This is CBSI on the world. I'm John Batchel with my colleague, Richard Epstein.

Professor Richard Epstein teaches law at NYU in the University of Chicago,

and the tariff story continues all around us.

As I understand it, Richard, according to the Wall Street Journal editorial page,

the tariffs now in place after Mr. Trump's announcement on Liberation Day are higher than they were doing Smoot-Hawley.

Smoot-Hawley is a way, it's sort of like invoking evil spirits.

You mention Smoot-Hawley and you figure something bad is going to happen.

What was Smoot-Hawley? What happened then?

Well, it was 1930. That's about six months after the Depression.

The stock market actually recovered itself by a fair degree.

And these two guys, one in the Senate, one in the House, listened to a bunch of businessmen

who told them, we really fear the competition from ex-foreign firm.

And Herbert Hoover, who himself was a classical liberal and principle,

what he did is he let his judgment be sway by individual pleas of hardship by firms

that had in fact lost out to foreign competitors.

Now, the irony of all of this is if an American firm had lost

out to another American firm, we would have said it's just business. But now, in effect,

since it's a foreign country, what happens is it's sending wealth overseas in some way.

And so we signed the tariff bills to protect these people. But it turns out tariffs never work in the way in which they're intended to do.

First of all, what they do is they create a tax.

And taxes are not necessarily bad, but generally speaking, if you want to impose a tax,

and it's simply for revenue purpose, you wanted to basically take two firms and tax them roughly equal, regardless of where they

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