 What's your sense of the comparative differences between the two major party presidential candidates and their trade policies? To be sure, there are differences. There you go. But they're not that big. You gotta give that in the second paragraph, Peter. Yeah, it's true. Come on, play the formula. I just, I wanted to forefront the to be sure there because to be sure, they're kind of the same. This is the thing, right? Is to be sure they're kind of the same because what happened here was Trump put in place a bunch of very bad tariffs. And then that started a kind of a low-level trade war with China where there were retaliatory tariffs. Trump, of course, promised that his tariffs would be great for Americans and for American workers. And then of course, what happened was because of the retaliation, the tariffs were terrible for American workers. And in fact, there was a bailout of American farmers, I believe, some number of billion dollars that I have it right in front of me, but like because the Trump tariffs were so bad. And so they didn't help anybody. They made tensions worse with China. And then what did Joe Biden do? Joe Biden basically just kept them in place. And his administration has continued to defend those tariffs. It's not just the Center for American Progress. It's Biden's own trade rep, the cabinet official who was in charge of this, Catherine Tai, who as recently as this year, just a couple of months ago, was out there saying that trade, that tariffs are an important defensive tool for, and this is a summary from Bloomberg, for rebalancing unfair commercial relationships, especially with regard to China. So it's not even that they're arguing that they're necessary for national security. It's that the Biden administration is just saying that we are, that the Biden administration should be in charge of manipulating the economy through tariffs. And Trump is saying, well, so should I. He wants to do it like Catherine said, in a more aggressive and dumber and I think more obnoxious and probably more destructive way than Biden is doing it currently, but it is the same basic theory, which is that the president and that the administration should be in charge of the economy in a fundamental way and should be deciding about this stuff. It's also just really ironic. To be sure, the Center for American Progress report has a point about Trump's tariffs, like they're fundamentally correct. They are directionally correct about the problems that they would cause and about the ways that they would effectively serve as a tax hike and a price increase on American consumers. And it is just so ironic that if you look at Trump's, at the big economic messages that Trump and his MAGA World Republican Party associates have been spreading for the last year or two, that basically boils down to two big economic messages that Trump has been promoting. One is the economy under Joe Biden is bad because prices are high. And two is Biden will raise your taxes. And so what is Trump's response to that is a policy that will make prices higher and also effectively raise your taxes. It's just incredibly ironic all around to be sure. Nick, what do you make of the kind of all over the place public opinion on this stuff? Oftentimes individual tariffs, especially against red China are popular. Also increased prices are super not popular nor is inflation. What to make of it? What to do with it as far as you're concerned? One thing that's important to remember is that Trump also put tariffs on the EU as well as Canada and a couple of other countries that we had in Mexico or was trying to do so. Although then he did sign a new deal with Canada and Mexico, but it's not just that. Matt, the most fascinating thing about free trade as a kind of political football and everything like that as far as I'm concerned is that according to Gallup in 2020, 79% of Americans said that they thought free trade was good for America and that's like an all time high. During the heyday right after NAFTA was passed and things like that in the late 90s, early 2000s, it was only about 55%. And as it stands now, Gallup says it's like 61% of Americans are in favor of free trade, which is still much higher than it was 20 years ago. So we're actually weirdly in an era where Americans are on board with the idea that free trade is pretty good. This is another instance where they don't have any way of expressing that politically because you have two parties that are talking about increasing tariffs or commanding, directing the economy in various ways. The one thing that you can say for sure about Donald Trump is that he has turned the Republican Party into a party against free trade. Again, going to Gallup in 2022, only 44% of Republicans said that they thought that free trade was an opportunity to help the American economy by increasing exports. The number of Democrats I believe that was 72%. So you've seen this actual significant change and it's hard for us to kind of grasp or take seriously because for all of our lifetimes put together, added up on top of one another, the Republican Party has always been the party of free trade but it is not the party of free trade anymore. And yet Americans are in favor of free trade but we cannot express that through a vote for either of the major party presidential candidates. And I think one of the things that we need to get back to is really making basic arguments about why free trade is good and why free trade is beneficial. And a lot of stuff, a lot of the things that get tariff slapped on them are things like aluminum and steel. And both Trump and Biden have talked about wanting to bring manufacturing of that back home but there's a fundamental economic mistake there which is that aluminum and steel are inputs in a lot of higher value products that Americans produce here, including things like cars and car parts and other types of kind of materials that get finished here. And the argument against slapping a huge tariffs on steel and aluminum is that a very small percentage of the American workforce is making those things here but so many other industries depend on them. It's like saying we wanna protect a small industry that will jack up the prices on everything else. And I think getting those kinds of basic economic arguments which I think we had one when NAFTA was being passed and when the WTO was being debated and things like that, we've gotta get back to making those arguments because people understand it but our understanding of why free trade is a good thing needs to be constantly refreshed and updated. Catherine, I'm reminded with Nick talking about that of the famous Al Gore Ross Perot debate, right? Yeah, on Larry King. On Larry King Live. Dubuque, hello about that. And that was a moment when like third-way Democrats were leading the charge of neoliberalism and such like back then. If you go and look back at all the state of the union addresses, which I do sometimes, you'll see a discussion by American presidents from both parties constantly about how we needed to complete the Doha round or whatever the Paraguay round of GATT or the precursor to the WTO. It was understood for many decades to be fundamental to American policy, to be the leader of the global tariff reduction regime as part of a way to build up the strength of the sort of free and democratic West. Don't really see that much anymore. Can you talk a little bit about the part of the Scott Linsicome t-shirt that warns about what happens between countries when we are in a tariff raising posture as opposed to a global tariff reduction posture? Yeah, I mean, I think this era that you're describing of the US leading the way in reducing tariffs and just kind of opening up trade whether through kind of multi-party trade agreements or bilaterally, it's true. There used to be just kind of in the laundry list of the state of the union, there used to be always a like, hey, just a reminder that we're still trying to finish the paperwork on whatever trade agreement is pending. That is the reason that people say like libertarians have been in charge for too long. Like that, I think like the most charitable interpretation of that weird sentiment that pops up sometimes when we libertarians are getting squashed between the two sides of the horseshoe is that our argument for the power of trade was ascended for a long time in a kind of moderately bipartisan way. And of course, the Scotland's a comb t-shirt reminds us that tariffs not only impose immense economic costs but also fail to achieve their primary policy aims and foster political dysfunction along the way. I have it in gray. It's a very nice, it looks nice in gray. Is it a gray wash, like a washed gray? No, it's just, it's, you know, it's got a nice, it's more of a saturated gray. I've got it in a see-through black mesh. Oh, God. Please, please erase my memory. So. The v-neck. The political dysfunction part of this is real. Like there is just absolutely this kind of like playground sense of fairness that happens when we stop moving toward openness and toward more trade and we start saying, oh, well, we're gonna impose costs on imports from a particular nation to punish them for being bad or whatever it is. You know, this has a natural result, which is retaliatory political dysfunction. And we're just gonna see a lot more of that. So much of this gets snuck into political discourse under the guise of being good for Americans, but it's not good for Americans broadly. It is occasionally designed, you know, occasionally it will prop up a very narrow group of Americans, a certain subset of workers. That is just true of all of the kind of Trumpian and Biden administration, industrial policy, and national economic policy. But this is also not new. And this is something that I do think we should think about here a little bit, is that this is not a brand new tendency that just popped into politics in 2024. Last week I talked about the old John Carpenter movie They Live, and that movie is about a drifter worker who shows up in Los Angeles because times are tough and he lost his construction job, you know, probably in Denver or something like that. And he's drifted into town and he finds construction work, you know, in a home, in a community with a bunch of other kind of drifter types who are down on their luck. And there's this big kind of, it's not a monologue, but it's a sort of quasi monologue discussion where Rowdy Roddy Piper, who plays the protagonist, the wrestler, right? And another guy sit in front of a palm tree and magic hour in Los Angeles. And they just talk about how the elites in America have screwed the average workers by offshoring work. You know, but they don't quite mention trade policy specifically, but it's very much this idea that they don't care about ordinary American workers. And so they've given the jobs to foreigners and they've preference foreigners and they've allowed foreign goods to come in and take American jobs and it's anti-American and it doesn't help them. But in fact, if this sort of protectionism and industrial policy, this kind of national economic policy doesn't help most Americans. Most Americans are worse off than we have seen that over the last several years where these policies have raised prices and contributed to inflation, which is the thing that people dislike most about the economy currently. That was a clip from the latest Reason Roundtable. If you wanna see more clips, go here. If you want to see the whole episode, go here. Make sure to subscribe at Reason's YouTube channel or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening, watching or both.