Business: How to Lose Friends

To supply U.S. housewives on washday, six U.S. companies and nine competing foreign nations manufacture spring-operated clothespins at the rate of 791 million a year. Last week, to please the six U.S. companies—and protect a market worth less than $4,000,000—at the risk of offending Sweden, Denmark, West Germany, Yugoslavia and five others, President Eisenhower doubled the tariff on imports of spring clothespins to the U.S. Concurring in a Tariff Commission finding that domestic industry was "injured" by rising imports, he raised the tariff from 10¢ per gross to 20¢ per gross, to give "appropriate relief," but rejected a recommendation for cutting...

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