This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, January 26, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Biden administration is failing and enabling a free and open trading system,

largely by leaving in place so many of the trade

restrictions left behind by Donald Trump. Cato's Inoumanic and Gabriella Beaumont

Smith discuss their free trade wish list. There are a lot of people who have been taking pictures of empty shelves in grocery stores and saying,

Empty shelves, Biden.

Now a whole lot of these products are domestically produced.

Some of them might have foreign inputs.

But before we get to the wish list,

how fair is it to attribute many of the problems that we're seeing for final

consumer goods at the feet of the president of the United States?

Well, I don't think you can entirely blame one person.

Obviously, there has been a lot of difficulties recently with trade in goods as a result of increased demand.

We've been seeing massive port bottlenecks and those are mainly a result of domestic, long standing domestic policies.

So I don't think you can entirely blame the president for those. Those are efficiency problems that maybe this

president should take a look at and encourage some improvements there.

Obviously, labor unions at the ports have been problematic.

They don't work as many hours, which also in response the government agencies then don't work the enough hours to be able to

process the increased demand at these ports. So I don't think you can blame President

Biden for empty shelves because of inefficiency

supports but maybe President Biden should take it upon himself to enact some policies to make

...