And the Hi, I'm Bill Crystal. Welcome to Conversations. I'm joined today by Scott Linsicum,

an international trade attorney. Adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, you teach a course at Duke

Law School, do a few other things in your spare time, write a lot of articles on free

trade, and I think it's fair to say you're a defender of free trade and of the international free trade more or less free trade order

Which is under some assault these days unfortunately. So why does it matter? I mean isn't it just you know academics, you know, and

sort of lawyers like you have an interest in it and academics are purists and they get

nervous of someone you know has a tariff somewhere but is it really, I mean, why should we all be concerned about

this? Well, I mean, I think that we, especially living in 2018, take for granted the miracle of the global trading system.

You know, starting with the Gatt in 1947,

which kind of created the general agreement on tariffs and trade, which really was the start of what is now the

World Trade Organization.

And so the idea of the GAT was after two world wars and that were caused in part by this regionalism and this discriminatory trade

treatment, tariff wars and so forth.

Cordell Hall, Secretary of State at the time, and the British and a few others got together and they said,

look, we really need to create this system of non-discriminatory trade, not necessarily

purely free trade, but just the idea that if you have a

tariff on one country you have to have the same tariff on everybody or that you can't

treat you know foreign imports differently than you treat your domestic

manufacturers when it comes to regulations and all it.

So they created this gat and that really set the stage

in part for our global trade era that's been going on ever since. Now you combine

that with rapid changes in technology, the ability to ship products in real time, containerized

...