Clashing over Commerce: A History of US Trade Policy

"Doug Irwin is considered, among experts, pretty much the top trade historian living. He’s a tremendous authority on this. I included his book, even though it’s quite dense. This is not an airport page-turner. It’s a very serious work of economic history. I think if you try to disentangle the Trump pitch, a lot of it is premised on the idea that he’s the first one to ever try this. He has this idea that the one time the US had tariffs, it was a glorious golden age and made everybody rich. Doug’s work certainly picks that apart, as well as this idea that all of the decisions made over the last 75-odd years in US trade policy involved the US being taken advantage of, that US leaders were suckers who got bamboozled by foreigners who took advantage of them. Without getting into the politics of it, it can be really valuable to go back through that history, step by step, as Doug does, to look at the debates in their historical context. To look at why some of these decisions were made; to look at what the policymakers were hoping to achieve; and to look at what kind of pressures they were under, and appreciate that this stuff is hard. It has always been hard, but US policy looks the way it looks, not because no one has ever thought of protectionism before. Protectionism wasn’t invented in 2016 or 2024. It’s been with us for a while, and Doug does a fantastic job of contextualizing that. Absolutely. The pre-colonies initially funded themselves with tariffs on luxury goods because they lacked the state capacity to collect more complex forms of taxes. If you think about it, a sort of sales tax or an income tax requires a lot of information and manpower and administration to know what everybody in the country is earning so you can tax it, whereas setting up a customs bureau at six or seven ports on the coast is a significantly more achievable bureaucratic task for a newly independent set of colonies. But even that was hugely contentious at the time, and almost led to a rift, which is the sort of thing that Doug talks about."