The discussion of the Halley-Smoot Tariff Act was the highlight of the book - one can recall the propaganda of high school history texts, and this is brutally exposed with gentle humor - Buchanan's quote from the movie "Farris Bueller's Day Off" (anyone-anyone?) highlighted this well and had me howling with laughter to boot. All but the most bias will be shaking their heads at how quick we are to believe anything if it is just repeated often enough.
Read this book. It's entertaining, factual, and honest.
This book brilliantly sheds the shackles of revisionist history and documents the successes of economic protectionism. Buchanan shows how Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" has been completely misread by free traders. He quotes Milton Friedman who says that Smoot-Hawley had nothing to do with the stock market crash. (It crashed 8 months BEFORE the tariff bill was even passed!)
Mr. Buchanan's solutions are not completely wrapped up in tariffs, as another reviewer stated. He forgot to read the final chapter where Buchanan outlines a mix of tax, trade, and capital-accumulation policies. Wouldn't you love a tax system that didn't require the burdensome IRS reporting we now have? It's in this book.
If Buchanan's practical policies are implemented, within five years the following would happen: Trade deficits would disappear; vulnerability to global financial crises would vanish; factories would spring up; millions of manufacturing jobs would be created; the demand for American workers and their pay scales would rise; the tax burden on American families would lighten; and America would be more self-reliant (no more OPEC handcuffs).
Buchanan crushes the Ivory Tower theories of free trade economists who should be grateful for the very policies they criticize: job protection! Let's see how they'd feel about "free trade" if their 100% Tenure Tariff were removed. Maybe then their free trade theories would not be so extremist.
There once was a higher value in America than The Bottom Line. It was called Freedom. Reading this book should be a requirement for every history teacher, economics professor and student in America who wants to PROTECT it.
And yet the central argument for Patrick Buchanan's _The Great Betrayal_ contains the exact same post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy. His thesis depends on the historical "proof" that America has been economically declining since adopting more "free trade measures" (more on that later) and was very prosperous in the 19th century when there was greater protection from foreign trade. He also cites as evidence the fall of the British Empire, which collapsed upon adopting free trade measures. Because Buchanan clearly knows nothing about economics, he does not understand if the US became prosperous _because of_ protectionism or _despite_ protectionism, and he does not understand if Britain's fall from economic power was _because of_ free trade or _despite_ free trade.
Here are the facts: the case for free trade is irrefutable. It would be absurd to attack it with empirical evidence, just as it would be absurd to attack a proof in Euclidean geometry with empirical evidence. If the protectionist case against free trade is true, consider this: it is also an attack against any form of interregional trade, as political boundaries are economically arbitrary, i.e. there is no separate theory for international trade. To be followed consistently it means that people would also be more prosperous if they didn't trade between states, cities, communities, and finally individuals. But this is absurd, for if you follow this line of reasoning logically, it means that people would be most prosperous if they were completely self-sufficient, which would in fact doom humanity to mass starvation and death. The simple, incontrovertible facts of Ricardo's law of comparative advantage and the division of labor affirm this.
Buchanan's emphasis on trade deficits is another example of his ignorance. I have a trade deficit with my local grocery store and Amazon.com -- who cares. Does Buchanan have any understanding as to what trade is all about? Clearly not. He seems to think that if trade is not "equal" or "fair," it is bad. But the whole basis of exchange is opposite values: if you sell me a shirt, it is because I value the shirt more than the money, and you value the money more than the shirt. It doesn't matter whether or not I get that money back by selling you a toaster or whatever.
And those free-trade measures...let's see. Free trade could be established with one or two sentences, and it requires no agreements because it can be adopted unilaterally at any time. These so-called "free trade agreements" are just expansion of government privilege and regulation, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, which is about 2500 pages. The World Trade Organization is a tool for political power, which subscribes to the economic absurdity "imports bad; exports good." It's just neo-mercantilism disguised as free trade -- the wolf dressed in sheep's clothing. These are not examples of free trade gone bad, they instead demand that the _real_ case for free trade be defended and elucidated, and not confused with the politicians' and world bureaucrats' deceptive language.
I enjoy Buchanan on a social conservative level, but he is tremendously ignorant about some very important things. Go read some real economics like that "dead Austrian economist" (as Buchanan calls him), Ludwig von Mises, and stay away from this non-scientific labyrinth of fallacies. It's almost as bad as what they teach in public schools. Buchanan's dead wrong on this one -- don't worry about him and keep buying cheap goods from Wal-Mart.