Better late than never, I suppose, so a quick picked-nit with regard to a category error made in an old episode of Planet Money. Right around the 14:30 mark, correspondent Chana Joffe-Walt says, discussing the strategic absence of tariffs on components used in the domestic (U.S.) assembly of high-tech products, that “we’ve decided” to make these components cheap to help domestic high-tech assemblers. The natural implication is that “we” have also decided to make other imports expensive to protect domestic industry from competition.
Well, I certainly didn’t decide either of these, and I’m willing to bet that no one I know did either. I’m going to go out on a limb and hypothesize that, in fact, politicians and/or bureaucrats made these decisions. Public choice theory and methodological individualism and all that.
The happy moral to this story is that there is a happy moral to the Planet Money podcast in question. They end with a nice, clear discussion of why tariffs are widely (and correctly) regarded as bad.