BOOKS IN BRIEF
The Wealth of a Nation: A History of Trade Politics in America
C. DONALD JOHNSON, OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 664 PP., $34.95, APRIL 2018
DURING THE U.S. CIVIL WAR, in the midst of one of the country’s many protectionist benders, a man named Joseph Wharton successfully lobbied for high tariffs on imported nickel. It made sense for him: He owned the nation’s only working nickel mine. He also got Congress to mandate a new 5-cent coin so there’d be a market for his monopoly. But Wharton is perhaps best known for endowing the world’s first business school, to which he assigned a clear mission: “to advocate economic protectionism unequivocally,” writes C. Donald Johnson in The Wealth of a Nation.
Perhaps it’s due to a certain
