This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, June 11, 2018. I'm Caleb Brown.

Rhetoric over trade became more intense over the weekend as the White House and Canadian

Prime Minister Trudeau appeared to have picked an ugly and pointless fight with American

and Canadian prosperity is bargaining chips.

Cato Institute adjunct scholar Don Boudreau discusses some of the continuing wrongheadedness

over trade.

Over the decades Congress has delegated vast authorities in the realm of trade to the White House

and they never envisioned those authorities being used to restrict trade and yet here we are.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean overall this delegation which began more than 80 years ago has worked reasonably

well.

That's worked very well. It's worked very well. The

U.S. tariff rates have fallen for that and other reasons. But

Trump is a new animal. He is a president who not only said a few nasty things about trade

during the election it's a central part of his of his campaign and I believe he actually believes it.

And to the extent that that is an opinion of his right now, it is fairly deeply held.

I believe so.

You can read the art of the deal and he is very concerned about Japanese people buying the crown jewels of New York real estate.

And he was very concerned, as many Americans were about trade with the Japanese

in the 80s.

Yeah and and and of course those concerns turned out to be completely pointless as

will concerns about America's trade with China today, but people

...