This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, June 25th, 2019. I'm Caleb Brown.

When Donald Trump imposes tariffs, he often does so under the guise of national security, with many dubious

claims supporting the restrictions. Cato Simon Lester is co-author of a new paper out today,

challenging the pervasive national security rationale for

restricting trade. One of the key rationales that this president has offered for

specific tariffs, tariffs even on on Canada, our biggest trading partner, has been national security.

What, if you can, drill down just a little bit, what are those rationales and and how have they been used in the past?

Well, what the Trump administration has done is taking this fairly broad statute that was

written in the, during the Cold War that gives the

president the power to restrict imports on the basis of national security and so in

the 1970s for, there were concerns about oil

prices and being dependent on Middle East oil. And so there were some restrictions imposed

in order to protect domestic oil production at that time.

But this remedy, this statute has kind of,

you know, fallen by the wayside hasn't been used much recently,

but President Trump and the Trump administration

have been looking for excuses to raise terrorists and they found a good one here.

They looked at this statute and said this is really broad. We can do a lot with this.

We can restrict imports of a particular product and they started with steel and

aluminum from anywhere even if it's our good friends the Canadians we can say

basically we need to have a domestic steel industry in order to have a functioning economy to be able to provide for our own national security and you know and the statute just gives us a lot of leeway to do so.

So they impose tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from around the world in order to support

...