RE THE COMPETITION MYTH CORRECTION NYT KRUGMAN EDITORIAL

See my prior commentary.


http://geraldmeaders.blogspot.com/2011/01/re-competition-myth.html


Re President Obama's competitiveness claims: 
historically, the Presidency has been about the last office inclined to take a protectionist domestic competitiveness stance. 


This goes back actually to FDR in the 20th Century. There were powerful anti protectionist forces leading up to the Civil War as well, as then Democrats controlled trade and kept tariffs on manufactures, and certain finished goods, notably steel, and on certain commodities notably coal, relatively low. 


'Complementarily', the British imposed no tariff on cotton, their biggest imported industrial raw material. 


See Nevins, Ordeal, V2, The Rising Industrialism, subch. 7, esp fn 55; and Nevins, Hewitt; Dorfman, The Economic Mind, 'The era of "Good Feeling"'; Eckes, Opening America's Market, early chapters.


For this history, of bipartisan Presidential selling out the domestic economy, in a capsule, article limited to post WWII, see the old Foreign Affairs article: 


Trading American Interests.