Frédéric Bastiat’s arguments against tarrifs are the first arguments with any depth i’ve encountered. In fact most of what he wrote in “The Law” in 1850 is incredibly compelling.
Discussion
It's great. He's the star of the Tuttle Twin's pilot episode.
"Is there any need to prove that this odious perversion
of law is a perpetual source of hatred and discord, that it
even tends to social disorganization? Look at the United
States. There is no country in the world where the law is
kept more within its proper domain—which is, to secure
to everyone his liberty and his property. Therefore, there
is no country in the world where social order appears to
rest upon a more solid basis. Nevertheless, even in the
United States, there are two questions, and only two, that
from the beginning have endangered political order. And
what are these two questions? That of slavery and that of
tariffs; that is, precisely the only two questions in which,
contrary to the general spirit of this republic, law has
taken the character of a plunderer. Slavery is a violation,
sanctioned by law, of the rights of the person. Protection
is a violation perpetrated by the law upon the rights of
property; and certainly it is very remarkable that, in the
midst of so many other debates, this double legal scourge,
the sorrowful inheritance of the Old World, should be the
only one which can, and perhaps will, cause the rupture
of the Union. "