William R. Hawkins is Senior Fellow for National Security Studies at the U.S. Business and Industry Council.

JACK KEMP, HISTORIAN—NOT!

In the April 14 issue of The Washington Times, former Congressman and cabinet member Jack Kemp wrote an op-ed against imposing tariffs on Chinese imports. Towards the end of that column, he made the wild claim that, “There is no demonstrable instances in economic history where nations were made worse off by free and open trade.” In reality, the examples are legion, and include even the most powerful countries being laid low by rivals in “open trade.”

Historian Jaime Vicens Vives has concluded, “One of the fundamental causes of the Spanish economy's profound decline in the seventeenth century, maritime trade had fallen into the hands of foreigners.” The “opening of the internal market to foreign goods” produced a “fatal result.” Imports ran double exports and ruined the finances of what was the global superpower of its day. The U.S. is fast approaching this 2-1 trade deficit ratio as the dollar trembles.

James Boswell wrote from The Netherlands in 1764, “Most of their principal towns are sadly decayed....Utrecht is remarkably ruined."  The cause was competition from England and France, who were not afraid to use protectionism and subsidies to win the economic contest, while the Dutch clung to “free trade” and were driven from the field.

The prominent commercial lawyer Lord Penzance wrote from London in 1886, “Will the lion always possess his share? Does that not depend on how he conducts himself? ... Where we used to find customers, we now find rivals....prudence demands a dispassionate inquiry into the course we are pursuing, in place of a blind adhesion to a discredited theory.” That theory was “free trade” under which England declined relative the to more vigorous American and German capitalists, who had the strength of national policy behind them, including high protective tariffs.

Historian Paul Kennedy cited several causes of England’s decline in his study The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict 1500-2000: “A failure to invest sufficiently in new plant and laboratories, and in entire new industries; an inadequately trained work-force, and an insufficient supply of engineers and scientists as compared with foreign rivals;...a social culture which accorded far greater prestige to the professions and service industries (law, medicine, merchant banking, stockbroking) that to the business of building ships, turbines, machine tools and other manufactures.” All of these negative factors are evident in America today.

Jack Kemp is clearly no student of history, and should know better than to pretend that he is. Instead, he should relate today’s global economic competition to something he does know; to his days at a pro football quarterback. It takes hard work and strategy to win in the NFL. The legendary football coach Vince Lombardi is famous for saying, “Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing.” But he also noted, “Winning is habit. Unfortunately, so is losing.” And America  has been regularly beaten in the trade wars, by ever larger margins, over the last decade. Losing has become such a habit that people like Kemp now embrace it as normal, afraid to exert any effort to turn things around and get back on a winning streak. That is a tragedy, for as Lombardi well knew, “Show me a good loser, and I'll show you a loser.”

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