WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump halted Canada-U.S. trade talks last week in an angry response to a TV ad run by Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s government featuring Ronald Reagan’s 1987 comments criticizing tariffs. “Ronald Reagan loved tariffs,” Trump said, labelling the ad “fraudulent.”
For insights into Reagan’s trade views and Trump’s response, National Post turned to Doug Irwin, a professor of economics at Dartmouth College and former staffer on Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers. Irwin has written extensively about trade and recently published a New York Times op-ed about Trump’s response to the ad and Reagan’s legacy.
Q: How would you describe Ronald Reagan’s core political principles regarding free trade — what you’ve described as the three Ps?
A: The first P is for Principle. Ronald Reagan was an economics major at Eureka College. He lived through the Great Depression. He was very opposed to tariffs and often mentioned the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930 in his radio addresses and speeches. That was the infamous tariff hike that the U.S. undertook just as the world was sinking into the depression, and Reagan associated it with the depression. So he had this innate sense that tariffs and protectionism were bad for the economy, and he also believed in economic liberty, so freedom of trade was part of that package. That was the core belief.
But as a politician living in the real world, there are a lot of exceptions and compromises one has to make in...
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