We just published the English edition of a forgotten Hungarian free-market classic on tariffs and protectionism

Protectionist ideas are becoming popular again in many right-wing circles. Like price controls, it’s an ancient fallacy—debunked in theory, failed in practice a thousand times, yet somehow always coming back like nothing ever happened.

So I just published the English edition of a book titled “The Tariff Superstition”, written in 1924 by Hungarian lawyer and columnist Marcel Kadosa. It’s a concise takedown of every single protectionist argument, written nearly 100 years ago, yet still unfortunately relevant today.

Kadosa was part of a small but passionate group of Hungarian classical liberals in the early 20th century who fought interventionism, only to be swept away by fascism and communism. His book dismantles the economic fallacies of tariffs in a way that’s both rigorous and highly readable.

For the next 4 days, the book is free on Kindle, so if you want a forgotten classic of free market economics, grab it while you can:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DZKDSWBF

Here’s the publisher’s note from the English edition which explains why we felt this book needed to be resurrected:

This little gem of a book lay forgotten for countless decades until we managed to secure a 99-year-old copy and republish it. The author, Marcel Kadosa (1874–1944) — pronounced Kadosha — belongs to a forgotten intellectual tradition of Hungary: a network of authors, statesmen, and industrialists who fought bitterly against the overwhelming tide of statism in the interwar period of the 20th century.

The names of these people are forgotten even in Hungary — only recently have we begun to rediscover and resurrect their works. They wrote passionately against interventionism; they resisted the rising totalitarianism; they organized the Cobden Association in an attempt to spread the true ideals of liberty and property, holding conferences and publishing books to popularize the arguments in favor of a free market economy.

This book was one of the works published by the Cobden Association as a small, gray, unassuming pocketbook. Yet behind the cover of this inexpensive copy lay a true treasure trove of insights. While these ideas are not new or original, their concise and striking presentation ranks this book among the great works of free market economics — one we can confidently recommend to anyone curious about these ideas.

The story of these forgotten Hungarian classical liberals around the Cobden Association ends in bitter loss and tragedy. Most of them were Jewish and — like the author of this volume — were murdered in the Holocaust. Those who survived lived long enough to watch the Nazi regime in Hungary collapse, only to be replaced by Soviet Communism.

But we believe they did not fight in vain. Their words live on, and they may yet reach a new generation of thinkers who will carry the flame of freedom they so desperately tried to protect during the darkest times of our modern civilization. And as protectionist ideas rise again around the world, their warnings are as urgent as ever.