American pulp and paper makers would quickly raise their prices. But that tariff would have the effect of hiking the price of every cardboard box that Compaq must buy for shipping its computers to Brazil and Argentina, the price of the paper and jacket of every medical textbook HarperCollins sells to India and Pakistan, the price of the liner in every compact disk recording that the Elvis Presley estate markets in Germany and Czechoslovakia. By insulating one industry from the need to meet world standards of price and quality, you willy-nilly damage the ability of every other company in America to meet those standards in its own market. Buchanan makes much of the statistics showing that manufacturing wages in Germany now exceed those in the United States. But one reason that disposable incomes in the United States remain so much higher than they are in Europe is that Americans are not obliged to pay double and triple the world price for the food they eat.
Protectionism is an attempt to raise standards of living by systematically raising prices.
As such, it is almost by definition bound to fail. And that s not merely a theoretical point. When put to the test, protectionism has consistently failed. Ask the Brazilians. Or the Mexicans.