This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, May 4th, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Normally, U.S. trading relationships are neither particularly contentious or newsworthy,

but the manner in which the Trump administration has chosen to pursue better trade deals,

that is hiking tariffs and inviting retaliation, may threaten longstanding relationships

while raising prices for consumers and harming domestic industries in the process.

Scott Linsicum is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute.

We talked about the future of trade this week.

Among the claims that I hear with respect to trade are look I'm all for free trade and then they say

but China doesn't practice free trade.

When the United States, when individuals in the United States go into business in China,

there is inevitably this transfer of intellectual property, of engineering designs, of some perhaps trade secrets

that end up in Chinese hands and then there suddenly you know once the

deal is done they've got all this information they turn it into products and

they send it back to the United States and we're left holding the bag.

And that seems like an argument that has a fair bit of currency in the United States.

Yeah, and I think that there's a, like a lot of Trump policies, or Trump administration

policies, there's a nugget of truth there.

You know, I think there's little doubt that especially in the past that there, you know, there were problems with the Chinese intellectual property regime, particularly with respect to what we call technology transfer.

You know, the idea that, look, if you want to invest in China, you have to hand over your trade

secrets to your JV partner, that kind of thing. You have to have a JV partner, that kind of thing.

And you have to have a JV partner.

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