This is the reason interview with Nikoleseby. Thanks for watching or listening.

Tariff is the most beautiful word in the dictionary, says Donald Trump, who made many promises

throughout the 2024 presidential race to raise the cost of imports from China, Mexico, and Canada,

America's three biggest trading partners. But are Trump's tariffs a good idea or a

terrible one? And is the era of free trade coming to a close? That's the topic of today's

reason interview. And my guest is Dartmouth economist Douglas Irwin, author of trade policy

disaster, the definitive treatment of the Smoot-Hawley

tariffs, which has just been reissued, and Free Trade Under Fire, now in its fifth edition.

We talk about the negative impacts of the tariffs that Trump levied in his first term, why

President Bush, Obama and Biden also trafficked in protectionism, and why free trade is

always under attack despite its overall benefits.

Here is the Reason interview with Douglas Irwin.

Douglas Irwin, thanks for talking a reason.

Great pleasure to be here.

So you have a reissue of a book that you originally wrote in 2011 called Trade Policy Disaster Lessons from the 1930s about the Smoot-Hawley Tariffs and Related Legislation.

And not too long ago, about four years ago, you published the fifth edition of your book, Free Trade Under Fire. Why does, let's just start with that, why does free trade under fire published in the early 2000s when this argument had been won. Why does it keep

needing new additions? Well, because it's always under fire, regardless of the time and

circumstance. So it seems, but the arguments keep changing. So I originally wrote that, or the

impetus was the battle in Seattle, the protests against the WTO summit in Seattle in 1999. And there were just so many

anti-globalization, anti-free trade protesters and arguments that were being made that I didn't think

were, you know, meritorious that I thought, I got to, there's no book out there that sort of

puts this together and makes the case for free trade and sort of combat some of the arguments against

...