This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, March 21st, 2014.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Instead of offering up sanctions to countries that do things we in the U.S. don't like,

why not offer anti-sanctions for countries that are

troubled? Drop the trade restrictions and other impediments to trade for countries

that are in the most need. Bill Watson is a trade policy analyst at the Cato Institute.

He comments.

When I spoke with Andre Larianoff about matters in Ukraine, this was before the invasion, the securing of Crimea on behalf of Vladimir Putin,

I asked him, well, how do we just, is it possible to just give Ukraine the benefits of free trade

because trade restrictions were part of the issues over Russia's dealings with them, and you have a similar idea now that these events have occurred.

Yeah, unfortunately, the knee-jerk reaction is always to do something negative, to impose some kind of

sanction and to reduce the liberty of the American people to do business with Russians or the Russian people to do business with the United States.

Thankfully, the Obama administration appears to be looking toward something a little bit more targeted

targeted sanctions on particular individuals, travel bans, and asset freezes for any money that they have in U.S. banks.

Unfortunately, every proposal for a sanction, one of its best arguments is that it's not as bad as something else, right,

where sanctions are not as bad as going to war, targeted sanctions are not as bad as general sanctions,

and there's not enough discussion of what good things we could do as a response to this crisis in a way that increases liberty in the U.S. and abroad.

Thankfully, there are a few proposals being floated around this time that really deserves

some attention.

There are some members of Congress that have proposed expanding oil and gas exports, not just to Ukraine, but also to Europe in general.

Certainly opening up U.S. production to global markets is a good thing for the United States.

And it has the potential to stabilize markets to provide alternative sources of energy and to help

...