Cato Event Podcast

Trade, tariffs, and America’s role in the global economy have taken center stage in the public policy debate during the first year of Donald Trump’s tumultuous presidency. That’s not surprising to economic historian and Dartmouth economics professor Douglas A. Irwin, whose latest treatise on the subject documents in exquisite detail how “the Tariff” has sparked passionate political, economic, and constitutional debate and has been a source of bitter political conflict from the Founding of the Republic to the present. Between 1787 and the Civil War, the main purpose of the tariff was to raise revenues for the operations of a modest federal government, which had few other sources of revenue. Although arguments for using the tariff to protect domestic industry prevailed on occasion during this era, it wasn’t until after the Civil War that bald protectionism became the tariff’s primary motive. In the early 1930s, as the disastrous effects of the Tariff Act of 1930 (i.e., “Smoot-Hawley” or “the Hawley-Smoot T