The Gershwins on free trade (that was then, this is now)

 [[{“value”:”In 1927, George and Ira Gershwin put on a musical satire about trade and war entitled Strike Up the Band.  The plot centres around a middle-aged US cheesemaker, Horace J. Fletcher of Connecticut, who wants to corner the domestic dairy market.  When Fletcher hears that the US government has just slapped a fifty per cent
The post The Gershwins on free trade (that was then, this is now) appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.”}]] 

In 1927, George and Ira Gershwin put on a musical satire about trade and war entitled Strike Up the Band.  The plot centres around a middle-aged US cheesemaker, Horace J. Fletcher of Connecticut, who wants to corner the domestic dairy market.  When Fletcher hears that the US government has just slapped a fifty per cent tariff on foreign-made cheese, he sees dollar signs.  High tariffs mean his fellow citizens will have little choice but to ‘buy American’.  What’s more, the tariff’s impact soon reaches beyond the national market to sour the country’s trade relationships.. Swiss cheesemakers are particularly sharp in their demands for retaliation.  Fletcher surmises that a prolonged Swiss-American military conflict would provide the necessary fiscal and nationalistic incentives to maintain the costly tariff on foreign cheese in perpetuity.

To make his monopolistic dream of market control a reality, Fletcher sees to it that the tariff spat between the two countries leads to an all-out war.  He first creates the Very Patriotic League to drum up support for the Alpine military adventure, as well as to weed out any ‘un-American’ agitation at home.  The Very Patriotic League’s members, donning white hoods reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan, go about excising all things Swiss from the nativist nation.  Not even the classic adventure The Swiss Family Robinson escapes notice: it gets rebranded The American Family Robinson.  With domestic anti-war dissent quelled, Fletcher next orchestrates a military invasion of Switzerland.  The farcical imperial intervention ends with a US victory.  But just as the war with Switzerland winds down and a peaceful League of Cheese established, an ultimatum arrives from Russia objecting to a US tariff on caviar.  And, it’s implied, the militant cycle repeats.

That is from the new and interesting Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World, by Marc-William Palen.

The post The Gershwins on free trade (that was then, this is now) appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

 Books, History, Music, Uncategorized