I just recommended this book in another thread, so I might as well repeat it here. Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power by John Steele Gordon. I would describe it as a mainstream conservative business-oriented view of economic history, so it receives some one-star reviews on Amazon from those with similarly, um, idiosyncratic views of economics to mmmbeer, mostly because it makes the case for the necessity of a central bank and the advisability of going off the gold standard. (I have problems with parts of the book myself, but not those.)
You can summarize modern views of the gold standard by the simple statement that in the 80 or so years since every modern economy went off the gold standard no state has ever re-instituted it. None. Not any school of economic thinking, not left, right, or middle political structures, not nations that were in hyperinflation, not a dictator who had absolute power, not a rogue state. How bad must an idea be before crazed autocrats will refuse to touch it?
Tariffs are much more interesting historically. Tariffs are central to U.S. history. They work to protect the goods or industries they are imposed on, so what you choose changes everything. Do you put a high tariff on finished goods to encourage consumers to support local industry or put the tariffs on raw materials to support local suppliers? More specifically, the North always wanted protection to grow its industries, while the South wanted low tariffs because foreign manufacturers could make goods cheaper. Since tariffs were the chief source of revenue for the U.S. pre-Civil War, high tariffs almost always won. Along as tariffs apply to an entire country, some areas and industries and peoples will benefit at the sake of others. Even after the war Great Britain and the other European powers complained bitterly against the tariffs the U.S. placed on good to shut out foreign competition. We became the world’s foremost industrial power on the back of tariffs.
Which we now bitterly complain about when other developing countries protect their growing industries by tariffs while we shout about the wonders of and need for free trade. Tariffs are a useful tool but something of a blunt instrument. They can easily be set too high or too low to properly raise revenue, and they will almost certainly set off retaliatory tariffs or other trading barriers and cause pain. They are a prime example of government control of economy in ways that free marketers hate yet they had indisputable success in making the country great. Yet almost everybody agrees that the Smoot-Hawley tariff turned the Crash of 1929 into a world depression as world trade collapsed. Free markets have never existed at any time in history and never will. The Constitution somehow fails to mention them entirely.
