Author: Henry Charles Carey

Letters on International Copyright argues against it. Henry Charles Carey held that ideas belong to the society that produced them, that an author's claim is weaker than it looks, and that an international copyright treaty would mainly raise the price of British books for American readers, and he pressed the case in open letters through the 1850s. He was the leading American economist of his day and the leading protectionist: The Harmony of Interests and Principles of Social Science set out a national economy of tariffs, internal improvement and manufacturing close to the farm, against the free-trade doctrine coming out of Britain. Abraham Lincoln's circle read him and the Republican tariff owed him a good deal. Carey lived from 1793 to 1879, took over his father Mathew Carey's Philadelphia publishing house before economics took him over, and the letters to the President and to newspaper editors collected under his name come from that campaigning habit.