What's the true history of how tariffs drove the rise of America? How does China's favorite board game symbolize their approach to strategy? How is debt linked to the collapse of empires? Historian Bill Federer joins Charlie for a wide-ranging Memorial Day discussion of what makes countries strong, what makes them weak, and how so many countries go from the former to the latter through their own poor choices. Watch every episode ad-free on members.charliekirk.com!Get new merch at charliekirkstore.com!Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What is the importance of tariffs in America's history?
Learn how you could protect your wealth with Noble Gold Investments at noblegoldinvestments.com. That is noblegoldinvestments.com. It's where I buy all of my gold. Go to noblegoldinvestments.com. Okay, everybody, today on The Charlie Kirk Show, we have an amazing guest and friend of mine to talk about history, how it connects with current events, and that is Bill Federer from AmericanMinute.com.
Bill, great to see you. You're impeccably dressed, as always. Thanks for taking the time. Charlie, good to be with you. So, Bill, I want to ask a couple of questions, the first of which, what is the history of tariffs in America? The media makes it seem as if we've never done this before. Have we financed our government tariffs before? How did some of our founding fathers think about tariffs?
And how does that connect to some of the news of President Trump using tariffs as a negotiating tool?
Right, for the first century and a half of our country, that's how the federal government raised its money. So a little background, industrial revolution in England, coal was what they burned and they had coal mines that would fill up with water. So in 1769, Isaac Watt invented a steam pump to get water out of coal mines and that quickly turned into a steam engine that ran factories.
And wool, if you look at it under a microscope, it has little barbs that if you pull them, they hook together and get tighter. So women would have to sit at a spinning wheel and take this yarn and turn it into thread and then make cloth. Well, factories could make bolts of cloth really quick, really inexpensive. And so this is called the Industrial Revolution.
But the British did not allow manufacturing in the colonies because they wanted to market.
And so when America becomes independent of Britain, the second bill that George Washington signed as president was the Tariff Act of 1789 to put a 5% tariff on all imports into America to make those factory-produced items from England more expensive intentionally so that it would provide a cushion for those manufacturing to begin in America.
Matter of fact, there was no income tax in America until the Civil War. I'll get to that. And the U.S. Constitution specifically mentions that tariff taxes was the way the federal government was going to get its income.
Article 1, Section 8 authorizes the federal government to collect duties and imposts, which are different terms for tariffs, to pay the debts, provide for the common defense and the general welfare of the United States. So basically, all federal money came from tariffs. And so Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the Treasury, created the Coast Guard to do what?
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Chapter 2: How did tariffs influence the Industrial Revolution?
Lo and behold, nations was God's invention to postpone a one-world government. But every generation has some king, pharaoh, caesar, kaiser, sultan, czar that wants to conquer other nations. And if left unchecked, they'd have been happy to conquer them all. And they keep getting bigger and bigger with the latest military advancements. The kings can kill more people.
So instead of cane-killing Abel with a rock, they can kill with a bronze weapon, an iron weapon, a phalanx spear. The Greeks had a scimitar sword that the Muslims had. And with the latest technological advancements, the kings can track more people. Augustus Caesar wanted a worldwide tracking system, 2 BC, called the census system.
If he could add access to 5G and cell phones and facial recognition software, I bet he would have been tempted to use that. So these kingdoms keep getting bigger until the king of England had the biggest, the sun never set on the British Empire. He was a globalist. He was a one-world government guy.
India, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, British Guiana, Canada, Barbados, Bermuda, Jamaica, and America. So America's founders broke away and flipped it and made the people the king. And so the word citizen is Greek. It means co-king. So kings have subjects who are subjected to their will. Republics have citizens. And the citizen is a co-king. And where did the founders get this idea?
It's a polarity change. America is an experiment of a polarity change in the flow of power. It's not a top-down rule by gang leader kings. It's bottom-up rule by we, the people. We got the idea from the New England pastors in Connecticut, in New Hampshire, in Massachusetts, in Rhode Island. Where did they get their ideas? From the Bible. What part of the Bible?
That first 400 years out of Egypt before they got a king. So king is the norm. The Pharaoh was one of the most powerful. And around 1400 BC, millions of Israelites come out of Egypt. And for four centuries, no king. And it worked because every citizen was taught the law and personally accountable to God to follow it.
And it worked for four centuries until the priests went woke and stopped teaching that there was sin. And Eli, the high priest, his own sons are sleeping with women in the tent of meeting and another Levite with a silver graven image and another Levite with a concubine.
where the law says the Levites to marry a virgin of his own tribe, and the poor concubines raped to death by a bunch of sodomites, something about that behavior that appears at the last stages of a people who ruin themselves. And it turns into chaos. They all go to Samuel the prophet, and they say, this self-government system is not working anymore. We want to be like the other countries.
We want a king. And Samuel cries, and the Lord tells Samuel, they did not reject you. They rejected me. Now, why is this story important? Kings of Europe look to the Bible for their authority, but they look to the King Saul and on part of the Bible, divine right of kings. I'm the royal gang leader. And the pilgrims and Puritans that founded New England look to the pre-King Saul part of the Bible.
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