Grant County herald. [volume] (Lancaster, Wis.) 1850-1968, 1886-11-22
The Old Free-Trade Cant.


less variety, originality and depth than
almost any other cant of the day 1t
consists of few phrases hardly changed
in form by the different theorists who
use them, and which were created
simply to catch the eye or to inveigle
the hearing, like feat in ALTERATION.
They are not intended to convince any
thoughtful mind, or to enlighten an in
telligence that penetrates beneath the
surface to ascertain if any meaning or
logic is covered up by the words. The
Iroquois speeches recently delivered
aptly illustrate the entirely superficial
aud fallacious character of all kinds of
free-trade cant
Speaker Carlisle's address an
admirer describes as powerful and
trenchant'' nothing but the old
cant, hardly disguised in a new dress.
He says: "Taxes do not create wealth;
they destroy it." In the next breath,
he says that tariff taxation creates
wealth, making one class wealthy at
the expense of another. Neither as
sertion is anything more than one of
the common places of free trade rhet-
oric, meaning nothing that is tangible
or ineligible. .Taxes do not create
wealth" That is. the money paid in
taxes does not swell, grow and increase,
so that little of it produces a great
deal-sach is the meaning of Mr.. Car
isles phrase if it means anything.
But neither does the money paid the
butcher, or the grocer, or the saloon
l~oono,. xuaaltb >, ~ tl1o+ oo,.ao
Money paid by one man to another is
no greater in amount in the hands of
the payee than in those of the payer.
MIR. Calisle need rot have come all the
way from Covington, KY., to make this
statement.
But the statement that ''taxes des-
| troy wealth. is absurd. Money paid
as taxes is not thrown into the sea nor
buried in the earth. 1t continues in
circulation as it did before, and is
wealth in other hands the same as it
was in the tax payers hands before he
paid it over to the tax gatherer, OF
would have been If he had not paid it
10 the tax gatherer. Unequal taxation
may produce an unequal and unjust
distribution of wealth. but it neither
creates nor destroys wealth.
| Of such is the most of Carlislean free
trade cant.
! Senator Beck free-trade cant is of q
similar kind. He says:
| "You know that machinery owned by few
men is now driving human labor from our manu-
| featuring establishments. One person now pro-
| duces what it required seven to produce thirty
| years ago. You know that we have surrendered
| the trade in manufacturing goods with the 800
100000 of people on the earth to the nations Of
| Europe in order to enable few protected mon
opolists to extort double price for their products
| from 60.000000 of American taxpayers. You
| know that our machineryis now more than equal
in capacity to all the human mn scles in the world
| that II can produce in six months all that this
people can consume in twelve; that il is the
| slave of its owner. and when idle consumes
| nothing that human labor produces. but the
| families OF the men who are hired to operate it
starve while ii is idle and while its owners horde
their surplus products till scarcity forces higher
| prices, which must come when competition from
abroad is prohibited by protective tariff legisla-
| tion."
Even in the exaggerations of this
paragraph, the absurdity of free-trade
cant appears in q clear light But for
| protection none of this machinery would
have been built We have not ''sur-
rendered trade" because we die not
have it before the protective system was
established, and never would have had
it under free-trade system. Without
tariff protection. our 60. 200, 900 people,
like the 1850, 900. 900 other people in
the world, would have been supplied
from Europe with all that they could
have afforded to buy-which would
have been little enough-and no part
of this vast world of machinery would
ever have been seen IN motion, with its
myriad wheels, nor would our air have
been filed with the music of labor,
thrift and prosperity which it produces.
So much for Senator Beck's style Of
free-trade can't Chicago Journal.