Here is Buchanan at his clearest on “How Capital Crushed Labor” in America

“...Does the cost of production here in America alone explain the decline in manufacturing and stagnation of workers’ wages?...

...since the Revolution, America has had a standard of living that has been the envy of the world. From the Civil War through the 1920s, as we became the greatest manufacturing power the world had ever seen, our workers enjoyed pay and benefits that were unmatched anywhere.

Yet our exports in those decades were double our imports, and our trade surpluses annually added 4 percent to the gross national product. How did we do it?...


...We taxed the products of foreign factories and workers and used the revenue to finance the government. We imposed tariffs of up to 40 percent on foreign goods entering our market and used the tariff money to keep taxes low in the United States...


..A new class came to power that looked on tariffs as xenophobic, on economic patriotism as atavistic and on national sovereignty as an antique idea in the new world order it envisioned.

By 1976, editorial writers were talking about a new declaration of interdependence to replace Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, which was now outdated...

...But why did corporate America, with its privileged access to the greatest market on earth, go along with sharing that market with its manufacturing rivals from all over the world?
The answer lies in the trade-off corporate America got.

Already established in the U.S. market, corporate America could risk sharing that market if, in return, it could shift its own production out of the United States to countries where the wages were low and regulations were light.

Corporate America could there produce for a fraction of what it cost to produce here. Then these same corporations could ship their foreign-made products back to the USA and pocket the difference in the cost of production. Corporate stock prices would soar, as would corporate salaries — and dividends, to make shareholders happy and supportive of a corporate policy of moving out of the USA.

Under globalization, America’s investor class could and did get rich by the abandonment of America’s working class.

America is in a terminal industrial decline because the interests of corporate America now clash directly with the interests of working America — and, indeed, with the national interest of the United States...”

(Full Essay Here)