Aging & Wisdom Quote by Henry Charles Carey

Protectionism is usually sold as self-reliance, a wall against foreign influence. Carey flips the script: tariffs, he argues, don`t starve England; they fatten her. The punch is in the phrase "best customer". Instead of treating Britain as a rival to outmaneuver, he recasts it as a merchant who thrives when America industrializes behind a protective barrier. That`s not a concession to free trade; it`s a claim that national development and foreign demand can rise together.

Carey is writing in the long shadow of British industrial dominance and America`s recurring argument over tariffs (the same fight that produced the "American System" and, later, Republican industrial policy). His larger project was to dethrone the British, Ricardo-inspired story that free trade is the natural endpoint of progress. The subtext here is strategic: protection is framed not as economic selfishness but as a stage in growth that ultimately increases purchasing power, wages, and internal markets. As domestic manufacturing thickens, the country buys more inputs, more capital goods, more luxuries - including imports from Britain. England becomes, almost unwillingly, a beneficiary of American nation-building.

There`s also a diplomatic sleight of hand. Carey implies: stop calling tariffs hostile. If your exports to us keep rising "most steadily and regularly", then protection looks less like aggression than like predictable, rules-based demand creation. It`s an economist`s argument with a politician`s aim: justify tariffs not by punishment, but by prosperity - and make the supposed loser sound like a silent winner.