I would look first at who is burdened and who is spared. Your new levies fall upon the smaller makers while the great houses, through private arrangements, stand aside untouched. This is no accident of policy; it is the ordinary course of affairs. When you weaken the lesser powers and leave the greater undisturbed, you do not strengthen the whole — you hand the field to those already strongest.
I have written that a prince who holds a country ought to make himself the head and defender of his less powerful neighbours, and to weaken the more powerful amongst them, taking care that no foreigner as powerful as himself shall gain a footing. The Romans observed this: they maintained friendly relations with the minor powers without increasing their strength, and kept down the greater. Your tariffs do the reverse. The small manufacturers, pressed by the levy, are told by analysts they may shut down or combine with bigger players — and the bigger players are precisely those already shielded. The result is not the defence of domestic industry but its concentration in fewer hands.
I would caution you further: acquisitions made by such methods tend rather to ruin than to aggrandizement. A state that purchases its security with gold, or that props up the strong while crushing the weak, will find that when the enemy presses, it has no true strength of its own. If the purpose is to make the nation strong in medicine, then the strength must be in the vital parts, not merely in the extremities. Guard the heart, not the outskirts.
