UNITED NATIONS – Donald Trump took to the stage in Cincinnati to say thank you for his victory over Hillary Clinton.
Speaking directly to the people and the region that helped achieve his historic upset, he promised to remove the rust from the Rust Belt.
The president-elect promised to unleash “a new industrial revolution” by rebuilding the nation’s public works – our roads, bridges, ports and water and energy infrastructure.
“Buy American and hire American,” he said in Ohio. “That will be our new mantra.”
Donald Trump’s mantra confirms what Ecclesiastes tells us: There is nothing new under the sun.
Indeed, the founders of the greatest republic in history would not only recognize the president-elect’s economic policy, they would endorse it.
For his inauguration, George Washington wore a suit made of cloth woven at the Hartford Woolen Manufactory in Connecticut when most textiles were imported from abroad. Britain dominated the world textile trade at the time and Washington’s sartorial choice was a declaration of economic and industrial independence.
Make no mistake – British cloth was cheaper than the American alternative, just as the British tea dumped in Boston Harbor carried a lower price than what the colonial merchants were selling.
But Washington wanted to set an example by demonstrating his faith in American industry. “It will not be a great while,” Washington wrote to the Marquis de Lafayette, “before it will be unfashionable for a gentleman to appear in any other dress.”
President Washington asked Alexander Hamilton, his treasury secretary, for a plan to nurture industry in the United States rather than having the new nation depend on manufactured goods imported from abroad.
In this Report on Manufactures, in 1791, Hamilton wrote: “The wealth … independence and security of a Country, appear to be materially connected with the prosperity of manufactures. Every nation ought to endeavor to possess within itself all the essentials of national supply.”
And so Congress set out to encourage the growth of American manufacturing industries. At Hamilton’s behest, the government offered a cash bounty to anyone who would deliver to our shores plans for the British textile works. The fruits of this 18th century industrial espionage live yet today in Cranston Print Works, a Pawtucket, Rhode Island-based textile company and founder of America’s first Industrial Revolution.
Congress also used government procurement policies to build American enterprise. In 1798, Eli Whitney, inventor of the cotton gin, won a contract to deliver 10,000 muskets. He endeavored to produce them using interchangeable parts fashioned by machine tools, rather than by hand. This was a novel production method that came to be known as the American system of manufacturing.
When Congress approved building the Transcontinental Railroad before the Civil War, it stipulated that the rails would be made in America, though British steel was cheaper at the time. That way, we wound up with a steel industry as well as a railroad.
Just as Buy American will boost our economy, so too will Hire American.
Our open-borders policy has deprived Americans of sharing in the promise of their birthright.
Educators, academics and politicians tell young Americans they should acquire degrees in the high-tech STEM fields of science, tech, engineering and math.
Yet, at the same time, Washington has opened the high-tech sector to a flood of low-paid guest workers that fill jobs Americans could do.
For example, the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program originally gave foreign students a one-year work visa upon graduation so they could acquire on-the-job experience as part of their higher education. But President Obama issued an executive order extending the one-year visa into a three-year visa. Universities soon began marketing a new product to foreign students: a one-year “Masters program” with the three-year work visa built into it. Americans lose two ways – we are shut out of jobs and priced out of universities by wealthy foreigners willing to pay anything for a U.S. work permit.
Buy American and Hire American is the way we will rebuild our economy and Make America Great Again.
Media wishing to interview Curtis Ellis, please contact [email protected].
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