With each year, America becomes ever more addicted to the narcotic of cheap imports. The price of that addiction is the dismantlement of the mighties… - Pat Buchanan

Free trade is the policy of fading and failing powers, past their prime. In the half-century following passage of the Corn Laws, the British showed the folly of free trade. They began the second half of the 19th century with an economy twice that of the USA and ended it with an economy half of ours, and equaled by a Germany, which had, under Bismarck, adopted what was known as the American System. Of the nations that have risen to economic preeminence in recent centuries—the British before 1850, the United States between 1789 and 1914, post-war Japan, China in recent decades—how many did so through free trade? None. All practiced economic nationalism.

We are the leader of the free world and a light unto the nations, but America’s role in the 21st century should be to become again the Arsenal of Democracy and Strategic Reserve of the West, not the policeman of the planet or the social worker of the world.

Immigration is a necessary subject for national debate, for it is about who we are as a people. Like the Mississippi, with its endless flow of life-giving water, immigration has enriched America throughout history. But when the Mississippi floods its banks, the devastation can be enormous.