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This was possible because the same can-do cultural values that inspired the American founding were accurately reflected in its new government. The U.S. Constitution created what was then the world’s largest free trade area, and it did so on purpose.** The combination of the American self-improvement ethos and the large, free internal market guaranteed by the Constitution yielded intensive growth on a scale never before seen.

Many displaced farm laborers got jobs making the very farm equipment that made intensive agricultural growth possible, from railroad networks to cotton gins. Each fed the other. Agriculture and industry are not separate; they are as interconnected as everything else in the economy. None of this could have happened had the government enacted policies to preserve full agricultural employment.

Understanding Value. Just as communication is impossible without agreedupon definitions of words, coherent policymaking is impossible without coherent categories. Policies are not likely to succeed when they try to separate an interconnected economy into arbitrary categories. The factory worker who builds a tractor does as much to boost farm production as the farmers themselves, yet economic planners put them in different categories. This problem is baked into industrial policy, as progressive planners have learned again and again.

Aconservative approach to economic policy should treat value as value, whether it is created on a farm, in a factory, or in an office. A dollar of value created in manufacturing is neither more nor less valuable than a dollar of value created in agriculture or services.

Pursuing Access to Growing Markets. American history holds lessons for today’s conservative trade policy. Some modern analysts see a correlation between high tariffs and high growth and confuse it for causation,“ but 19th century America teaches a different lesson.

While the Constitution banned internal tariffs in the US., international tariffs reached their highest levels in U.S. history during the 19th century, beginning with the 1828 Tariff of Abominations.* At their peak in 1830, the average tariff on dutiable goods was 62 percent.** Fortunately, however, the tariffs’ distorting effects were outweighed by market growth elsewhere. The 19th century saw Western expansion and a growing population (including millions of immigrants) working for the American dream. America’s growing internal free trade zone allowed for still more specialization and more trade across state borders.

America’s geographic expansion ended long ago, but population growth, the U.S.-led rules-based international trading system, and the steady 75-year decline in tariffs after World War II have made possible decades of continued prosperity. Intensive growth requires specialization, and the larger the market, the more specialization is possible.

Fighting Pessimistic Bias. Farmers’ share of the population continued to decline through this entire period, yet employment remained high, and the