This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Saturday, July 20th,

20th, 2024.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Protectionism is on the march,

and a frequent justification for protectionism is national security.

That justification leaves many people unable to respond credibly to a threat that is often

itself a secret. But it's worth asking as Cato's Colin Grabo does, why is it that free trade,

the strengthening of trading ties and economic robustness? Why is that rarely, if ever justified on national security grounds?

He argues there are good reasons to believe that the freedom to trade has a role to play in enhancing national security.

This is an area where expertise in trade might run out, right? We're talking about national security and there may be and it's hard to say with a lot of

certainty here there may at times be perfectly good reasons to engage in some sort of protectionism on the basis of national security.

Most of these appear to be significantly overblown or attempts to attach national security rationales to protectionism that

certain politicians want to do anyway, but I can't dismiss out of hand those concerns.

No, no, and we shouldn't dismiss those concerns.

I think there are perfectly valid reasons to try to maintain certain industries for the interest of national security.

And even free marketers agree with this.

We have a history of agreeing with this.

The likes of Milton Friedman, Adam Smith, have recognized the need to preserve certain economic activities that may not be perfectly

efficient but are nevertheless necessary in the interest of national defense.

For example, you don't want to be reliant on your enemies for the production of ammunition, for example, things like this.

So there are good reasons to have these concerns, but like you said, we need to also make sure that these are not abused

because when we create a national security exception then suddenly things

...