Active History has been active in recent days, by offering a set of backgrounders on tariffs. The material came from a roundtable on tariffs at Bishop's University last month. Good to see both the university and Active History responding so promptly to an urgent need for informed explanations on this once-again current topic.
Tariffs were a big deal in the 19th century, when countries mostly did not have sophisticated tax collection systems, it was easier to fund governments by imposing some tariffs. In that time, tariff were either called "revenue" tariffs (if they were simply to fund government spending) or "protective tariffs" (if intended to support local producers by making imported goods more expensive.
The third entry in the series makes the point that even as national taxation systems developed (enormously) most countries continued to levy tariffs for protective reasons until after the Second World War, when a broad movement to reduce tariffs led to their near eliminations in global trade. The general understanding was that trade was a good thing, and also that taxes were a much more fair way to fund governments than tariffs could ever be.
The organization that managed the tariffs eliminations from the 1940s to the 1960s was so successful that it had to abandon its name -- the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or GATT -- and become the World Trade Organization.
The Canada-US free trade agreement of 1988 hardly reduced tariffs at all, because there were few tariff remaining in place; "free trade" in 1988 was mostly about reducing trade-inhibiting laws and regulations by governments -- that is, fixing in place the neo-liberal view that the place of governments in regulating the economy should be reduced as much as possible.
Here's the first one by Heather McKeen-Edwards.
And the second one by Gordon Barker.
And the third one by Gilbert Gagne.
I'm trying not to repost every single story about newly stupid and cruel things being done by the Trumpazoid fanatics in Washington DC, but here's one if you want to laugh and cry at once. It's from the AmHist blog, Lawyers Guns and Money.
