I'm John Batchel with my colleague Professor Richard Epstein, teaches law at NYU in the University

of Chicago. He's a member of the SITAS Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, writing

most recently for the Civitas Outlook Institute on tariffs, Liberation Day, and here we are, Liberation

Day plus nine.

And the tumult is obvious around the world.

You've written the first and foremost thing, what's wrong with tariffs?

The first thing is, I believe it's a tax, Richard.

Is that too exaggerated a remark?

No, it's even worse than that. It's a highly discriminatory tax. Classical liberals who are very much in shortage today on both the left

and the right have always followed the general proposition of Adam Smith. It is what you want

to do is have broad taxes at low rates.

You want them to be broad so that there's no institution gets a tax advantage by being out

from underneath it.

And you want the rates to be low and to be flat so as to essentially minimize the total

level of interference with the taxes.

And if you play this game right and you reduce the taxes, keep them flat,

and the general growth in the economy will allow you to do the unthinkable, namely the role of the taxes even more,

because the ratio of private to public activities will move in favor of private activities, which means that the central government has fewer things to do as a total

percentage of the economy.

That's the position that you want to take.

And what tariffs do is they basically are taxes, but they're discriminatory taxes, high on

some people, very low on other people.

...