This is the Kato Daily Podcast for Friday, February 23rd, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Antagantism toward free trade is part of what propelled Donald Trump to the White

House, but the costs of sacrificing trading relationships

for some particular political goal can be massive.

Douglas Irwin has studied the long history of trade policy and its sometimes uncomfortable associations with politics.

His new book is clashing over commerce, a history of U.S. trade policy.

We spoke last month.

In the founding era, what did politicians think about trade and tariffs?

I'm thinking about the original budgets of the United States of America and terrorists played an incredibly

a huge role in funding the government.

Absolutely. So we right from the very beginning, we were a trading country.

We were really dependent on importing a lot of manufactured goods from Britain.

And most of the founding fathers wanted to encourage trade.

They realized that it helped the prosperity

build the prosperity of the United States but the problem on the

articles of Confederation was this national government had no means of raising

revenue so one of the arguments for the Constitution was to

empower the new National Congress to have the power to tax and everyone at the time

recognized it would involve taxing imports. That was simply the most efficient way of raising revenue for the federal government.

So most, I'd say there's a broad consensus that those tariffs should be moderate.

You didn't want to discourage imports too much, but obviously you need to raise enough revenue to fund the debt

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