especially the receiving-huge-acreage kind of reprisals. Luckily this sort of talk tapered off after Lincoln's assassination, and the work was left to the feckless Fenians. 

In 1871, the case was closed when Britain agreed that it should pay some monetary compensations. But the big new republic was a place in which business and the military were learning to butter each other's buttocks. If military annexation was not going to look all that good, there were always economic means.

In 1854 the US and British North America had signed a Reciprocity Treaty, which had proven quite handy for the businessmen on both sides, and during their big war, the US had been happy to get fish, food, minerals and wood without paying tariffs on them. But when the war was over, the US Senate began to listen to the complains of businessmen whose business was fish, coal and lumber. 

Listen, said these businessmen, we need protection from these foreign traders. Don't you remember that we just recently fought a couple of wars with them? Don't you realize that if we put up tariffs they will eventually beg for annexation so they can make a living? 

The US withdrew from the Reciprocity Treaty in 1866, whereupon some economic realists proposed the idea of a confederation of the several provinces. Said Sir John Eh Macdonald, who would become the first prime minister, "I'll drink to that!", and so the Dominion of Canada was born. 

This was the kind of thing that made Canadian schoolchildren decide that history was kind of boring. US schoolchildren, of course, never heard abut it. But over the years there have been a lot of apoplectic fits, suicides and desertions caused by the tariffs that keep showing up at the US border.

The lesson for DJT, should he deign to pay attention, is that Canadians will find a way to keep the World's Longest Undefended Border (TM) intact and still do business with the new imperial America. Most of them -- let's say 50% + 1 -- reject the idea of joining the Excited States of America, even if staying out costs them a bit more. As those arch-Canucks, Bob & Doug McKenzie, would put it:

* Note from Ed. to American readers: "Knickers" is what the Brits call ladies' underpants. Canadians call them "panties", like Americans do.

Trudeau ready to meet Trump (and Mexicans) to renegotiate USMCA

During President Trump's first term, the US of A entered into negotiations with Canada and Mexico to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which the President called a "terrible deal". While the Donald frequently expressed his love for Canada, he took aim at Prime Minister Blackie McBlackface, calling him "two faced", "weak", and a "far-left lunatic."

The result was the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), which replaced NAFTA, effective in 2020. 

This past August, as the campaign for the 2024 election started to heat up, President Trump said, "I terminated NAFTA. That's a pretty big thing. A lot of people said it would be impossible to do. I got it done, and we have a great deal now. What we have to do is make it much better even, and we'll be able to do that very shortly."

Just three weeks prior to his landslide victory, President Trump vowed to renegotiate the USMCA.  "I am announcing today that upon taking office, I will formally notify Mexico and Canada of my intention to invoke the six-year renegotiation provisions of the USMCA that I put in," he told the Detroit Economic Club.

The USMCA agreement is up for review on its sixth anniversary [not "six-year anniversay"! Ed.], when the three countries will have to confirm in writing if they wish to extend the pact or re-evaluate it. "That was the hardest thing I had to get, they didn't want that," Mr Trump said of the unique review clause. "I said, 'Nope, I want to be able to renegotiate in six years, otherwise we're not making the deal.' And I got it, and it's coming due very soon. Oh, I'm going to have a lot of fun." 

President Trump said he wanted to better protect and promote the American auto industry, which has long been centred in Detroit. "I'll also seek strong new protections against transgender ["transshipment" shurely, Ed.] so that China and other countries cannot smuggle their products and auto parts into the United States tax-free through Mexico to the detriment of our workers and our supply chains. They smuggle this stuff in. They don't pay anything. We're going to have very strong language on that."

Car-makers and car-buyers, stay tuned!

MOR Canuck pundit blames Liberals for NAFTA talks impasse

The NAFTA renegotiation between the Excited States of America and the Dominion of Canada (yes, that's its proper title) is not going well. The Canuck Minister of Global/Foreign/External Affairs (or whatever it's called today) appeared at her country's embassy in Washington yesterday to indicate through body language if not unequivocal words that things are, errr, stalled.

Andrew Coyne, a middle-of-the-road-hugging columnist for Canada's somewhat National Post, had something to say about the NAFTA talks and who's responsible for the Mexican standoff (pun intended), in "The Trudeau Liberals fall to earth...". Here's the relevant excerpt:

And then there's the Liberals' trade agenda. In one arena after another — China, the Trans Pacific Partnership, and especially the NAFTA renegotiations — the Liberals appear to have genuinely believed they could impose their own bleeding-edge social-justice agenda on that of their negotiating partners, transforming blueprints for managing international commercial relations — difficult enough at the best of times — into sweeping progressive manifestos. Each time they were rebuffed but without apparently learning any lessons in the process.

NAFTA may yet be salvaged, but if so it will not be for any of the Liberals' doing. It's probably too strong to blame the perilous state of the talks on the failings of Liberal negotiating strategy — Donald Trump is simply not a rational actor — but it's equally hard to see how they have helped, from their intransigence on issues that ought to have been bargaining chips, like supply management, to getting visibly outhustled by the Mexicans.

Further reading:
"Trump Hits Canada Over Trade Talks: U.S. Shouldn’t Have to 'Buy' Allies with 'Bad' Deals", Breitbart News, 1/9/18.
"Payback for the Lady in Red - Trump set to stick it to Canada", WWW 28/8/18.

Footnote: Agent 3 saw video of Ms Freeland's presser on the CBC, which runs Freeland clips at every opportunity, and claims she was not wearing a bra. Walt asks, hasn't No. 3 heard of the legal maxim "De minimis non curat lex?" WTF is wrong with you, 3?!

Payback for the Lady in Red - Trump set to stick it to Canada

As the picture above shows, the Honourable Chrystia Freeland, Canada's Minister of Global/Foreign/External/Whatever Affairs, is a natural-born diplomat. So much so that, last June, Foreign Policy magazine, the voice of the one-world crowd, gave her its Diplomat of the Year award, which she travelled to Washington to accept.

Today, even as I write, the talented and fragrant "Lady in Red" is jetting down to the nation's capital [It's not in Richmond any more? Ed.] for an emergency meeting with... well... whoever in the American administration is willing (or obliged) to talk to her about free trade. Yesterday, President Trump (hahaha, liberals!) announced the demise of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and the beginning of a new US-Mexico trade agreement. Canada is to be shut out of what was supposed to be a three-way deal, and now it's up to Ms Freeland to get America's second-biggest trading partner back in there.

Ms Freeland's skills as a negotiator are well known, and have been discussed in WWW before. As reported here in October of 2016, her ass in the hole [Please use your spell-checker. Ed.], played at a meeting to discuss a Canada-EU trade agreement, is throwing a hissy fit and storming out of the meeting room to tell the meeja "These people are impossible! I'm going home to my children!" Amazingly, the obstreporous Belgians (the objects of her feminist wrath) went for it and got the meeting going again, although the agreement in principle has yet to be ratified.

That's just one example of Ms Freeland's fine feminist SJW form. Like Hellery Clinton, she does not hesitate to diss anyone who disagrees with the enlightened and progressive principles which she shares with her boss, Canuck Prime Minister Just In Trudeau. It was the lovely Chrystia who insisted that gender equity, indigenous rights and climate change be included in any new North American free trade pact. Why the Americans and Mexicans didn't put anything in their new agreement about those important issues is undoubtedly a mystery to her.

Like Mrs Bill Clinton, Ms Freeland is one of those who lay the blame for all the world's troubles at the feet of President Trump. Without actually calling him "deplorable", she managed to infuriate him by the foreign policy speech she delivered while accepting the award mentioned above. In the speech, she directly addressed Americans in the room, raising "concerns" about the direction the United States has been taking under the Trump administration. She criticized America's approach to international relations, including NATO, tariffs and trade.

According to people who should know, both President Trump and Robert Lighthizer, the lead American trade negotiataor, viewed the speech as an insult, not only targeting administration publicly but doing so on their turf in Washington. Worse, the speech came hard on the heels of the acrimonious and unproductive G7 meetings in Charlevoix QC. It will be remembered that in the closing presser, M Trudeau said he'd had good meetings with President Trump et al. Then, only minutes after Mr Trump's plane had lifted off, Mr Socks said Canada would not be bullied, yada yada yada!

The White House was not fond of Chrystia Freeland even before her speech. The President's staff and allies dislike her, her policy positions (gender equity???), and her negotiating style ("These people are impossible!"). So they made Canada pay for Ms Freeland's feminist rants, by disinviting the Canucks from recent meetings. See "While Canuck minister plays SJW, USA and Mexico near NAFTA deal", WWW 11/8/18.

Senior government officials in Ottawa insist they're not worried about Ms Freeland's having got her tits in the wringer, saying the deal is far bigger than personalities. In their liberal smugness, they actually think the "Lady in Red" is only disliked because she has been so relentless in bluntly pushing forward Canadian interests, such as, errr, indigenous rights and, errr, gender equity, and [That's enough Canadian interests. Ed.]

The Liberal government and its apologists in the state-owned CBC are telling worried Canadians that this could be the most critical week yet in NAFTA negotiations and that a deal could be done by the end of the week. Walt will take that bet. Lifetime pct .989.

Further reading: "Questioning the CBC's love affair with Chrystia Freeland", WWW 8/10/17. Spoiler alert! The link to Ms Freeland's disastrous appearance with Bill Maher, in which her biases and ignorance were revealed to an incredulous public, doesn't work. YouTube has deleted that video. Any suggestion that pressure from the Trudeau government had anything to do with its disappearance is, of course, completely unfounded.

Adam Smith says POTUS is wrong on tariffs and trade

Who dares to take issue with President Trump's desire to raise tariffs on steel, aluminum and a wide range of goods America imports from its friends and allies, and thus provoke a trade war? Adam Smith, that's who!

Mr Smith was a Scottish economist, philosopher and author as well as a moral philosopher, a pioneer of political economy and a key figure during the Scottish Enlightenment era. He is best known for two classic works: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) and The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). The former, usually abbreviated to The Wealth of Nations, is considered his magnum opus and the first modern work of economics.

Adam Smith was a classical liberal -- the good kind -- and a firm believer in free trade. In The Wealth of Nations, he argues for three foundations of modern economics, viz.:

1. pursuit of self-interest - It's OK to look out for Number One
2. division of labour - It's folly to have everyone build his own house when different people can be employed to dig the foundation, do the framing and put the roof on
3. freedom of trade - I give you something you want, and I get something I want, which goes back to the first principle. 

The Wealth of Nations is a huge book -- huge in its impact on political thought and, unfortunately, huge in size -- over 900 pages even in an abridged edition. Everyone who fancies himself [or herself! Ed.] a thinker refers to Adam Smith, but few actually quote him because few have read this literally magnum opus. P.J. O'Rourke has done so, or skimmed through it at least, and has produced a remarkably slim "Best of Adam Smith" book called On the Wealth of Nations (Douglas & McIntyre, 2007), from which I've drawn this passage (from Book 4 of the original work). The words of Adam Smith, himself, are shown in italics.

Smith disdained trade retaliation: "Those workmen...who suffered by our neighbours' prohibition will not be benefited by ours. On the contrary, they and almost all the other classes of our citizens will thereby be obliged to pay dearer than before for certain goods."

And Smith gave the lie to claims that tariffs protect working stiffs: "To lay a new tax upon them...and because they already pay too dear for the necessaries of life, to make them likewise pay too dear for the greater part of other commodities, is certainly a most absurd way of making amends."

As for all our money going overseas, Smith had shown in book 2 of Wealth why this doesn't harm an economy: "we must not imagine that it is sent abroad for nothing." And Smith was referring to gold bullion. Gold always has some value.... The American money that the Chinese are getting is fiat currency that could turn into wastepaper at any time.

By holding dollars and dollar-denominated securities, China is buying our debt. Smith had declared, "A man must be perfectly crazy who...does not employ all the stock which he commands, whether it be his own or borrowed." If Americans think they're using all the capital they can get their hands on "in the way that they judge most advantageous to themselves," they'd be crazy not to be in debt.

As I pointed out in "MAGA to MAAA - Walt explains President Trump's 'trade war' strategy", WWW 1/6/18, Making America Great Again doesn't necessarily involve Making America Alone Again. Reverting to the protectionism of a hundred years ago will almost certainly be counter-productive. If POTUS persists in making war on America's allies (no matter how irritating their leaders may be), it will not end well. Lifetime pct .986.

VIDEO: Mark Steyn: Is Canada the exception to a worldwide trend?

It's been a while since we had some straight talk from Mark Steyn. Last week the erstwhile citizen of the Anglosphere was in Canada for the Manning Conference, a conservative get-together akin to the CPAC conference in the USA. The Rebel's Brian Lilley cornered him for a wide-ranging interview on Trump, Brexit, Le Pen, and the trend to populism. How much longer will Canadians stand for the Trudeau government's liberal elitist nonsense? Check it out. Running time: 13 minutes.

VIDEO: Vote NO MA'AM!

There's a lesson for American voters in the current brouhaha between Canada and the EU over free trade. A couple of years ago, when Canada was under the dictatorship of Steve Harpoon, the Dear Leader drank the koolaid of globalization and started work on making a free trade deal with the European Union. The Canada-Europe Trade Agreement (CETA) was worked out, and endorsed by the Gliberal government of Justin Trudeau, which took power a year ago. Open trade and open borders are the kind of thing liberals love, and CETA fits their one-world agenda perfectly.

Fast forward to October of 2016, when CETA is due to be ratified by the member states of the EU, all 28 of them. 27 countries fell into line without any fuss. And then there was Belgium. That country is divided more or less in half by language and ethnicity. The southern half, Wallonia, is home to French-speaking Walloons. (Gotta love that name.) The Walloons, it turns out, think increasing globalization is not a good idea. Gives too much power to multinationals, you see. The parliament of Wallonia passed a resolution against CETA last Friday, so Belgium's federal government is unable to give its consent.

Enter Canada's International Trade Minister, Chrystia Freeland, who was sent to Brussels to tweak the deal a little bit and so persuade the stubborn Walloons to change their minds. As Walt pointed out in April, Ms Freeland is a certified and certifiable member of the liberal elite. She is the spoiled child of privilege, the type who feels she is entitled to her entitlements, such as spending $6000 of taxpayers' money to hire a photographer to record her presence at a trade summit in Paris, or swanning around the world -- first class, of course -- preaching the benefits of globalization, free trade agreements and helping all the poor people of the Third World.

When the Walloons failed to succumb to Ms Freeland's charm (?) offensive, she threw a hissy fit, storming out of the meeting room to tell the meeja "These people are impossible! I'm going home to my children!" Well, at least she didn't call the Walloons "deplorable", but she's the sort of liberal feminist who might have used that word. Just like... you know who!

Walt asks the MEN of America, do you want to be ruled for the next four years by the gender warriors --  WIMMIN like (((Madeleine Albright))), Elizabeth Warren, Justice (((Ruth Bader Ginsburg))) and... you know who?! NO?! Better join NO MA'AM -- the National Organization of Men Against Amazonian Masterhood. When the existence of this organization was revealed on Married With Children (watch the video below), you probably thought it was just a joke. It's no joke now! Vote accordingly!