This is longtime Cato Daily podcast host, Caleb Brown.

I've moved on to head the Kentucky's Bluegrass Institute,

but I wanted to leave listeners with some favorite episodes over the last nearly 18 years of my hosting tenure.

I tried to pick episodes that are relevant to our current moment.

Thank you for listening.

This is the Cato Daily podcast for Friday, June 17, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Smoot-Hawley-Therif Act was an error of gigantic proportions as the U.S. slid into its

greatest ever economic collapse.

Protectionism was precisely the wrong prescription.

So argues Douglas Irwin in his new book,

Peddling Protectionism. We spoke following a forum for his book held last month.

Help us understand the environment that led up to the passage of the Smoot-Hawley-Therifact.

Well, you might recall the 1920s was called the roaring 20s,

because it was actually a boom period for the United States economy. Industry is growing very well,

unemployment remained low, but the farm sector was very weak. And so the Smoot-Hawley tariff

actually has its origins, not so much in industries pushing the government for higher tariffs

to block imports,

because industry is doing very well during this period.

It had to do with agrarian discontent.

And the Republican leadership decided, well, we're going to throw a bone to the farmers, so to speak, help them out by imposing a tariff on imports.

That sort of got started.

...