Quotation: "If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered.... I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.... The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs."
Thomas Jefferson
Every nation that rose to world power did so by protecting and nurturing its manufacturing base - from Great Britain under the Acts of Navigation, to the United States from the Civil War to the Roaring Twenties, to Bismarck's Germany before World War I, to postwar Japan, to China today. No nation rose to world power on free trade. From Britain after 1860 to America after 1960, free trade has been the policy of powers that put consumption before production, today before tomorrow.
The historical record is clear. Nations rise on economic nationalism. They descend on free trade.
Pat Buchanan. Suicide of a Superpower
In the early postcolonial period after 1945, Third World regimes looked on multinational companies as agents of a new imperialism, and on their young who departed for the West as defectors. Third World rulers behave more sagely today. They compete for Western investment. They provide incentives for Western companies to transfer factories and technology and to train local workers. The near-term goal is to have the First World modernize Third World industries to compete in Western markets. The long-term goal is to make the Third World the producers upon whom their former masters depend for the necessities of national life.
Pat Buchanan. State of Emergency. 2006
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