Freeman

ANYTHING PEACEFUL

Laissez Faire and the Tariff

AUGUST 24, 2012 by SHELDON RICHMAN

In his great book Master of the Senate, volume 3 of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Robert A. Caro describes the Progressive Era Senate Republican leaders as holding an “unshaken belief in laissez faire and the protective tariff.” Just before this he describes the hardship  the tariff imposed on working people and noted that the tariff was (as the saying went back then) “the mother of trusts.”

Did those Republicans believe in square circles too?

ABOUT

SHELDON RICHMAN

Sheldon Richman is the former editor of The Freeman and TheFreemanOnline.org, and a contributor to The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. He is the author of Separating School and State: How to Liberate America's Families.

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