Politics & Power Quote by Joseph E. Brown

Brown is sketching out a political identity by rejecting the two loudest, cleanest options in a perennial American fight: tariffs as a revenue machine or tariffs as a protectionist weapon. The sentence is built like a refusal to join a club. He won’t be a “free-trade man” if free trade means starving the federal government of tariff income and then making up the difference with “direct tax upon the people” - an especially radioactive idea in the 19th century, when income taxation wasn’t normalized and “direct tax” read as intrusive, unavoidably personal government.

Then he pivots and denies the other camp’s moral alibi: protection for its own sake. If the government “does not need the money,” a tariff becomes something worse than taxation - it becomes engineered favoritism, a forced transfer from consumers to selected industries. That phrase quietly reframes protectionism from patriotism to patronage.

The intent is pragmatic but also tactical. Brown (a Southern politician shaped by the era’s tariff wars and the broader suspicion of federal power) is signaling: I’ll accept tariffs when they’re tethered to legitimate public need, not when they’re a backdoor industrial policy or an excuse to expand Washington’s reach into private wallets. The subtext is a demand for fiscal honesty: call a tax a tax, justify it as necessity, and don’t dress sectional advantage up as national interest.

Rhetorically, it works because it doesn’t offer a third ideology so much as a third standard - need. He’s not preaching purity; he’s policing pretexts.