This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, September 25th, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The pandemic wreaked havoc with global supply chains and with a president whose broad view of trade is that it

ought to be restricted it's been harder for many people to get access to basic

goods. Dan Eekinson directs the Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy

Studies at the Cato Institute.

He's written a new essay as part of Cato's Pandemics and Policy Series.

This president's Protectionist Bonifides are well established.

How has his preferred trade policy or his preferred way of engaging with trade. What's it done since this pandemic began?

Well, Caleb, the pandemic has provided, I think, another excuse for protectionists to come up with proposals that would restrict trade.

And in response to the pandemic, the Trump administration and the Biden campaign and as well as congressional leadership on both sides of the aisle

have offered up proposals to repatriate supply chains to restrict government spending to goods and services produced domestically, to impose tariffs

so that to prevent greater reliance on imports, and to subsidize domestic production of

everything from pharmaceutical ingredients to personal protective equipment

to to semiconductors achieving you know greater national self-sufficiency by making international trade and investment

and supply chain collaboration more expensive seems to be the administration's goal or

policymakers goal.

It's not a new goal. I think the excuse for pursuing it.

The pandemic is, you know, like like other hyped up concerns about national

security threats, the pandemic is being used to repackage these these old arguments and I

think you know proponents of of retrenchment see cross-border trade and investment and migration not as liberating or life enhancing or as

wealth creating but really as vectors across which you know a local outbreak became a global pandemic and you know of course international trade and

...