Protection For The Steel Industry Is As Old As America

TUESDAY, APRIL 24, 2018, NPR Morning Edition Correspondent John Ydstie speaks with Dartmouth Professor Douglas Irwin about tariffs on imported steel. 

“President Trump's tariffs on imported steel aren't the first time the industry has gotten protection from the U.S. government. Not by a long shot. In fact, tariff protection for the industry — which politicians often say is a vital national interest — goes back to the very beginning of the republic.”  Click here to listen the full show on NPR.

Douglas Irwin is the John French Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College.  He is author of Clashing over Commerce: A History of U.S. Trade Policy (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Free Trade Under Fire (Princeton University Press, fourth edition 2015), Trade Policy Disaster: Lessons from the 1930s (MIT Press, 2012), Peddling Protectionism: Smoot-Hawley and the Great Depression (Princeton University Press, 2011), The Genesis of the GATT (Cambridge University Press, 2008, co-authored with Petros Mavroidis and Alan Sykes), Against the Tide:  An Intellectual History of Free Trade (Princeton University Press, 1996), and many articles on trade policy in books and professional journals.  He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and has also served on the staff of the President's Council of Economic Advisers and the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.   

You can listen Prof. Irwin’s other public talk on NPR Planet Money Podcast Worst. Tariffs. Ever.