This is the Cato Daily podcast for Wednesday, April 9th, 2025. I'm Caleb Brown. The United States should be setting an example for the world with its policies. And yet, as Cato's Ian Vasquez explains, the U.S. has allowed massive tariffs to go into effect. He says it all looks an awful lot like the kind of

rhetoric and behavior we've seen out of failed third world dictatorial government. We spoke today.

The example that is stuck in my head when thinking about tariffs is bananas. It seems like a

pretty clean example. The U.S. doesn't really grow bananas. The U.S.

loves bananas. We buy them from countries that are better suited to grow them. That creates a trade

deficit. But we sort of are having a friend, right? A friend in a foreign country who's producing this thing that we love,

and we buy it from them. And it's really hard to see the problem with that sort of straightforward

analysis. It's called comparative advantage. And it's one of the most basic principles of trade that when some country is better comparatively at producing something, you're better off trading with them, what you're comparatively better off producing, and both sides will become way better off than if, say, the United

States tried to grow bananas in Minnesota.

It would be a very expensive proposition.

And so I think that one of the biggest problems with what President Trump is doing with these

reciprocal tariffs, which have nothing to do with reciprocity, is that it is behaving like failed third world governments used to behave some 30 years ago before they realized that they could

increase their wealth and catch up with the rich world by opening up their economies and

leaving statism behind. And instead, the kind of rhetoric that Trump is using is precisely

the kind of rhetoric that we used to hear from

status, third world dictatorships and other failed government leaders, that we have to be

afraid of the outside world, that the failures in our own country are not due to, are due to

others taking advantage of us, and that we have been victims

of outsiders, when, of course, that was not true of third world countries 30 years ago. It's

not true of the United States. And at the same time, he's throwing out the window window very well-known principles of economic freedom

and replacing them with sheer nonsense.

And the other countries involved, there are so many that the United States, or rather this

...