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Dan Ikenson joins us to explain how trade between countries increases wealth all around—and why restricting that trade is harmful to economic growth.
Daniel J. Ikenson explains the idea of free trade between nations on this week’s show. We discuss how Enlightenment-era economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo saw trade as a non zero-sum game and what their theories mean for continued economic growth today. We discuss in detail the idea of comparative advantage, and talk about the effects of regulation on trade.
What is a trade surplus? What’s a trade deficit? Is one good and the other bad?
Should we be worried about the loss of manufacturing jobs in America? What about job losses from trade? Will “Buy American” laws fix this?
What are “anti-dumping” laws and how do they work? What’s the distinction between free trade and managed trade? Should advocates of free trade support free trade agreements?
Show Notes and Further Reading
Daniel J. Ikenson, “Did the Profit Motive Spark the Recent Asian Factory Fires?” (Cato @ Liberty blog post)
Jason Dedrick, Kenneth L. Kraemer, Greg Linden, “Who Profits from Innovation in Global Value Chains? A Study of the iPod and notebook PCs” (academic paper)
Daniel J. Ikenson is director of the Cato Institute’s Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies, where he coordinates and conducts research on all manners of international trade and investment policy.
Aaron Powell founded Libertarianism.org. He is now the host of (Re)Imagining Liberty, a podcast about the case for radical freedom.
Trevor Burrus was a research fellow in the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies and editor-in-chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review. His research interests include constitutional law, civil and criminal law, legal and political philosophy, legal history, and the interface between science and public policy.
He is the editor of A Conspiracy against Obamacare (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and Deep Commitments: The Past, Present, and Future of Religious Liberty (Cato, 2017). Burrus holds a BA in philosophy from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a JD from the University of Denver Sturm College of Law. He also contributed a chapter to Libertarianism.org’s Visions of Liberty.