This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, April 14th, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Most of the current crop of presidential candidates have tried to talk about trade in terms of us versus them

and winning versus losing.

In the case of air conditioner maker carrier, the rhetoric surrounding their shift of some manufacturing New Mexico has earned a special rebuke.

Dan Pearson, a senior fellow in trade policy studies at the Cato Institute explains why much

of that heated rhetoric is at best mistaken.

Carrier has taken some grief in the presidential campaign because it's made a business decision

to move production of air conditioners from two factories in Indiana to Mexico. And that will mean the loss of about 2,100 jobs in Indiana.

There are lots of reasons that they might want to move to Mexico.

The ones that concern me the most are ones that the United States actually could

control and fix because it's partly in response to U.S. policy.

The United States has anti-dumping and countervailing duty rules that make important

inputs to the manufacturer of air conditioners far more expensive than they should be.

The United States has anti-dumping duty orders on many types of

steel, not all of which are used in air conditioners. It has anti-dumping duty orders on

copper tubing, which is a really important component of air conditioning for the heat exchanging,

and also on aluminum extrusions.

And so all of these costs carrier can escape by moving to Mexico.

So first of all, anti-dumping duties are essentially a tax placed on cheap goods that come into the United States?

That's right, they are an import duty, if you will, a tax on imports that have been put in place

because the domestic producers of those products have been

...