These are notes and excerpts from April 2025.
I am trying to save them from the migration of DailyKos to a new system. They were never published online before.
Trump's tariffs will fail because USA is no longer a republic, but an oligarchy
Pluralistic: What's wrong with tariffs (02 Apr 2025)
A Masterclass featuring Sam Labrier
Matthew Ehret
Apr 03, 2025
Trump is historically ignorant. Everyone knows it — even MAGA, but they pride themselves on being unschooled.
What scares me is that most of Trump’s critics are not much better. All discussions about Trump’s tariffs I’ve seen so far are, well, historically ignorant. There is a knee jerk reaction of hostility to tariffs and protectionism, and a frankly ideological belief in “free trade” that is contrary to the historical facts. I believe we are in danger of thinking some people are our allies because of their strong hostility to tariffs, when they who are actually ideologically hostile to us and the very idea of citizens controlling their own economic fate.
I’m not saying what Trump is proposing is good. But the simple historical fact is that tariffs and protectionism were a key component of the policy mix that led USA and other countries outside the British empire to industrialize. To build a program of policies with a vision for a better future for everyone, we need to understand why tariffs and protectionism have worked in the past, but won’t work now, under the present economic and political conditions in the United States.
The United States industrialized and achieved economic power using protectionist tariffs, but they were only one of five key policies. The first three made up what we call today an “industrial policy,” the other two are important socio-cultural factors that supported that industrial policy and helped it succeed. These are:
- protection of USA industries and workers and their wages;
- "internal improvements," which today we call infrastructure investment;
- a national banking system able to hold speculation in check and stabilize the currency, while also democratizing finance by expanding sources of and access to credit;
- government programs to promote science and industrial and agricultural technology, such as the Coast and Geodetic Survey, and the “open doors” policy at the Springfield and Harpers Ferry national armories that created the metalworking technologies which form the basis of modern industrial mass production;
- a “high wage doctrine”;
- a culture of improvement.
The issue of tariffs provides an extremely useful example of why you need more than tariffs: if tariffs are imposed, you have to make sure that the people who want to actually rebuild domestic production capacity have access to ample and easy credit. They will be building new factories and hiring and training workers, but to do that they need to get loans and other financing. But the way Wall Street operates now makes new financing of actual factories much more difficult than it need to be. In short, for any industrial policy to work, you have to squeeze as much financial speculation out of the economy as possible.
As Chalmers Johnson writes in his excellent book review of South Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang's 2007 book Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism:
Alexander Hamilton, the first American secretary of the treasury is the man who coined the term "infant industry." Although he did not live to see it, by 1820 Hamilton’s 40 percent tariff on manufactured imports into the United States was an established fact. Hamilton provided the blueprint for U.S. economic policy until the end of the Second World War. In the 19th and early 20th century U.S. tariffs of 40 to 50 percent were then the highest of any country in the world. Throughout this same period, it was also the world’s fastest growing economy. Much like contemporary China, whose average tariff was over 30 percent right up to the 1990s, neither American nor Chinese protectionism inhibited foreign direct investment but rather seemed to stimulate it.
These policies were the foundation for USA industrialization — and, they were copied by many other countries which successfully industrialized, including Germany, Russia, China and Japan in the late 1800s and South Korea the “Asian Tigers” after World War Two, as Ha-Joon Chang explains in Bad Samaritans.
In the late 1980s, James Fellows of The Atlantic Monthly was converted from a free trader to a proponent of a national industrial policy, including protectionism, when he visited Japan and other countries in Asia, and learned what was really behind their fantastic economic growth and success: the American School of political economy. Fallows tried to reintroduce Americans to these forgotten policies in a controversial December 1993 article, “How the World Works.”
Americans persist in thinking that Adam Smith's rules for free trade are the only legitimate ones. But today's fastest-growing economies are using a very different set of rules. Once, we knew them—knew them so well that we played by them, and won. Now we seem to have forgotten….
Societies did not automatically move from farming to small crafts to major industries just because millions of small merchants were making decisions for themselves. If every person put his money where the return was greatest, the money might not automatically go where it would do the nation the most good. For it to do so required a plan, a push, an exercise of central power.
But Fallow’s article was published 13 years after Ronald Reagan had brought to power a group of conservatives, who were as ideologically rigid as any member of the Soviet Communist Party. Fallows' article on how Japan and Korea and other "Asian Tigers" had used strict protectionism and robust government support of economic producers to build themselves industrially was simply ignored and dismissed by the free trade and free market ideologues of the "Reagan Revolution."
Tariffs and protectionism are only one of five critical policies needed for economic success. They all existed in 19th century America, supported and nurtured by the founding governing philosophy of civic republicanism. But all five have been driven to the edge of extinction by the rise of liberal capitalism — ironically achieving dominance in USA under the banner of Reagan’s anti-government conservatism. The problem with Trump’s proposed tariffs is that tariffs alone will not succeed in the current climate of a financialized and oligarchical political economy.
Protectionism
While standard accounts of USA economic history grudgingly acknowledge the protectionist policies of the 19th century, the policy details have been obscured and hidden by over a century of myths and lies. If you don’t know who Henry C. Carey was, then you are a victim of those myths and lies. Carey was the leading USA economist of the mid-19th century, and the world’s leading proponent of protectionism. And the proof is certainly in the pudding: the success of Carey’s ideas are amply proven by USA’s rise to global industrial leadership by the end of that century.
Michael Hudson explains in the Preface to his 2010 book, Americas Protectionist Takeoff 1815—1914 (Islet, 2010):
The protectionist doctrine that shaped America's industry and agriculture... went beyond the narrow boundaries of today's economics discipline by deeming public policy and technology central to economic theorizing, not "exogenous." Analyzing what was needed to increase productivity, the American School emphasized that wages and prices had to be high enough to sustain rising living and educational standards for labor, and investment in rising energy mobilization by capital."
If you plot steel production, railroad mileage built, and coal production, against the various tariff regimes in the 1800s to 1920s, the results are very stark: low tariffs are strongly correlated with downturns in real production, and high tariffs are strongly correlated with increases in real production.
Henry C Carey: A Study in American Economic Thought (1931) Excerpts, Part 1
Internal improvements.
This policy is simply major and massive infrastructure programs, almost always undertaken by the national government directly, or with massive support and promotion by the national government. Examples are the building of roads, bridges and canals. The standard reference is Carter Goodrich’s Government Promotion of American Canals and Railroads, 1800-1890, which was published in 1960, just before the rise of Milton Friedman’s and Alan Greenspan’s neoliberalism made it almost impossible to write approvingly of government “directing” the economy.
John Lauritz Larson, in his book, Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2001, available on InternetArchive), argued that
This chaotic political history has resulted in most Americans today believing that “free enterprise and government noninterference” are “compelling and self-evident” virtues, because the “advocates of private-sector liberty and laissez-faire policy triumphed so completely” by the end of the nineteenth century….
After mid-century, railroad developers and other innovative entrepreneurs, while they never strayed far from government subsidies and protection, trumpeted with rising conviction the superiority of strictly private enterprise over public works. In the process, such new Wall Street revolutionaries shifted American ideology onto new foundations: thereafter not the consent of the governed but the freedom or rights of private property became the central pillar of American republicanism. With property rights in the ascendant, markets moved in as more legitimate arbiters of conflict than democratic governments….
Larson concludes, “The tragedy for Americans was not that they had failed to build a national system of roads and canals, or that they lots control of the railroads to the private sector. The tragedy lay in the subtle substitution, during the long struggle over internal improvements, of economic liberalism for political republicanism at the heart of the American experiment.”
National banking is not as clearcut as Internal improvements, because of the self-serving myths created by Wall Street and the big banks over the past century. Also, because Alexander Hamilton’s plan of national finance was eclipsed by Andrew Jackson’s “War on the bank” (Second Bank of the United States) which resulted in three decades of wildcat state banking and a financial system so weak and disorganized that the national government almost lost the Civil War in the first year. Lincoln and the Republicans only pulled the nation out of danger when they discarded entirely Jackson’s nonsystem chaos and restored some Hamiltonian national purpose to banking and finance. Led by Congressmen and Senators who followed and corresponded with Carey, the Congress passed the National Bank Act which reestablished a national banking system, and authorized the issuance of fiat currency.
(This fiat currency became called "greenbacks" because they were printed with green ink, and the big banks on the east coast hated them. After the war, the banks lobbied and bribed to get sidetrack the greenbacks by putting the USA back on a gold standard; the ensuing monetary contractions caused a series of crashes and economic depressions in the 1870s through 1890s.)
Most people, when they see the phrase “national banking” think of some bureaucratic leviathan, such as the present Federal Reserve. This is misleading. What makes national banking important in supporting industrialization and economic development is putting in place the regulations and guard rails needed to squeeze out much of the speculation and useless financial trading, and ensure that banking and finance are confined to channels that will help the rest of the national economy. A key example in the context of tariffs is useful: if tariffs are imposed, you have to make sure that the people who want to actually rebuild domestic production capacity have access to ample and easy credit. They will be building manufacturing and processing facilities, hiring and training workers, and building linkages in the “supply chain.” Wall Street has shown, repeatedly over the past four decades, that it much prefers to “make money” in financial legerdemain and riding the latest investment craze, rather than invest in actual industries where the expected annual return is a “paltry” five or six percent.
To give actual industrialists access to ample and easy credit today, we would have to
- break up the “too big to fail” banks;
- eliminate stock buy backs and much of what private equity does today;
- once again restrict futures trading to actual commodity producers and users;
- bring interest rates back under regulation, as they were before the 1970s;
- drastically cut down the amount of short term stock trading, most especially “flash” algorithmic trading.
Obviously, with the financial system lording it over the rest of us politically, none of this is likely to happen. Trump is rapidly surrounding himself with dozens of denizens from finance and private equity who will do all in their power to preserve the banksters’ domination of the economy. So, it’s a certainty that just imposing tariffs is never going to succeed at doing anything but raising prices.
Doctrine of high wages
This is one critical component of 19th century industrialization overlooked by historians and economists, and when they do notice it, they spin it as “plentiful land and scarce labor.”
But there really was a time when there was a strong cultural and normative bias in favor of paying workers well, and widely sharing the prosperity of the national economy. This is a key component of the political economy of civic republicanism. An excellent book on this is James L. Huston’s Securing the Fruits of Labor: The American Concept of Wealth Distribution, 1765–1900 (LSU Press, 1998). Huston writes:
An important economic corollary of republicanism established primarily by Englishman James Harrington (1611-77) during the Puritan Commonwealth was widely acknowledged by American revolutionaries: to endure, a republic had to possess an equal or nearly equal distribution of land wealth among its citizens….
...The interesting entanglement was the rise of a protectionist argument that as a republic depended on equality for its existence, the state had to ensure that wages (or remuneration generally) would be high enough to allow social mobility. This could not be accomplished when virtuous republican nations traded with aristocratic ones because aristocratic nations purposely depressed wages so as to win foreign
markets. To avoid an inegalitarian fate and the demise of free government,
republics had to avoid trading with lands that suppressed wage rates.
Permit me, fellow citizens, to read the tariff plank of the Chicago platform, or rather, to have it read in your hearing by one who has younger eyes than I have.” According to the newspaper report, Mr. Lincoln’s private Secretary then read section twelve of the Chicago platform, as follows:
That, while providing revenue for the support of the General Government by duties upon imposts, sound policy requires such an adjustment of the imposts as to encourage the development of the industrial interest of the whole country, and we commend that policy of national exchanges which secures to the working men liberal wages, to agriculture remunerating prices, to mechanics and manufacturers an adequate reward for their skills, labor and enterprise, and to the nation commercial prosperity and independence.
the American School, which developed the “Economy of High Wages” doctrine. As Hudson explains this long-forgotten doctrine: “Productivity gains tend to exceed wage gains, enabling high-wage labor to undersell “pauper labor.” Hence, profits and wages may rise together. Higher income slows the growth of population, pushing up wages all the more. Also, higher wages spur capital substitution, increasing labor productivity. Finally, higher population density increases productivity and therefore increases wage levels.”
A social requirement to do good is also generally overlooked by historians and economists, and, again, a key component of the political economy of civic republicanism. Any decent biography of Benjamin Franklin will reflect this—his entire life was emblematic of his stated belief that “‘Serving God is doing good to man.”
The idea of doing good and promoting the general welfare was explored by Edmund S. Morgan, in “The Puritan Ethic and the American Revolution” (The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 1, Jan., 1967, pp. 3-43)
“The Ethic conveyed the idea of each man’s and woman’s “calling” in life. “The emphasis of [work or labor] was on productivity for the benefit of society… “The calling of a ruler, as the colonists and their Puritan forebearers saw it, was like any other calling: it must serve the common good; it must be useful, productive; and it must be assiduously pursued.” ….
The Puritan Ethic whether enjoined by God, by history, or by philosophy, called for diligence in a productive calling, beneficial both to society and to the individual. It encouraged frugality and frowned on extravagance. It viewed the merchant with suspicion and speculation with horror….
Manufacturing was now freed of the restrictions formerly imposed by the British; if once firmly established in the United States, it would help protect the very virtues that fostered it. An industrious, frugal people would manufacture for themselves, and in turn “Manufactures will promote industry, and industry contributes to health, virtue, riches and population.” ….
As manufactures were linked to virtue, so both were linked to the independent republican government for Which Americans had been fighting. “America must adopt [a] new policy,” David Ramsay insisted in 1785, “or 'she never Will be independent in reality. We must import less and attend more to agriculture and manufactures.”84It was now possible to see a new significance in England’s old restraints on colonial manufacturing. Why had she prevented Americans from “working up those materials that God
Peskin, Lawrence A., Manufacturing Revolution: The Intellectual Origins of Early American Industry (Studies in Early American Economy and Society from the Library Company of Philadelphia), Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).
A good book on USA’s early cultural and social imperative to do good is David Walker Howe’s The Political Culture of the American Whigs (University of Chicago Press, 1979). See especially the material on the administration of John Quincy Adams.
Or just read the last third or quarter if Adams’ First Annual Message to Congress (December 6, 1825):
The great object of the institution of civil government is the improvement of the condition of those who are parties to the social compact, and no government, in what ever form constituted, can accomplish the lawful ends of its institution but in proportion as it improves the condition of those over whom it is established. Roads and canals, by multiplying and facilitating the communications and intercourse between distant regions and multitudes of men, are among the most important means of improvement. But moral, political, intellectual improvement are duties assigned by the Author of Our Existence to social no less than to individual man.
For the fulfillment of those duties governments are invested with power, and to the attainment of the end—the progressive improvement of the condition of the governed—the exercise of delegated powers is a duty as sacred and indispensable as the usurpation of powers not granted is criminal and odious.
Among the first, perhaps the very first, instrument for the improvement of the condition of men is knowledge, and to the acquisition of much of the knowledge adapted to the wants, the comforts, and enjoyments of human life public institutions and seminaries of learning are essential.
‘Never Too Much’
Trevor Jackson
If globalization has allowed elites to remove themselves from democratic accountability and regulation, is there any path toward a just economy?
January 16, 2025 issue
Reviewed:
The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism
- tariff protection of USA industries and workers; "internal improvements" infrastructure investment;
- a national bank able to hold speculation in check and stabilize the currency, while also democratizing finance by expanding sources of and access to credit;
- government programs to promote science and industrial and agricultural technology, such as the Coast and Geodetic Survey,
- g overnment programs to promote industrial and agricultural technology, such as the “open doors” policy at the Springfield and Harpers Ferry national armories that created the metalworking technologies which form the basis of modern industrial mass production;
- and a doctrine of high wages.
In addition, there were two social and cultural factors that were crucially conducive to the policies of the American School:
Doctrine of high wages
A social requirement to do good is — promote the General Welfare
. . . .
Monday, May 14, 2012
Constitutional Foundation of the US Economy: Powers are Implied Not Enumerated
The first Act of Congress established the administering of oaths of office for federal officials, but the second Act was the imposition of the Hamilton Tariff to protect domestic industry and raise revenue. In 1791, Congress chartered the First Bank of the United States. The Patent Office was created in 1802. Direct federal involvement in the building of transportation infrastructure included projects authorized under the 1807 Coast and Geodetic Survey, and other measures to improve river and harbor navigation, which were formalized and put on a more permanent footing by the 1824 Rivers and Harbors Act. Various Army expeditions to the west, beginning with Lewis and Clark's Corps of Discovery in 1804 and continuing into the 1870s, gathered and disseminated geographical and scientific knowledge that was crucial to opening the West to settlement (see for example, the careers of Major Stephen Harriman Long, Major General John C. Frémont, and Brigadier General Randolph B. Marcy). These expeditions were almost always under the direction of an officer from the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers, an organization that has been almost completely written out of American history, but which comprised the elite of U.S. Army officers. Pursuant to the General Survey Act of 1824, Army officers were assigned to assist or direct the surveying and construction of the early roads, railroads and canals -- whether they were private or state projects did not matter.
Our national government has also played a crucial role in the development of metal-cutting and metal-forming machine tools and mass mechanical assembly, which form the basis of modern industrial economies; the building of a trans-continental railroad system; the application of science to agriculture, and the mechanization of farming; improvements of steam propulsion for maritime transport; development of radio; creation of a nation-wide electricity power grid; creation of a national system of paved roads; development of aviation; development of frozen foods; development of electronics; creation of nuclear power; the creation of computers, and development of the internet.
It is no accident that our national government has played this role of nurturing and facilitating the development of the economy. Such a role was clearly the intent and desire of the Founders—contrary to all the wrong-wing lies about small government and free enterprise. This review of the creation of the Constitution shows that an activist role for government was clearly intended all along. The Republicans and conservatives (I prefer to call them the wrong-wing because so little of what they believe and proclaim about American history is correct) have a directly contrary view of this history.
An excellent short book I highly recommend is The Great Challenge: The Myth of Laissez-Faire in the Early Republic, by Frank Bourgin (1989, George Braziller Inc., New York, NY; 1990, Harper & Row, New York, NY). Bourgin shows that the Constitution was carefully crafted to give the national government the authority and the power to intervene forcefully in the economic life of the new nation. In the Foreword, Arthur Schlesinger wrote that Bourgin’s dissertation,
represents an act of intellectual liberation from the laissez-faire myth so long cherished and propagated by those who profit from laissez-faire policies. It enriches our national traditions by reminding us of the long established role of government as an instrument to promote the welfare of the people.
Laissez-faire is an idea developed by the French physiocrats in the late 1600s and later picked up and more fully explicated by Adam Smith in the 1770s (yes, we were fighting for independence from the ideas of Adam Smith, among other things British). Laissez-faire economic theory posits that the workings of private individuals in a free market better allocates society’s resources than top-down government direction. Therefore, the markets should be free of state intervention, including restrictive regulations, taxes, tariffs and enforced monopolies. (Note that organized labor unions are regarded by these economic ideologues as a monopolistic impediment to the free workings of the market. So you see that the wrong-wing hatred of organized labor today arises directly from the wrong-wing clinging to British economic doctrines that are actually contrary to the actual origins of the American economy. They are trying to prevent reality from interfering with their theory!) Today, economists also call this body of thinking “neo-liberalism” (and the use of the term has almost always incited confusion and even hostility on progressive and liberal forums such as this, by a few people who simply are not familiar with the meaning of the term, and erroneously believe it is disparaging political liberalism.)
As Bourgin writes on pages 34-35:
Laissez-faire did not fit the purposes of the Constitution makers, for it was against the laissez-faire policy of the confederation that the Constitution was struck. In the words of James Wilson, one of the leaders of the convention, “The great fault of the existing Confederacy is its inactivity. It has never been a complaint against Congress that they have governed overmuch. The complaint has been that they have governed too little. To remedy this defect, we were sent here.” The manner in which the detailed powers of the national government were written into the Constitution, their number, their phrasing, and the circumstances attending thereto—all this indicates that the convention members were fairly of one mind to create a vigorous instrument of government capable of standing beside any foreign power in unity, stability, and power.
As Bourgin relates, there was indeed debate in the Convention over whether or not to give explicit powers to the new government bearing on the economy. Franklin wanted to have an explicit clause on building post roads and canals. Madison wanted to add to Franklin’s clause an express power to grant charters of incorporation to accomplish such projects. Unlike today, it was common at the beginning of the republic to hold corporations strictly accountable to very narrow objectives embodied in their charters. A corporation established to build a road was expected to build a road, and not also undertake cotton cloth manufacturing. Today, of course, corporate conglomerates engaged in many different economic activities is the norm. General Electric is still thought of as a manufacturer of industrial and consumer electrical goods, but it also builds jet engines, and over half its revenues and profits come from financial activities, not manufacturing. Such a company in the early 1800s would have met with widespread public suspicion and hostility.
Up until the Civil War, corporate charters were issued for very specific purposes -- such as to build roads, canals, bridges, ports, and railroads. And often, the purposes had to be accomplished in very specific time frames or the charter of incorporation would lapse and the corporation would cease having a legal existence. It was not unusual for a state to revoke a corporate charter if the corporation did not fulfill the purpose for which it was incorporated. For example, the Sunbury and Erie Railroad, chartered by Pennsylvania in 1837, was never able to actually begin construction, and after the state had given it an extension of time, the company was dissolved by state government fiat and its property confiscated and given to the Pennsylvania Railroad. (Sunbury is located near the confluence of the north and west branches of the Susquehanna River.) As another example, the Franklin Railroad received an unusual dual charter from Maryland and Pennsylvania in 1832, to construct a railroad from Chambersburg, Penn., 27 miles south to Hagerstown, Maryland. The company went bankrupt within a couple years, but was operated by the bankruptcy receiver until 1852, when the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania determined that the thin-flat, bar-rail on which the horse-drawn cars rode had become unsafe to operate on, and ordered that the company either disband, or relay the road with heavy T-rail to allow the running of steam locomotives. A very direct and heavy-handed interference of the government in the market!
Trump Is Giving Protectionism a Bad Name
Posted on August 9, 2018 by Yves Smith
By William G. Moseley, a professor of geography and director of the Program for Food, Agriculture and Society at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minn. Follow him on Twitter @WilliamGMoseley. Originally published at TripleCrisis
As a development geographer and an Africanist scholar, I have long been critical of unfettered free trade because of its deleterious economic impacts on African countries. At the behest of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the majority of African countries were essentially forced, because of conditional loan and debt-refinancing requirements, to undergo free market–oriented economic reforms from the early 1980s through the mid-2000s. One by one, these countries reduced tariff barriers, eliminated subsidies, cut back on government expenditures, and emphasized commodity exports. With the possible exception of Ghana, the economy of nearly every African country undertaking these reforms was devastated.
Why Republican Tax Cuts Always Cause A Financial Crash Jan 2017\
The only economists who ever created a national economy
The more I had heard about List in the preceding five years, from economists in Seoul and Osaka and Tokyo, the more I had wondered why I had virtually never heard of him while studying economics in England and the United States.
Fallows goes on to describe the historical importance, not of British opium-trade apologist Adam Smith, but of the American School, in guiding the early industrial development of Tokugawa Japan, late imperial China, czarist Russia, Germany, South Korea, and other countries.
Monday, January 26, 2015
HAWB - Introduction - How America Was Built
some of the highlights of the chronology:
- 1783 Benjamin Franklin’s Reflections on the Augmentation of Wages, Which Will Be Occasioned in Europe by the American Revolution
- Jefferson’s Land Ordinance of 1785
- The Constitutional Convention - Bourgin's The Myth of Laissez-Faire in the Early Republic
- The Constitutional mandate to promote the general welfare
- Charles Beard did not write what you think he wrote in An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution
- The Tariff and Tonnage Acts of 1789
- Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton designs the USA economy
- How early corporations were enjoined by their charters to promote the general welfare
- On the question of aesthetics: L’Enfant’s 1791 Report on the Plan Intended for the Permanent Seat of Government and Jefferson's plans for the state capitol in Richmond and the University of Virginia
- 1794-1816 The federal armories lay the foundation of modern industrial mass production
- 1801–1806 Oliver Evans develops the high-pressure steam engine
- The Coast Survey Act of 1807 and the discovery of a deep water channel into the port of New York City
- 1804-1859 The Army Corps of Topographical Engineers explore and map the West
- 1817 The Erie Canal
- 1802-1835 The US Military Academy at West Point and its role in engineering and education
- McCulloch v. Maryland 1819 - Powers are implied, not enumerated
- The General Survey Act of 1824
- The Rivers and Harbors Act of 1824
- 1833 Associate Justice Joseph Story's Commentaries on the Constitution
- 1835-1852 The Illinois-Michigan Canal and the creation of Chicago
- 1838-1842 United States Exploring Expedition of the US Navy
- 1843 Direct funding to Samuel Morse for development of the telegraph
- 1850s Admiral Benjamin Franklin Isherwood and the development of steam power
- Land Grant Act of 1850
- Steamboat Act of 1852 and the power to regulate private property
- 1859 Brig. Gen. Randolph B. Marcy's Prairie Traveler
- Pacific Railroad Acts of 1861 and 1862
- 1862 Morrill Land-Grant Colleges
- 1862 Abraham Lincoln establishes the Department of Agriculture
- 1867-1872 The United States Geological and Geographical Surveys of the plains and the west
- 1870 Weather Bureau of the United States established
- 1879 United States Geological Survey and the development of mining
- Hatch Act of 1887 creates agricultural experiment stations
- 1890s-1920s The Good Roads movement and government pavement of roads
- 1907 U.S. Forest Service establishes Forest Products Laboratory at University of Wisconsin Madison
- The Air Commerce Act of 1926
- 1928 The National Bureau of Standards and the Cooperative Fuel Research engine
- 1911 US Supreme Court breaks Rockefeller's Standard Oil monopoly
- 1912 USDA botanist and plant pathologist Mark Carleton and the improvement of wheat
- Smith–Lever Act of 1914 establishes a system of agricultural cooperative extension services
- 1915 National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics
- 1917-1919 The US Navy and the development of radio
- 1919 Nebraska State Legislature establishes Tractor Test Laboratory at University of Nebraska
- 1919 Bank of North Dakota established by state legislature after Non-Partisan League sweeps state elections
- 1920 USDA scientists Harry A. Allard and W.W. Garner discover photo-periodicity of plants
- 1924 US Army Industrial College lays the foundation for the Arsenal of Democracy in World War 2
- 1930s The Bonneville Power Authority, the Tennessee Valley Authority and rural electrification
- The Norris-La Guardia Act of 1932 promotes organized labor unions
- 1942 US military develops mass production of penicillin
- 1943 National Resources Planning Board publishes plans for post-war demobilization of military personnel and reorientation of industry
- 1943 Petroleum Administration for War sends Everette Lee DeGolyer to assess oil supplies in the Middle East
- 1948-1965 USDA regional research laboratories and the frozen foods industry
- Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 (the GI Bill)
- 1945 Vannevar Bush's report to Truman Science, The Endless Frontier argues the need for continued government support of science and engineering research and development
- 1940s-1950s The origins of computers: Whirlwind and the SAGE air defense system
- 1952-1957 US Air Force funded Boeing 707 brings us the jet age
Everything sucks because no one knows what they are doing
[Dougald Lamont’s Substack, via Naked Capitalism 12-22-2024]
In the mid 1970s, there was an intellectual revolution in economics. Because wages were stagnating while inflation was high for several years running – so-called “stagflation” Keynesian New Deal ideas were thrown out and replaced with Neoliberal / Neoclassical ideas.
These fundamentally libertarian ideas – which include assumptions and mathematical models of different parts of the economy, claim to describe how the mechanics of the economy work. They don’t.
The fundamental assumption that neoclassical / neoliberal economics gets wrong is related to the creation of new money in an economy….
A fundamental aspect of the neoliberal / neoclassical ideology is that government is to blame for everything, because the market left to itself will be perfect….
Timothy Noah, April 2, 2025 Only One Thing Explains Trump’s Tariff Madness
it’s totally idiotic to think tariffs could ever replace the income tax, even partially, as a meaningful source of federal revenue. And they’re right: This idea is really, really stupid!
One minute we hear (from the Financial Times’ Rana Foroohar) that the skeleton key is the Miran report, a November paper about devaluing U.S. currency by Stephen Miran, chair of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers. The next minute we hear (from Jonathan Cable and Leika Kihara of Reuters) that it’s all about factory output. Au contraire, says Reuters; it’s about killing off the World Trade Organization. Try to keep up, will you?
Abraham Lincoln and the Tariff
Carey’s letter to Lincoln that if Clay’s high tariffs had been continued, the people in the slave states residing in the hilly and mountainous west of those states, would have created mines, industries and farms that would have created and enough wealth and population to wrest political control away from the slave-holding planters, and secession probably would never have happened.
Had the policy advocated by Mr Clay, as embodied in the tariff of 1842, been maintained, there could have been no secession, and for the reason that the southern mineral region would long since have obtained control of the planting one. If now maintained – if measures be now adopted for enabling the people of the hill country to profit of our present tariff – and if capitalists can have such assurances of its permanence as is required for securing the creation of mills and furnaces, and the opening of mines — we may retrace our steps and thus secure the permanent maintenance of the Union. If, on the contrary, our people left in doubt as to the purposes of the Administration, are compelled at each succeeding session of Congress to fight for life, and if, finally, the British free trade system be readopted – the Union must, before the lapse of many years, be rent into numerous fragments, mere instruments in the hands of foreign powers. From this, there can be no escape.
These accounts usually present protectionism as one of a triad of economic policies that created the conditions for USA’s industrial development. The other two are “internal improvements” and “national banking.” It is important to note that all three policies were bitterly contested. It is no coincidence that the center of strong opposition to these three policies were the southern slave states.
The neomercantilists : a global intellectual history
Eric Helleiner, 2021 in Ithaca NY Cornell University Press
