This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, August 21st, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Donald Trump's trade policy appears to be one of us versus them, zero-sum thinking.

According to Trump, he'd hire smart businessman to in his

words watch-over trade deals and his rhetoric is peppered with how US businesses

are getting quote killed on trade. Dan Eichenson, director of trade policy studies at the Cato

Institute, offers his thoughts. Donald Trump is somebody who has, you know, frankly has engaged

in a lot of trade, has put had more at stake

than most other presidential candidates save probably Carly Fiorena and so he

certainly would be well positioned to understand some aspects of trade.

There are rules that he might like to change, but he, again, like so many other standard issue politicians, seems to view trade as a zero-sum game,

I win and you must then necessarily lose.

That's right.

Now there's not much difference between Trump's positions and those positions of other candidates when it comes to trade there's always

a lot of demagoguery it's just that Trump is a little more brusque he's rude and he's crude

but he does have experience engaging in commerce and at a personal level you

do want to win in a transaction and you do want to get the best price, the best terms, but if a transaction happens,

then both sides are winners.

Both sides are made better off by that, so he's never really won a transaction. He's gotten the terms that he wanted and the other side of the deal got the terms that they

wanted.

When you talk about trade at a national level, it's not us versus them at all. We're talking about millions, hundreds

of millions, billions of transactions. And on both sides of those transactions are winners.

...