Part 1: Reasons for Embracing Protectionism

Nothing destroys a good idea so efficiently as success—not so much the success of the idea itself as much as the success of those, politicians mostly, who claim to be implementing it. This is why in Russia advocating privatization is more likely to get you punched in the face than listened to “privatization”[1]For a fairly accurate discussion of why many of Mikhail Gorbachev’s so-called reforms were mostly ineffective window dressing for an attempt to save the Communist system, see the introduction to Requiem for Marx by Yuri Maltsev. having been neoliberalspeak for moving away from Communism by having Russian Communist Jews invite their Western co-ethnics to come and help them loot the nation’s wealth via crooked inside dealing.[2]Although the author wouldn’t have dared describe the situation in quite so unflattering of terms, Amy Chua’s World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability gives a decent summary of just how predominant in the Russian economy Jews became during the ‘90s looting binge. There’s actually a humorous anecdote by her in which, upon learning that six out of the seven top Russian oligarchs are Jews, her Jewish husband responded, “Only six? So who’s the seventh guy?” Truly moral privatization, on the other hand, would have involved forcefully but gradually dissolving the Communist system by allowing private citizens to begin trading amongst themselves in the open (they had been doing so clandestinely since the beginning of Communism, of course) and without state interference, allowing them to accumulate the experience needed to take the reins of Russia’s economy themselves. Too often sound and noble concepts are like beautiful women born among bourgeois intellectuals and initially admired until given flattering attention by the elites who then rape and whore them until they’re despised and rejected by the masses who have no idea what they were originally like.

Since Trump’s recent ascendance, the same could happen to protectionism, a concept which long before Trump was divided into many different forms, some far less sound than others. Indeed it might be said that protectionism divides the dissident right the way that immigration once divided and is again beginning to divide the Left (the split being mostly between those who want to restrict immigration to help the working classes and those who want to open the floodgates out of misplaced pity for nonwhites and/or outright malice for whites): those who enter the dissident right via libertarianism and retain a (mostly healthy) distrust of the state tend to distrust or outright despise protectionist measures, while those who did not come that route, or who did but have fully burned those bridges are more likely to be willing to give it a go, perhaps even with enthusiasm.

Coming down on the pro-protectionist (though critical of Trump’s variety) side, I hope to explain and defend my position in this essay, which was given impetus by a recent comment by longtime, erudite commenter Lord Shang: Lord Shang’s having worked, by his telling (which I have no reason to doubt), on Pat Buchanan’s election campaign in some capacity back in the ‘90s reminded me of my own journey to the dissident right, which in a slightly uncommon turn passed through protectionism (by way of Buchanan’s The Great Betrayal: How American Sovereignty and Social Justice Are Being Sacrificed to the Gods of the Global Economy) before moving into Austrian School libertarianism and ultimately settling in the dissident right proper. As a nationalist by temperament, I always found Pat Buchanan’s general stance and rationale for it far more congenial than Austrian School free trade, though from familiarity with the latter’s economics in general, I could see perfectly well the shortcomings and flaws of Buchanan’s specific policies. Because of this, I spent some time developing, from the ground up, an Austrian-/axiomatic-/deductive-style of my own, parts of which touch on the nature of protectionism and free trade. With that in mind, let me now lay out what I consider to be true protectionism, following which I’ll contrast it with the nature of the kind of crony capitalism which many politicians tout as protectionism.

To begin, let’s note the major reasons that a nation might want to engage in protectionism—whether protectionism can actually fulfill those goals is another matter, and we’ll deal with that in a minute. But for now, let’s simply lay out the major ostensible reasons for using it. Basically, there are three: economic power, military power, and cultural preservation. Let’s cover the third one, which is kind of the odd one out, first.

Although it was a severe (and self-serving) exaggeration on Karl Marx’s part that “the hand-mill gives you society with a feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist,”[3]Marx, Karl. “The Poverty of Philosophy.” Translated by Institute of Marxism Leninism, The Poverty of Philosophy – Chapter 2.1, 1993, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ch02.htm. there is no doubt that economics and technology exert strong effects on a nation’s culture, for good and evil. The biggest example of this in our own nation and time (though both the effect and notice of it go back to the early United States) might be the rural/city divide with regard to politics and culture, as was starkly on display during all of Trump’s presidential runs: as an anonymously authored article on Identity Dixie has pointed out, if during the 2020 election, carrying a state depended on winning counties rather than the popular vote, Trump would have overwhelmingly won both Texas and Georgia (unlike the actual election outcome, which saw Georgia go to Biden and Trump take Texas by a far-slimmer margin); whether you love it or hate it, the ability of blue-hive cities to inculcate hive-mind thinking is undeniable, as is the tendency of rural folks to lean conservative (in a true sense). And, of course, it’s not simply that those of a leftist temperament migrate to the cities while those of an opposite temperament either stay behind or flee the cities (though that does play a part in it); we all know the stories about kids who had no natural inclination towards the former changing once they became immersed in big city/liberal academic culture during their stint in college. There is a collective cultural pressure in various locales, the magnification or diminution of which will be based on economic policies of the nation that, intentionally or accidentally, tilt the scales in favor of one or the other. As I said, this phenomenon is so old that even Thomas Jefferson commented on it, attempting to explain it in a chapter of his Notes on the State of Virginia:

The political oeconomists of Europe have established it as a principle that every state should endeavour to manufacture for itself: and this principle, like many others, we transfer to America, without calculating the difference of circumstance which should often produce a difference of result. In Europe the lands are either cultivated or locked up against the cultivator. Manufacture must therefore be resorted to of necessity not of choice, to support the surplus of their people. But we have an immensity of land courting the industry of the husbandman. Is it best then that all our citizens should be employed in its improvement, or that one half should be called off from that to exercise manufactures and handicraft arts for the other? Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposite for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth.

Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phaenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example. It is the mark set on those, who not looking up to heaven, to their own soil and industry, as does the husbandman, for their subsistence, depend for it on casualties and caprice of customers. Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition. This, the natural progress and consequence of the arts, has sometimes perhaps been retarded by accidental circumstances: but, generally speaking, the proportion which the aggregate of the other classes of citizens bears in any state to that of its husbandmen, is the proportion of its unsound to its healthy parts, and is a good enough barometer whereby to measure its degree of corruption. While we have land to labour then, let us never wish to see our citizens occupied at a work-bench, or twirling a distaff. Carpenters, masons, smiths, are wanting in husbandry: but, for the general operations of manufacture, let our workshops remain in Europe. It is better to carry provisions and materials to workmen there, than bring them to the provisions and materials, and with them their manners and principles. The loss by the transportation of commodities across the Atlantic will be made up in happiness and permanence of government. The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body. It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigour. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution.

The famous running intellectual feud between Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton about what economic path the early republic should tread featured heavily such concerns; and indeed, our present debates may be said to be the (currently) furthest end of a philosophical and economic debate that has been flaring and receding since the founders’ time. Part of the debate, of course, involved purely economic issues, though all the greatest minds (such as Jefferson and Hamilton) taking part in the debate acknowledged that cultural issues are certainly at stake as well and must be addressed—though addressing them is an act of playing with fire and must be undertaken with extreme circumspection.

The reason it’s playing with fire is that, unlike the purely economic ones, cultural issues are not very amenable to straightforward empirical analysis, leaving far more ambiguity and gray areas for conniving politicians to exploit for their own ends, which they will relentlessly pursue, and in the process transform a true protectionist policy into a crony capitalist one. Because of that, we won’t even attempt to address cultural issues in this essay beyond making the reader aware of them and instead focus on purely economic concerns which are amenable to cut-and-dried quantitative analysis. (In a later essay, we’ll be dealing with those thorny cultural issues.)

The other two reasons for embracing protectionism of some kind are, as I’ve said, much more clear-cut and provable or disprovable. The first is economic prosperity, whether we measure that in terms of a nation’s share of the world economy or an individual’s share of his national economy: other things being equal, most people outside of fanatical liberals (and they often adopt their counterposition only hypocritically as a virtue signal) want to see their nation’s share of the world pie as big as possible and the same for their own share of the nation’s. And while such economic prosperity does not necessarily lead individually to happiness or collectively to a culturally and spiritually high civilization capable of weathering the ages, it definitely does translate, but for the gross incompetence of politicians, into military might (whether to be used purely defensively as a republic or offensively as an empire is a separate issue). Part of this is direct, as was the case with the U.S. in World War II when the factories that once churned out tractors began churning out Sherman tanks; part of this is indirect, as with Saudi Arabia, which manufactures almost nothing of its own but instead uses petrodollars from the sale of its vast oil reserves to purchase the latest and best military hardware. The case of 19th- and early 20-th century Britain is an example of both: being the first nation to strongly industrialize allowed the British to create and sustain an army and navy capable of holding together a worldwide empire, while their embrace of free trade in both agricultural and manufactured goods both increased their economic well-being (undeniably with regard to food and agricultural products available to ordinary Britons) and increased their dependence on imported goods such that by the time of World War I, protectionist Germany rivaled them in terms of manufacturing while its submarine warfare threatened the British Isles with potential war famine as they no longer grew enough at home to feed their population. Had Britain been able to keep its Victorian-era share of world manufacturing up to the eve of World War I, it is unlikely that it would have needed the United States’s help to overcome Germany, and to be sure, given the vast resources of the United States and the human capital of both the U.S. and Germany, even had the British embraced true protectionism, it would not have been enough to maintain that level of economic dominance for itself, but it likely would have slowed the industrial rise of its rivals and sped up its own; and the same is most definitely true with regard to the economic decline of the U.S. and concomitant rise (largely via the same mechanism) of China. At least, that is my contention; the Austrians and even mainstream economists would likely argue otherwise, and it is the purpose of part 2 of this essay to show why they are mistaken.

Part 2: The Nature of True Protectionism and How It Works

In part 1 we discussed the goals of true protectionists; now our task becomes defining true protectionism and proving that it is a correct means to those ends. With that mind, let me start out by answering the question what is true protectionism and how does it work? To answer both parts at once, true protectionism is an economic nationalist policy designed to maximize capital accumulation (and thus wealth) per capita by using tariffs to equalize labor costs between the economies of your country and those you trade with.

First, we ought to ask, what is an economy?

To put it briefly, it is nothing more and nothing less than the sum of the activities of those who engage in or otherwise effect (for good or ill) economic activity at any level—hence, you can talk about the local economy, the state economy, the national economy, or the world economy.

What determines the strength or prosperity of an economy at any level? Basically, three things: the amount of natural resources commanded by those who make up the economy; the amount of economically useful capital per capita (that is, the amount of useful machines, tools etc., that make labor more productive which are available for workers in the economy to use) that they command; and the state of technology. I say command rather than own, as an imperial economy (such as that of Ancient Rome) or quasi-imperial one (such as, unfortunately, the US under the petrodollar, if not earlier) can strengthen itself by making other economic zones (be those nations, tribal areas, or other types) offers they can’t refuse. I specify economically useful since an asset may not always be a positive economic contribution: for example, an old steam shovel might increase a person’s productivity relative to using a spade, but if it uses three times as much fuel to move one-fourth the earth as a newer model that’s readily available for about the same price as it would cost to keep the old model running, it’s not an asset to the economy; and I say “the state of technology” since technology can be an economic force multiplier, allowing for superior capital designs that allow the same amount of resources to be made even more productive.

The last two, in turn, are heavily dependent on three more factors, those being the economy’s rate of savings, its level of human capital, and its cultural institutions: that is, how many resources (including human labor) its participants are willing to forgo as consumers’ goods so that they can be transferred to the production of producers’ goods (i.e., capital); the average intelligence, drive, sociability, and conscientiousness of those participants (for which average IQ/STEM numbers per capita can serve as a proxy); and the cultural, legal, and political institutions and the degree to which they allow the population to unleash its natural potential or hamper it from doing so. So, other things being equal, the smarter and more honest and frugal a nation’s population is, the more powerful its economy is going to be, especially if it has beneficial barriers to keep it from diluting that power by harmfully mixing with another, lesser economy.

I know that sounds a bit odd so let me explain. At any level of economic activity there are greater and lesser degrees of integration of that economy’s parts, be those natural resources, human capital, or technology, with prices of things which economic actors consider the same usually converging to some degree. The degree of convergence, in turn, depends on the barriers or obstacles to such convergence: these can be anything from natural barriers born of nature or human nature (so physical distance and hard-to-cross terrain, or the imperfect nature of human knowledge) to man-made barriers such as borders, tariffs, laws, etc.

When two economies that had been separated for whatever reason have the barriers separating them removed, they begin to fuse as if they are one and their prices begin to converge. In some cases, this can be to the detriment of one of those economies. To see how, let me give you a concrete and realistic example of how this works. Say you have two formerly separate economies of two countries that begin to engage in free trade after being separated for some time. Let’s examine what will begin to happen on the micro level once trade is established or if there are no trade barriers for the first time and then pull back and see what kinds of macro trends occur as a result. Our example will contain two countries of roughly the same size, one with post-WWII conditions, i.e., large amounts of capital per capita, a high standard of living, and high labor costs; the other will be modeled on China at the beginning of its reform period when it first began opening itself up to major trade and started courting industries from abroad. To eliminate complications, we will assume that both countries are the same size and have the same sets of natural resources, as well as the same average IQ levels and rate of savings. Furthermore, we’re going to assume that the countries stand right next to each other such that transport costs are not a factor. Let us just assume, for the sake of convenience, that all other production costs are identical for the countries so that any difference in making a particular product in the first vs the second country is due solely to the difference in labor costs.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at the situation from a micro perspective. The question is, once the two economies fuse, what will come to the notice of the entrepreneurs, who in their quest for profits are one of two primary groups making changes to the economy’s structure of production—that is, the particular arrangement of all resources within it (including human capital) at any given time—in light of recent or anticipated changes in the natural world, in consumers’ buying patterns, and/or changes in governmental activity that impacts the economy (government being the other group making, sometimes for good but usually for ill, changes to the economy). Basically, our entrepreneurs will see a huge pool of cheap labor available and will begin shifting capital from the richer country to the poorer one to take advantage of it, as illustrated by the following graphic which shows the cost of producing the same product in either country.

As you can see, profits to be had are much higher in the more capital-poor country, to which the first country’s entrepreneurs begin offshoring their production facilities. How long this process will go on depends on many factors, but they all boil down to what parts of both economies are considered interchangeable by the market participants and thus will have their prices begin to converge, and what barriers exist to stop their convergence. This process of course includes real wages of workers in the two countries, and by examining them we can see the limits of the offshoring process; as I explain in another essay:

Of course, for that [profit] differential [between producing it in one country vs the other] to work, the company needs its [home country] buyers to have the same real income. The reason the company loves those Third-Worlders as workers is the same reason it hates them as customers: unless we’re talking about food and maybe something like a cell phone, there’s no way the man who puts in an entire day to earn what an American worker would make in an hour is going to buy the company’s product for the same price. But as offshoring continues apace and throws more and more American workers out of their manufacturing jobs and into wage competition with other US workers, both real and nominal incomes decline and those workers’ inability to buy the offshoring companies’ products reduces its sales and hence their profit margins from above at the same time that rising real wages of the Third World workers begin to reduce those profits from below. This will keep going until it seems as if the two economies fuse and all things interchangeable, including labor and incomes, are mixed and evened out, [in some cases] to the great detriment of the West’s middle and working classes.

Such an outcome is not the case in our above example, at least not in the long-run, since it assumes that both countries have equal average IQs, resources, etc. But consider an example where the first economy is the same as in the example above but the one it’s merging with is something like that of a sub-Saharan African nation or Haiti: in other words, an economy made up of people with such low average IQ that the exceptions are too few to be statistically significant, an entire population made up of what in an industrial economy would be considered unskilled or menial labor:

List of characteristics:

Country A:

Total population: 120,000 (100,000 working; 20,000 nonworking)

Total income: 100,000,000.00

Workers:

20,000 STEM-types (they earn collectively, 30,000,000.00)

30,000 semiskilled-types (they earn collectively 30,000,000.00)

50,000 unskilled (they earn collectively 40,000,000.00)

Country B:

Total population: 120,000 (100,000 working; 20,000 nonworking)

Total income: 10,000,000.00

Workers:

100,000 unskilled (they earn collectively 10,000,000.00)

Country A-B fused economy:

Total population: 240,000 (200,000 working; 40,000 nonworking)

Total income: 110,000,000.00

Workers:

20,000 STEM-types (they earn collectively, 30,000,000.00)

30,000 semiskilled-types (they earn collectively 30,000,000.00)

150,000 unskilled (they earn collectively 50,000,000.00)

Prefusion per capita earnings:

Country A:

STEM-type: $1,500.00

Semiskilled: $1,000.00

Unskilled: $800.00

Postfusion per capita earnings:

Country A:

STEM-type: $1,500.00

Semiskilled: $1,000.00

Unskilled: $333.33

*This example is also taken from my Occidental Observer essay, which I now notice contains an embarrassing math mistake: the semiskilled workers’ per capital earnings should be $1,000.00 (not the $1,500.00 shown).

As you can see, in the long run as well as the short run such a union of opposite economies is a match made in hell for the US working and middle classes, who see their real wages decimated by being forced into competition with such low-tier human capital.

But the devastation goes even beyond that, given that, as I show in my other paper, while economic prosperity (whether absolute or relative) tends to fuel greater savings and capital formation among the White middle and, to a lesser extent, working classes, among the denizens of third world, it tends to fuel a population boom, meaning that in the future the white working classes will have even lower wages as they compete with even greater numbers of Third Worlders.

But the problem goes even deeper and the future it portends becomes even darker still when you take into account the effect of such a transfer of real wealth on the absolute number of STEM types in the world as a whole. This problem (which I hope to elaborate on in a future essay) is one which virtually the entire economics profession has either missed or ignored on purpose, but one with the greatest import for the future of world living standards, to say nothing of the living standard in the Western nations. The problem goes to the heart of genetics, specifically to the nature of dominant and recessive genes. Imagine two groups of rabbits, one in which half the population have black stripes in their fur that are missing in the phenotypes of the other half, and another group in which the black stripes occur in only about 1/100th of the population. Given the frequency of the stripes in such a high percentage of the first population as a whole, it is far, far more likely that the stripe-less members of the first group will have offspring with blacks stripes than it is that the stripe-less members of the second group will (that is, far greater numbers in the first groups are likely to have recessive genes that could contribute to producing the stripes than are members of the second group).

Now apply this to humans. High intelligence is so biologically complicated that scientists do not believe that any single gene or even small set of genes will be soon identified that could be thought to lead to it, at least not by themselves. While high (or low) intelligence is highly heritable, it’s not entirely so, and as Richard Lynn shows in his book Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations, about one-third of children leave the social class of their parents, either rising or falling from it.[4]Lynn, Richard. Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations. Second Revised ed., Ulster Institute for Social Research, 1930, 190, 193. When your trade policies result in a loss of real income for Whites and a gain for races with far lower average IQ scores, you are reducing the number of children likely to have high IQs, and thus you are indirectly lowering the average IQ score of the entire earth! This is true even if the workers of both races have the same IQ rates as individuals since even a low-IQ White is more likely to possess the recessive genes that in the next generation could lead to high intelligence than is a Black or Brown with the same individual IQ. To see how this must be the case, consider how much more likely higher-IQ Blacks are to become involved in criminal activity than Whites of the same IQ: while a Black with an IQ of 100 is equal to the average White in that respect, he’s likely far closer to the Black average in terms of temperament, impulse control, and future orientation. IQ is not the center of a genetic universe which all other genes revolve around and calibrate themselves by, but rather one part of a potential package that is more likely to resemble the average of its race in more ways than not.

And since world living standards per capita are largely the product of the total amount of capital in the world, and since the amount of capital worldwide is highly dependent on the number of STEM workers relative to the world population, the higher the percentage of the world total that Whites and East Asians make up, the higher world living standards will be, even for the non-white, non-East Asian nations. Hence economic nationalist policies by the White and Yellow nations are at once self-protective and altruistic—the best of both worlds, for the entire world.

Part 3: Implementing Economic Nationalism and Reindustrializing the West

So given what we learned in part 2 about capital accumulation, the role of human capital in that process, and the nature of genetics and intelligence, what is the best way for the West and East Asia to help not only themselves but the entire world in the long run? Well, by keeping their homelands as White or East Asian as possible and by preventing the offshoring of capital from those homelands to the Third World. The first, while even more important than the second, is largely a matter of obvious policy changes (kick the illegal aliens out, followed, perhaps more gradually, by all the remaining non-Whites, stop them from coming back, etc.) that have been well covered by others and it’s unnecessary to rehash them here, so my focus will be on the second.

As for undoing the damage of decades of offshoring, part of the solution, as Paul Craig Roberts has repeatedly pointed out, will involve repealing the tax incentives favoring offshoring:

Instead of tariffs, the income tax should be used. US corporations that produce domestically using American labor—not H-1B and L-1 imported labor—should have a lower tax rate. US corporations that produce abroad with foreign labor goods and services sold in the US should have a higher tax rate. The tax rate should be high enough to more than offset the lower labor and regulatory cost of producing abroad for American markets.

This is indeed a good starting point, but without tariffs as well it is a no-go in the long run because without tariffs on foreign goods, you leave open the possibility of American capital simply switching from American companies to investing in, say, Chinese companies or companies nominally owned by Chinese citizens (which would not be subjected to taxes on US companies) that sell to America; also, since money can easily flee, you could have our oligarchs simply taking dual citizenship in one of these countries or even becoming full citizens of them and then enjoying their profits from the American market there. They might even be able to obtain sweetheart tax rates or dual Chinese/[minor country that’s a tax haven] citizenship using their wealth to bribe the right officials. But with tariffs in place as well, as I shall show below, this problem is preempted.

In addition, a system of tariffs designed to equalize labor costs between two trading countries should be put into place, this being the part of an economic nationalist program that most of those who have heard the term protectionism think of it as relating to—though most of them have only a vague idea of how such a tariff system can work and should work. And that, in turn, allows the crooked and/or stupid pols to pass off as true protectionism what is actually crony capitalism. To see the difference, let’s show how true protectionism (what I call veraprotectionism) works, which can be summarized as:

• Measuring the average cost of production in the country you’re trading with, determining what percentage on average of it is labor costs, and using tariffs to equalize the cost of labor between the two countries. You might also do this with costs associated with one country having laxly enforced or nonexistent environmental regulations (not the crazy, screaming Greta Thunberg kind, mind you, but the kind that would punish a company for, say, dumping formaldehyde into a nearby river to save money on disposal).
• Making the rate needed to equalize labor (and possibly environmental regulation) costs apply uniformly to at least all manufactured goods and possibly all goods period.
• If raw materials and agricultural products are not included in the equalization rate, apply a revenue tariff rate to them to generate funds for the (hopefully small and limited) government.
• If the country has higher labor and/or environmental costs than yours, apply a revenue tariff rate uniformly on its exports to you.
• Use market incentives and private enterprise as well as (small numbers of) government officials to enforce the tariff collection and minimize potential corruption.

Recall the graphic from part 2:

Let’s assume that average costs of producing a given product within the two countries are such that in the first country the product that could be sold in the home market for $100,000 costs $95,000 to produce, whereas in producing it in the second, for sale in the first at $100,000, costs only $75,000. With such a differential, the stampede to offshore will be all but inevitable—unless there is a tariff in place.

Were we to add a tariff of 27% (the average cost difference between the two countries is $20,000, which is $20,000 ÷ $75,000 = .2666 rounded to 27%, so $75,000 x 27% = $20,250, and $75,000 + $20,250 = $95,250, which is over due to rounding but close enough) to all manufactured goods from the second country, the costs of producing our example product there would be the very same as producing it here and there would be no incentive to offshore production. Again, we’re assuming the only difference in average costs between the countries is due to difference in average labor costs.

THIS is how true protectionism works. Save for cultural concerns (which, again, we’ll be covering in a separate paper), it aims for nothing more and nothing less than intensifying the accumulation of capital per capita by preventing, through tariff barriers, cheap labor in a foreign nation from siphoning off capital from our nation where labor costs are higher. The beauty and elegance of a labor-cost equalizing tariff lies in how, once the system is in place, consumers can choose any item they want based on price. In that way, it does not lead to economic inefficiency for the country implementing it, since foreign products that are truly superior relative to their price for whatever reason—be it for technological prowess (as with German cars) or a cultural and traditional mastery of the creation process (as with Persian rugs)—will get through and be preferred by the country’s consumers.

Because veraprotectionism goes by labor costs, it has the greatest effect on manufactured goods (where labor is so often a relatively high percentage of total costs) and the least effect on agricultural products and raw materials (where land is by far the most important and priciest factor of production). In that way, veraprotectionism very closely (and ironically) resembles the free trade of classical economists, whose examples were virtually all based on agricultural or animal-based products and assumed the immobility of capital across borders. And, indeed, veraprotectionism as I define it is designed to allow nonmanufactured goods to get through easily, with just enough taxation to fund a government very limited in its scope.

The other way to do this (which would also constitute a veraprotectionism policy) would be to make raw materials and food or agricultural products duty free and apply the equalization rates only to manufactured goods. That would lower producers’ costs and make your manufactured goods more competitive, but it might lower tax revenue below the level needed to fund even a minimalist government and thus force it to rely on other forms of taxation which both cost more to collect and are more intrusive, such as the income tax, and thus hurt the economy and citizens overall.

The alternative, a kind of voluntary protectionism on the part of individuals, in which they freely choose to buy American-made products only and convince others to do so by moral suasion, might be the only kind that the diehard free traders such as the Austrians would find acceptable—ideologically they could have no grounds for complaining since it would be totally voluntary and therefore not statist; but such a proposal would be not only extremely foolish and wasteful but also ironic to an extreme degree, because of the way it would have American consumers implicitly try to do what the Austrians would explicitly condemn them for trying to do in another context: that is, the Austrians ask consumers to, like the socialist central planners that they all rebuke, make micromanaging decisions about what goods in the economy ought to be produced in a context where their decisions would be based on knowledge too limited to make such decisions with any degree of success or economic efficiency.

Under veraprotectionism, on the other hand, they just buy what they want based on the goods’ qualities and prices, safe in the knowledge that the tariff schedule is keeping capital accumulation at home. To be clear, most of the Austrians would likely say that the people are being extremely foolish to try their “Buy American!” voluntary protectionist system at all; but I still find it amusingly ironic that the Austrians’ ideology would force them to rebuke my system, which is actually rather similar to the system of free trade described by the 19th-century writers (in that it is a system in which agricultural goods and raw materials get through at most at revenue-tariff rates while capital does not freely flow across borders). At the same time, they would admit the legitimacy of a system much closer to the socialism that they all deplore.

It is important to note that veraprotectionist tariffs do NOT keep capital from going abroad; rather, they keep the level of capital per capita rising until it hits the point of producing a spillover effect.

What’s that?

It’s what happens when the value of selling capital to a foreign nation exceeds the value of keeping and using it at home. This could happen for one (or more) of several reasons:

• The capital goods being exported from the US will be used by companies with economic efficiency that is due to something other than the cheaper labor cost there, and whose products are therefore able to successfully compete with our own in our own markets despite the tariff rates.
• Enough time has passed and enough capital has accumulated at home that the last tariff rate is no longer enough to keep capital from flowing abroad or it will likely be used to sell products in the country that produced that capital: e.g., if the tariff is readjusted every five years and at three years the home economy has gone from having real wages that instead of being 10 times a poorer nation’s are 11 times that (the former being what the tariff rates were designed to compensate for), goods that once were unprofitable to produce there to sell here are now profitable. Of course, whether companies will begin offshoring and to what extent depends on the profits they anticipate making in the time between the new tariff and the next scheduled tariff adjustment (and what options they have for using their offshored factories after the adjustment). Their question then is whether the new tariff regime will be enough to make the move worthwhile.
• Technological improvement makes old but usable and fairly efficient machinery cheap enough that poorer nations find it worth the cost to buy it.
• There are others but those are the major ones that come to mind.

So even an economic nationalist (and White nationalist, for that matter) like me does not in any way intend to and would not be able to hurt foreign nations with my veraprotectionist policies; those like me wish only to, in keeping with the nationalist notion that a nation (and/or race, for a White nationalist) is just the family writ large and ought to be treated like it, help their own above and before they help others. And as I’ve shown earlier, those policies do help others in the world, albeit unintentionally and indirectly.

With that in mind, it ought to be noted that veraprotectionism is easily made part of the policy of a truly Christian nation, given that it adheres to Golden Rule standards: all nations are persuaded to set equalization tariffs (or nominal, revenue-generating ones if the country they’re trading with has higher labor/regulatory costs than they do); hence, it is both inherently nationalist and universalist at the same time. Encouraging this international system won’t lead to peace, but if embraced by most nations (unlikely, but one can hope), it will remove some of the hypocrisy and irritations inherent in the present system that give politicians convenient excuses to demonize their fellow elites abroad to the rubes at home.

Also, just as important is the fact that veraprotectionism’s method leaves no room for government favoritism; you just set one rate per country you’re trading with and that’s it: no special treatment for politically well-connected industries; no lobbyists swarming DC like a plague of locusts seeking exclusive or extra protection for their industries; no central planning of any kind!

Protectionism as Crony Capitalism

This is why most of what the political classes sell as protectionism is actually crony capitalism. In their model, specific industries are designated—by themselves, of course, mostly in conjunction with their most important donors—for specific amounts of protection, often in a fashion that’s economically arbitrary but based on “rational” political calculations. By such means is the economic nationalist’s noble quest for renewal and reindustrialization of his homeland turned into just another political racket and mutual grift by the public and private sectors. Under the veraprotectionism system of one uniform rate per country, on the other hand, the pols and their cronies are left out in the cold: the former can do nothing for the latter, and if they want their industries to benefit from the veraprotectionist tariffs, they will have to make them state of the art such that their efficiency is far above that of those of the majority in the countries we are trading with, and hence with labor costs equalized, the American firms’ products are cheaper and of better quality than their foreign competitors.’ Under such a system, men with money to invest will not be tempted to fleece their fellow countrymen by either gaming the political system or offshoring our capital stock and will focus on gaining an edge over their domestic and foreign (from high-IQ, high-capital levels countries) competition by using research and development to develop better and better capital, which aids both their homeland and other nations as well via the spillover effect (that is, as we begin to replace our old capital with ever more efficient versions, we sell that old stock for cheap to the poorer foreign nations that can then upgrade theirs). Again, this is more to the benefit of the entire world than free trade. If the standard version of protectionism is able to achieve anything near this, it’s not for lack of trying by the political classes, who seem pathologically determined to corrupt any good idea someone may devise. The less government involvement the better. And veraprotectionism keeps government interference to a bare minimum—even in its enforcement mechanism!

You see, knowing how corrupt and/or incompetent pols and bureaucrats can be, I designed the enforcement mechanism for veraprotectionist tariffs to rely on private-sector competition. The bureau or department that would handle collecting tariff duties has agents to perform the collections, but for verification of the accuracy of the goods and monetary values declared, those bureaucrats rely on both the importers and (much more critically) inspectors on the payroll of their competitors or anyone else who would stand to gain from their loss. The penalty for lying about goods imported could go something like this: the first time you are fined five times the value of the goods that you lied about, the second time (if it occurs within the same three-year period; the slate is wiped clean every three) the fine is ten times of the value of the goods, and the third time your company loses its importing license for good. The exact penalty is debatable. What is not is that it must be high enough to make it not worth the risk to try to skirt the system but not so high as to make it safer—given that mistakes are made and if the first strike were your last, human error would prove fatal—for companies to create dozens small companies that each apply for licenses. Ports that handle foreign imports are to be open to a large number of inspectors, some of which will be from other importers, whether large or small, who are direct competitors of the companies they will inspect (and thus would, unlike bureaucrats, stand to gain more from pointing out cheaters—and thus knocking them out of the pool of competition—than from accepting bribes to look the other way). Of course, to ensure that competitors do not resort to sabotage—say, planting cocaine in with some of the goods—all inspectors are required to wear cameras and microphones at all times during inspections.

Such a preference for free market forces ought to be the default for any true economic nationalist (as opposed to crony capitalist), with deviation from natural market forces considered only when necessary and justified by a rigorous economic analysis. The reason protectionism is necessary is that without it there exists a tragedy-of-the-commons–type scenario in which even if everyone could know the damage to national wealth done by exporting capital to countries with cheaper labor costs (and often with much lower average IQs), the move by companies who value profit over nation will also be utilized by the more scrupulous since doing so is the only way they can compete with those who don’t care. There is no way for the free market to overcome such tragedy-of-the-commons forces—which is precisely why government intervention in the form of tariffs is necessary. Where there is a free-market solution that works just as well (or better, as is usually the case), that should always be preferred.

For it must never be forgotten that the economy that you seek to protect, for economic nationalist or crony capitalist reasons, behind tariff walls is only as powerful as its human capital and institutions and will be riddled with as many flaws as nature and/or man will allow: trap a crony capitalist economy riddled with the inefficiencies that result from unnecessary government intervention and you’ll have a garbage economy that tariffs will have no power to make into an economic dynamo. Such is why the Peronist disaster that those who oppose protectionism constantly make reference to was the way it was: it was a hot mess of not only tariffs—which were not even necessary in the case of a county that in Peron’s time had enough of a lower average IQ and cheaper enough labor costs that siphoning off capital from the free-trading US would have been a better, faster route to increasing prosperity—but massive, inefficient labor unions and a bevy of interventionist laws and regulations that hamstrung the economy to a ludicrous degree. Under such conditions, tariffs would have no chance of producing prosperity. Therefore, it is absolutely critical that those who seek to protect their economy from capital drain take care to ensure that what they are protecting within their tariff walls is worth protecting.

Transitioning to a Veraprotectioniat System

What remains is for us to discuss the best way to transition, with the least pain and most gain, from our current state to one fully implementing the veraprotectionist system. To begin, we must note that we do not need a kind of economic shock therapy such as was forced on Russia in the early ‘90s in which everything is done rapidly and harshly, either out of incompetence or (as in that case) to allow politically connected oligarchs to make out like bandits before anyone out of the loop has a chance to react. Trump may be right to use massive tariff increases as political tools to help end the immigration crisis, but such an approach to solving economic problems is like trying to use a 10-pound sledge hammer to fix a bent fender on a bicycle. Rather, what is needed is for Trump and his most trusted economic advisors to use various media to lay out a complete veraprotectionist plan, including its schedule of tariff increases: this should involve tariffs that begin extremely low and gradually increase over a period of time, say one to three years, till they reach the point of labor (and possibly regulations) equalization. This will serve several purposes:

• It will allow Trump et al. to concentrate in the near term on the ultimately more important task of rounding up and deporting all of the 20 million or so illegals that “Biden” let into the country: this in and of itself will be indirectly most useful for the veraprotectionism program since it will greatly lower housing and other costs and thus allow the average consumer to see lowering prices and rising real incomes across the board even with the slight increase in prices in the short term that the tariff increases will cause. This will prevent the Dems, MSM, and their oligarch allies (the latter having grown fat off the offshoring craze) from using the temporary price increases which even veraprotectionist tariffs will entail to turn voters against the program in the time leading up to the ‘26 elections.
• By laying out the plan in full and implementing it over several years, Trump and his team can give everyone time to rationally adjust to the changes:
  • By having tariff rates start out small and increase gradually, there will develop a step-by-step process by which a few types of businesses (likely manufacturing in nature) that had not been profitable suddenly become so; entrepreneurs then move into those areas and have time to concentrate on mastering and improving them before another batch become profitable—by which time they will have the profits and expertise from the first set to quickly and efficiently begin moving into and remaking the next set. Suddenly increasing tariffs to very high levels all at once simply unleashes chaos by making far too many businesses suddenly profitable and robbing businessmen of a way to know which they should move into first; it gives them too many rabbits to chase at once, leaves them no time to perfect their knowledge of any individual sector, and makes the whole effort become far more disorderly than it need be.
  • Having the increases be gradual will also allow the effects of much of what painful aspects of the plan must be experienced to be lessened and also spread out over a longer period of time rather than concentrated in the time before the midterms.
  • This also gives consumers and workers time to adjust to the new jobs and new prices (some of which will be higher in the short term). By giving them this time, Trump and his supporters can lessen the chaos and economic pain that ordinary Americans would otherwise strongly experience—and which the vicious elements of the deep state could then use to turn them against Trump.
  • This also gives other nations time to make the adjustment to an economically multipolar world: as the US and Europe (assuming they embrace veraprotectionism as well) begin to reindustrialize, China will see its preeminent status as the world’s factory begin to fade somewhat, this being the flip side of the US ending its Talmudic quest to be the sole writer (and when need be, ignorer) of the unwritten “rules-based order” rules; just as it is fair for China and Russia to demand that the US stop acting like they are Israelis and the rest of the world is Palestine, so it is fair for the White nations to demand that China respect their wish to revitalize their economies—and for all to demand that the plans for the new international arrangement be laid out in full and put into place at a slow enough rate to make the transition as orderly as possible.
• Doing it this way will give Trump time to implement policies to improve the human capital stock of the nation, which in turn will make the transition much easier and the end result much better.

That last point is especially important and needs to be emphasized as fully as possible. You see, far more than soft times, parasitic times make weak men; that is, in late stages of empires, when force and the inertia of a (weakening) military machine still bring economic plenty, there is a strong tendency toward the dysgenics and parasitism in the general population that has been documented to have been the case with the Roman Empire: we know from historic documents that the Roman welfare state[5]Haskell, H. J. The New Deal in Old Rome: How Government in the Ancient World Tried to Deal with Modern Problems. Muriwai Books, 2019. (supported mostly by the grain of its Egyptian holdings) was breeding an underclass even as its upper classes were having fewer children; and from Davide Piffer, et al.’s genetic analysis[6]Piffer, Davide, et al. “Intelligence Trends in Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of Roman Polygenic Scores.” OpenPsych, 21 July 2023, https://doi.org/10.26775/OP.2023.07.21. we now know that this was producing gradual declines in average IQ that went on until the Empire’s fall. The same thing has happened with the American empire in the post-World War II era when its welfare state, immigration policies, and extensive system of anti-White discrimination gradually lowered average IQ levels and the quality of human capital in general.

While the restoration of the genetic aspects of U.S. human capital will take some time—tossing out the human refuse from the Third World would be a great start—the restoration of the intellectual aspects of it can be accomplished almost instantly if Trump can muster the political will. And here I might find some disagreement with my fellow Dissident Righters. I will here argue that Trump’s attempts to take back the universities and other leftist bastions is a fool’s errand, since those leftists are entrenched in them and can use their allies in the courts to stonewall him until his term expires. Instead, I would advocate that Trump put aside his ego and desire to be a demigod king and put out a national call for those at the state and local levels to create new educational institutions to outcompete and replace the old liberal hives. That way, all Trump and his allies have to do is keep at bay leftist lawfare that might threaten them while the newly formed academic and vocational schools begin cranking out STEM-types and other professionals better, faster, and at less cost than the old institutions ever did. Also, training as many STEM-capables as is efficient at the small, private, and local operation level will make such schools and training programs immune to liberal lawfare efforts from either a de jure or de facto standpoint: the ones that are wholly private and not for profit can’t be sued for discrimination, and even the ones that might be suable will simply be too numerous and spread out for the system to punish without being overwhelmed. And the more the regime tries to destroy such ubiquitous private efforts, the more they look like bullies and tyrants in the eyes of ordinary Americans, especially if Trump leaves their tainted institutions alone; regime overreach and the outrage it will generate can then allow Trump and his allies to use the numbers in the burgeoning state and local efforts to justify not forcing the liberal hives to close or become politically neutral (which would allow them to play the part of politically persecuted martyrs) but to have their federal funding massively shrink to match their growing irrelevance, forcing them to either abandon their vicious ideologies or keep hemorrhaging ever more users to the new institutions and thus justify further cuts to their budgets.

The synergistic effect of both of these efforts will be profound: just as the cost of STEM-level human capital in the U.S. gradually begins to decline with the increase in supply, making producing products in the U.S. less expensive, so the tariffs will begin to gradually make producing goods offshore more expensive, accelerating the reindustrialization process by making more manufacturing ventures more economically viable at a faster rate; both trends moving toward each other like two blades of a scissors will slice through the socioeconomic malaise and restore both white confidence and economic power, and American economic prowess.

Notes

[1] For a fairly accurate discussion of why many of Mikhail Gorbachev’s so-called reforms were mostly ineffective window dressing for an attempt to save the Communist system, see the introduction to Requiem for Marx by Yuri Maltsev.

[2] Although the author wouldn’t have dared describe the situation in quite so unflattering of terms, Amy Chua’s World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability gives a decent summary of just how predominant in the Russian economy Jews became during the ‘90s looting binge. There’s actually a humorous anecdote by her in which, upon learning that six out of the seven top Russian oligarchs are Jews, her Jewish husband responded, “Only six? So who’s the seventh guy?”

[3] Marx, Karl. “The Poverty of Philosophy.” Translated by Institute of Marxism Leninism, The Poverty of Philosophy – Chapter 2.1, 1993, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ch02.htm.

[4] Lynn, Richard. Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations. Second Revised ed., Ulster Institute for Social Research, 1930, 190, 193.

[5] Haskell, H. J. The New Deal in Old Rome: How Government in the Ancient World Tried to Deal with Modern Problems. Muriwai Books, 2019.

[6] Piffer, Davide, et al. “Intelligence Trends in Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of Roman Polygenic Scores.” OpenPsych, 21 July 2023, https://doi.org/10.26775/OP.2023.07.21.