Bonus Quotation of the Day…

by Don Boudreaux on June 3, 2018

in Trade

is from Tunku Varadarajan’s June 2nd Wall Street Journal interview with the great trade economist Doug Irwin:

Mr. Trump may be the first openly protectionist president since Hoover, but what Mr. Irwin finds most frustrating about him is that “he never really defines what a ‘better’ trade deal is. His judgment of trade comes down to the trade balance, which he uses as a sort of ledger, as a businessman would, rather than think more broadly about the national economic impact of trade.” It is impossible for every country to run a trade surplus, but “Trump thinks about trade in these zero-sum terms, about whether there’s profits or losses, and he views exports as good and imports as bad.”

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