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, October 18, 2024, and Caleb Brown.

On the matter of trade policy, Congress has, for many decades, delegated large swaths of power of trade negotiation and notably trade restrictions to the White House. That worries Rand

Paul, Republican U.S. Senator from Kentucky. He says the case for free trade is overwhelming,

and Congress should do its job in that area. And he'd like to claw back some authority over

trade from future presidents. One of the areas where I think in some ways foolishly, Congress has

delegated away its own authority has been trade. Prior to the presidency of Donald Trump,

what were the consequences of that? You know, a couple things. I think for the most part, over a several

decade period, Congress gave a lot of the power to the executive branch, but with the intention

that trade deals wouldn't get hung up in the legislative branch, that actually trade deals

would move forward. And I would say the history from World War II on is mostly of enhanced international

trade. I would say that's the general trend. And the general trend was the legislature to give

more and more of this to the executives, but the executives tended to be in favor of international

trade. It also came with some potential bureaucratic problems in the sense that since Congress wasn't

fine-tuning these trade deals and the executive branch was writing them, large bureaucracies

were developing, large international bureaucracies.

And so sometimes the trade deals became a trade-off in the sense that there were lowered tariffs, which was good for international trade, good for the U.S., but there was an enhanced bureaucracy which sometimes had additional labor rules, additional EPA rules, additional other things that were bureaucratic that sometimes made it more managed trade than free trade. But by

and large, the trend over the last several decades has been towards more trade, and that's been

...