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Welcome back to Radio Rothbard.
I'm Ryan McMakin, executive editor at the Mises Institute.
And joining me today is Tom DiLorenzo,
our president here at the Mises Institute.
And if you don't already know, of course,
Tom's been before he was president of Senior Fellow
for decades and has been in many ways
our go-to guy on tariffs.
And so we're gonna talk a little bit about tariffs today
because in spite of, I don't know, the hundreds,
maybe thousands of articles
we have published on Mises.org over the last nearly 30 years,
we apparently still have a long way to go
when it comes to people understanding tariffs
and how they work and their nature as taxes,
their coercive nature, all of that stuff.
Because I think the rise of Trump has contributed a bit
to a lot of confusion over it and a lot of people
because of political allegiances
have decided that tariffs aren't that bad.
So we'll just talk about some of the fundamentals
involved there.
Now, before we get to that,
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Now, Tom, I just continue to see,
and I'll basically just ask you questions
along these lines, continue to see
just ongoing confusion about tariffs.
And I can tell you that when I am out
in among a broader audience,
say at when the Mises Institute might be present
at other events that aren't strictly Mises events,
that people will come by our table or booth
and strike up a debate with me about tariffs.
And it's amazing the theories people have about tariffs
and about how they're really not a tax,
they're really not a problem economically.
It's pretty common, I would say, for this to happen,
at least in recent years.
It didn't come up nearly as much prior to Trump.
But one thing, and so I've just got a series of questions
here for you to help us clarify these issues.
And one thing that I noticed that comes up historically
and is relevant to your most recent article for us,
which came out on the 26th,
and this was an article called
Our History of Protectionist Tariff Train Racks.
And I think this is a good starting point.
It offers some historical analysis,
but the key adjective I think in the title there
is protectionist tariff train racks.
And these are two different things
you could be discussing, right?
We could be talking about revenue tariffs
or we could be talking about protectionist tariffs.
In policy, those things,
they have different motivations and different outcomes
and manifest themselves differently.
But I think if we're just gonna continue along those lines,
maybe a good place to start is just to have you clarify
the difference between a protectionist tariff
and a revenue tariff.
Maybe in terms of economic analysis,
there's not a difference, but in application,
there's a real difference, right?
Yeah, right.
Well, at the beginning of the American Republic,
tariffs were constitutional
and we didn't get an income tax until 1913.
And so at the beginning of the Republic,
a revenue tariff was just a low tariff for maybe 10%.
And it wasn't enough to really significantly deter
competition from abroad.
Its purpose was to raise enough funds
to finance the constitutional functions of government.
And then of course, once that was available,
beginning in the 1820s, if not sooner,
protectionists who wanted protection from competition
started pushing for protectionist tariffs,
40, 50, 60% on average.
And one of the first big victories was in 1824
and they pushed the average tariff
rate up to around 45%.
And then that means that some things
had like woolen blankets would have had like 100% tariff.
And so if somebody from England
is shipping woolen blankets to America
and they have to pay 100% tariff,
the American manufacturer of woolen blankets
can raise its price by say 80 or 90%
and still out compete the guy from England.
And so everybody's prices go up.
And there's an old saying that what protectionist tariffs
protect us from is lower prices.
And that's when this all started.
And so that all throughout the 19th century,
that was one of the big economic debates.
And unfortunately, Donald Trump is on the wrong side of it
when he was president the first time
his first economic speech, he went to Lexington, Kentucky
because that's where Henry Clay was from.
And Henry Clay was a big 19th century proponent
of protectionist tariffs.
And he called his program the American system.
And so Trump apparently thought, well,
he likes, you know, America first, make America great.
And so, but he doesn't seem to have an understanding
of even Econ 101 about tariffs
because Henry Clay himself was a large slave plantation
owning hemp grower.
And he wanted protectionist tariffs on hemp
coming in from abroad.
That's, he actually said that's what got him
into politics in the first place.
See if he wanted to be able to put high tariffs on
to kill the competition for his hemp
in that he was growing on his slave plantation
in Kentucky.
And so, and so Trump thinks that's great.
Well, that's not good for Americans.
That might have been good for Henry Clay,
but it would be it's bad for people
who buy the products for sure.
And, you know, fast forward to today
if Trump puts the higher tariffs on steel.
Well, yeah, that'll temporarily help out the steel workers
in the steel industry, but it'll harm the car industry.
We use a lot of steel to make cars.
So it'll make the American car industry less competitive
on international markets.
And basically protectionist tariffs are, you know,
they protect us from lower prices.
It's against your self-interest.
It's against my self-interest.
But for hundreds of years,
propagandists and publicists for the protectionists
have beat this drum of trying to convince us
that things that are against our own self-interest
are really in our self-interest.
And they've been pretty successful at it.
And they usually appeal to xenophobia
or, you know, China is gonna invade America
or something like that.
And people tend to become dumb
when they become fearful of a foreign invasion,
even if it's an economic invasion
and not a military invasion.
Well, and also from a revenue tariff standpoint,
right, you could see how that would be
just a totally different argument, right?
Because now we're constantly seeing
the two things mixed together, right?
Where, okay, we've got Trump coming in
and saying I'm gonna abolish the income tax
and replace it with the revenue, with a tariff.
Okay, well, he's arguing in that case
for a revenue tariff.
Now, I don't know who actually believes
that he's going to abolish the income tax.
We do know that he'll raise tariffs
and then maybe get around later
to getting rid of the income tax.
Seems to be the order of operations
that they're planning on, which of course is terrible.
Get rid of the income tax first
and then I can talk about tariffs, fine.
But revenue tariffs, right?
There's a certain motivation to keep them low enough
that people continue to buy imports, right?
Because if you just raise it to 100%,
people will stop buying the imports
and then you're not getting any of the revenue.
So the federal government would have a motivation
to keep revenue tariffs at a reasonable level, right?
Yeah, right.
Well, unless it's all a matter of who's bribing who,
because the industry is at what the 100% tariffs,
if they pour enough millions
into the coffers of the Democrat and Republican parties,
well, they might think, well, we could always print money.
Yeah, we'll lose a little bit of tariff revenue,
but we'll just get the Fed to print more money for us
and we'll do it that way.
And so, of course, there's not like a bright,
shining line between a revenue and protectionist tariff,
I suppose.
And when you think about it,
think about war, what do countries do to each other
when they go to war?
Well, they try to impose a blockade.
They try to starve the economy of the enemy.
And so in the American Civil War, for example,
one of the very first things Abraham Lincoln did
was to commence a blockade of the Southern ports
to try to starve the Southern economy.
And the same is true, World War I,
World War II, attempts at blockades.
So basically with protectionist tariffs,
we do to ourselves in peacetime
what our enemies would like to do to us in wartime,
starving our own economy.
And so it's this bombardment of propaganda
that actually convinces millions of Americans
that things that are against their self-interest
are really in their self-interest.
It's very Orwellian.
I'd forgotten about that argument, right?
If the argument that cutting down on imports
is good for your economy,
well, then the Confederate economy
should have gone gangbusters, right?
Yeah, they should have won the war in about two months.
Because they couldn't import anything
and ruin their local economy.
Yeah, so the fact that an embargo is an act of war,
right, the Germans should have been just fat and comfortable
after the starvation blockade was imposed on Germany.
World War I.
Yeah, that would seem to contradict the idea
that imports are bad for your economy.
And which I think brings us to an important issue here
which probably is foundational as well
is I continue to see headlines
that they're phrased in a way where it says,
well, Trump plans to raise tariffs,
but he plans to cut taxes.
Or how tariffs are different from taxes.
These are like actual headlines I've seen.
Well, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong,
isn't a tariff just a tax?
Well, sure it is.
That's why we have customs houses.
If you ship goods into, say,
Charleston, South Carolina,
you can see the old customs house right there
on the water in Charleston Harbor.
It's, I'm not sure, I don't think it's in use anymore.
It's like a museum.
But the real customs house is still there.
You gotta pay a tariff, the Port of Baltimore,
you gotta pay tariffs on things
that are where there are tariffs imposed on things.
And so it's a tax, it'd be more clear
if we just called it the tariff tax
and not just tariff,
because that's kind of a weird word.
And the people who are not economically educated,
they don't know what that is.
But yeah, of course it's a tax.
If it's collected by the government, it's a tax.
Well, it is, and by force, right?
It's not like they're optional.
That's right.
If you wanna buy those goods.
That's right, that's right.
Now, I mean, the very same people
who tell me in many cases, right,
you'll see all this at the time in domestic politics, right?
Oh, some government, state government,
local government, federal government, whoever,
they want to impose a sales tax on a good.
So when you purchase that, the merchant has to collect,
the merchant is responsible for paying that tax.
So they collect an additional sales tax from you.
And what is often argued is, oh, well,
the sales tax is just passed on to the consumer.
And so we shouldn't have sales taxes
because the consumer just ends up paying for it.
And which actually isn't totally true, right?
The tax is partially passed on,
but are also partially paid.
I mean, at least that's what we were taught
in Principles of Econ.
But then these exact same people will say,
oh, well, if you impose a tax on imports,
which strikes me as a type of sales tax,
it's a transactional tax on a sale.
They don't say, oh, the consumer,
that is the American side of the transaction,
it just gets passed on to the Americans.
No, they then tell me the opposite.
They then tell me that the Chinese pay
the full brunt of the tariff.
Right, this is, they should apply in both cases.
Right, they're passing on a large part of that
just to the American consumer.
Of course it does, they can't pass on all of it,
but they have to eat a good bit of it.
And another thing that happens is,
when the price goes up, as they always do,
that's the whole purpose of protectionist tariffs,
to raise prices.
We know the law of demand says people will consume less
of whatever it is.
And so we do without, a lot of people just do without
because they can't afford it.
Or if they can't afford it, they just choose not to have it
for whatever, because it's too expensive,
they don't need it.
And so the economists call that a deadweight loss.
It's kind of a clunky economics term.
But the way to think about it is,
well, we have to do without.
It's going to reduce our standard of living.
When they say inflation is a measure of the standard of living,
well, yeah, you can't afford as much stuff in your life
if everything gets more expensive,
and tariffs make certain things more expensive for you.
Now, I mean, some will argue then that that's okay
because it encourages more people to then save.
I mean, you'll even get people in our corner of things,
right, saying is that, well, if you got to have a tax,
sales tax better, so tariffs better
than other types of taxes.
I mean, I guess I kind of see where they're coming from.
But I made to really make a judgment about that,
aren't you engaging in a type of central planning then?
Right, because what you're saying is that,
okay, you've got all these goods and services,
which small business people may be using
to build their companies and essentially build capital.
But we're saying, oh, it's okay to tax those.
It just seems that there's this common misconception
that tariffs are only imposed on end product goods, right?
Like, oh, now people won't be able to buy this Chinese junk.
But what if I'm buying stuff for my small business
that I need to build things?
Oh yeah, capital goods, the majority of tariffs
are actually on so-called inputs,
things that are used to produce other products.
Like I mentioned, steel earlier,
you want to tariff on steel,
steel is used to produce a million different things.
So all those things will be more costly to produce.
And that's gonna hurt your bottom line
if you're in business and the consumers have to pay more
if the price goes up.
And that's true, there are many thousands of things
that have tariffs on them over the years
that have had tariffs on them
that are inputs into the production process
of the final goods.
And so like in the late 19th century
when we had high tariffs of in a 50% range
after the Civil War, that was a big hindrance
to the Industrial Revolution
because even if foreign trade accounted
for maybe 10% or less of the whole economy,
but still a lot of the inputs
and a lot of the capital goods
that they were being taxed with a tariff tax
made it harder for American companies to compete back then.
And so, and a lot of people make,
Pat Buchanan used to be famous for making
the post hoc, ergo, proctor hoc fallacy argument
that high tariffs existed, America prospered
in about 30 or 40 years after the Civil War economically.
Therefore, the tariffs caused the prosperity.
That's like saying the rooster crows in the morning,
the sun comes up in the morning,
therefore the rooster crowing causes the sun to come up.
But that's a fallacy.
Well, the other classic example would be
that ice cream sales cause homicides, right?
Because there's more homicides in the summer.
And yeah, that was essentially gonna be
my next question is, right, we see that all the time.
When I'm sure you get the same emails
if you write an article on tariffs
is, well, America had high tariffs in the 19th century
and that's when America was really prosperous.
The classic correlation must mean causation argument,
but not mentioned, of course,
is that the United States had no income tax in that period.
The regulatory state was virtually non-existent.
What, the first three letter agency came in
and I think the 1880s with the railroad regulate,
or the 1870s perhaps.
1887.
Okay, so I mean nothing.
The Interstate Commerce Commission, yeah.
There was nothing before that in terms of federal regulation.
So I'm supposed to believe that it was the tariffs
that drove all that regulation.
I guess we should just say, well,
get rid of federal regulation.
Hey, hey guys, you can even still have state regulation
if you want.
Get rid of that, get rid of the income tax.
And hey, then you can raise tariffs
and then we'll see how prosperous we are.
Maybe we'll be, but again, that's different from arguing
that the tariffs caused the prosperity.
Yeah, that's foolish.
It's economically ignorant and it's ahistorical as well.
Well, I mean, another aspect of the tariff thing, of course,
is that he's using it or in policy, Trump is.
And we've seen this a couple of times just in recent weeks.
So there's all these different arguments, right?
We've of course said
that there's no economic argument in favor of tariffs.
Because boy, we can slap those down all day
in terms of very good economic theory.
Those are the easy ones, I think,
in terms of building an argument.
However, people will come back
with more speculative arguments.
These are the political arguments,
the national defense arguments such as,
oh, we have to produce all of our own steel
because then an enemy, whoever that might be,
would cut us off from steel.
We wouldn't be able to buy warships
or build warships, et cetera, et cetera.
Now I've argued against that too.
And even the Pentagon has said
the US doesn't need to worry about its sources of steel.
There are many such sources and they're not tied to China.
Nevertheless, people continue along
with these political arguments.
And now Trump very innovatively is coming up
with other ways to use tariffs,
just basically as a foreign policy threat,
involving all sorts of things,
one of which is, hey, Mexico,
stop immigrants from making it to the northern border
or I'll slap a 100% tariff on all of your goods
that might go to the US.
And I'm sure he's coming up with other things as well
that he can say, hey, just take orders
from the United States or we're gonna slap
huge tariffs on them.
I mean, essentially though,
I'm at a loss for the way Americans are willing
to accept this so easily is that right
because what he's saying is, hey, America,
I'm gonna double the cost of, hey, small businessman,
I'm gonna double the cost of your goods
that you need to import in order to make your stuff
until Mexico does what I say.
I mean, I guess checkmate to Trump
because I can see how politically popular
this position could be, but I guess it's only popular
because people don't see that tariffs
are essentially attacks on them.
But I'm impressed with it from a political standpoint.
Yeah, it's a slick political maneuver.
Like I said earlier, people tend to become dumb
when politicians start talking about patriotism
and waving the flag.
It's kind of like one of the things
in the famous essay, War is the Health of the State
by Randolph Bourne.
He said, what's the government declares
that there's an enemy plotting to attack us?
People, he said, people become childlike
and they want mommy and daddy to protect them.
And in that case, mommy and daddy is the government.
And I think we have some of that that goes on
when we have presidents talking about the foreign threat
over the border from economic threat,
not necessarily a military threat.
And as far as the argument that we need protectionism
so that we can produce steel at war time,
well, I grew up in Western Pennsylvania,
North of Pittsburgh in the 1960s and 70s,
right in the middle of the decline of the steel industry
and it was the heavily protected steel industry.
And the reason why it was declined
and the same with cars was it was so heavily protected.
You protect businesses from competition,
they become fat and lazy.
And that's what happened to the steel industry
and that was happening to the car industry.
And so without competition,
and when the unions wanted a dollar an hour raise
every year for the next three years,
the company just said, sure, no problem.
We don't have any competition to speak of
so we'll give you the raise.
And no strike, so you don't need a bloody strike.
You know, year after year you do that
that all of a sudden the Japanese show up
and clean their clocks as far as competition.
So if you want to be prepared
for national defense purposes,
you want to subject your industries to competition.
You don't want to protect them from competition.
And I would argue you would want low tariffs
or no tariffs and not the opposite.
And of course, Trump seems to assume
that other countries are not going to retaliate
as they have no ability to retaliate.
He can just walk around there and bluster and threaten.
But, you know, the lesson of the famous
smooth holly tariff of 1930 is that a dozen other countries
immediately slapped very heavy tariffs on American products.
And so in the next three years,
a world trade, the international trade across the world
shrunk by 80% because of an international trade war.
And I'm not saying that Trump's tariffs on Mexico
will do the same thing like that,
but they could smart, you know, Mexico can retaliate
and he's also threatened Canada.
So Mexico and Canada could both retaliate.
They don't need to necessarily sit back and take it
because he's Donald Trump as far as that's concerned.
Well, it seems like a weird strategy
to make it as difficult as possible
to do business with Americans.
And to act like, that's interesting.
That can be seen also in the BRICS threat, right?
So these BRICS people who are getting together
and they're trying to create an alternative to the dollar,
which I don't think is imminent,
but it's a longer term geopolitical project
that they've got going.
And they're trying to create some sort of alternative
to the dollar and Trump turns around and says,
well, I'm going to slap huge tariffs
on all you BRICS countries if you do anything
to try and diminish the influence of the dollar.
This yet again, I'm going to make it as difficult as possible.
I'm going to put anyone who does business
with the United States under threat.
And this is the same way with US sanctions, right?
Is anyone who uses the American dominated swift system,
anyone who uses the dollar,
we reserve the right to steal all of your deposits
like we did with Russia and do whatever we want with them.
All he's doing is telling the world, don't use dollars,
don't trade with the United States.
And in the short term,
you're not going to see much of a distinction.
And I guess if you're serving a four year presidential term,
then that's probably not going to be a problem.
But if the US just keeps saying,
hey, trading with us using our currency,
we're just going to use that as leverage against you
to accomplish political ends.
It's like, that is so the opposite
of the old Washington doctrine of just,
hey, have friendly market relations with everybody
and don't get involved in their politics.
Trump's like the opposite of that, right?
I'm going to use tariffs to impose my dollar policy,
my trade policy on everybody.
And it's hard to see why that wouldn't have
longer term repercussions.
But again, I guess it can be very, very popular politically.
And also Trump can just do this seemingly
without any intervention
from the rest of the federal government.
I saw that recently Trump's coming in,
he's talking about, I'm going to do this with tariffs,
I'm going to do that with tariffs.
Because apparently the president can, due to convention,
obviously the constitution does not allow this.
The constitution says that the Congress
shall have total control of all imposts,
duties, taxes, et cetera.
But, and I don't know if you know the history of it,
I have not looked this up.
At what point the president just started deciding
that he could just set tariff rates,
however he felt like it.
But that seems to be where we are now.
And then shockingly, I saw Rand Paul to his credit,
gets up and says, hey, I think we should pass legislation
in Congress saying that presidents can't just impose taxes
on imports whenever and wherever they feel like it.
And he was attacked.
Rand was attacked all over the place by MAGA people
for hating America, essentially,
because Rand wanted to, you know,
stick to the US constitution on that aspect.
So it's just amazing what these Trump supporters are saying.
Screw the constitution, just support Trump
so he can impose more taxes.
It's very bizarre.
Yeah, it's because of the rise
of these so-called executive orders.
And that probably, I don't have the statistics in front of me,
but I'm guessing that that probably ballooned out
during the Lyndon Johnson years,
executive orders, because we had a war going on.
And so in the last 60 or 70 years,
you've had this accumulation of these executive orders,
which is pretty much saying the constitution doesn't matter.
And so it finally, that's where we are.
You might remember one of Clinton's flunkies once said
something like stroke of the pen, law of the land.
Pretty neat, you know, I just,
I forget who that was that said that.
I think it was one of Clinton's people.
Like Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini,
stroke of the pen, law of the land.
Who needs a legislature if you can do that?
And then there's the czars.
I've been reading that Trump is already appointing czars,
a new czar, when I was,
one of my courses that I used to teach,
I used to put up on the screen in a classroom a list of,
this online list of all the czars.
And we've, you know, we have like a salmon fishery czar
and everything under the sun, there's a czar now.
And these people don't have to be,
go through the Senate confirmation process.
They give us sort of mini dictatorial powers
to do whatever the president wants.
So he uses that.
He'll probably have a tariff czar.
I don't think there is a tariff czar yet.
Well, do you know, when did you notice
we were using this word czar
to refer to basically these government agents?
Cause it seems weird to me that you would want to name
an American government office
after like a despotic Russian monarch.
So I don't know when that started.
Yeah, well, they, the people in Washington liked the idea
of being a despotic monarch,
but they want to be despotic American monarchs.
And probably, you know, I've looked this up,
you go look it up on the web, the czars.
And then, and you can find, they'll tell you when they started,
I think probably in the 1960s,
they started really proliferating of all these czars.
It's just one of those times that the true nature
of American politics peeks through the veil, I suppose,
as we're calling ourselves.
I mean, why not, why not make it the tariff furor?
Maybe that would be more appropriate.
Wow, I was disappointed when they called it
the Department of Homeland Security
and not the Department of Fatherland Security.
I thought that would have been more accurate.
Yes, they, well, and of course,
the outcome is exactly what we expected from that department.
But no talk about abolishing that.
But I, yeah, I just think it's very remarkable
where we are in terms of talking about raising taxes
and any talk about Trump as a tax cutter
just really is kind of a joke
as long as we're talking about raising taxes on imports.
And yet it seems that a lot of his supporters
are continuing to push that narrative
that he's a tax cutter.
And remember that it seems to me,
all of these new tariffs that he's talking about
are on top of essentially his tariffs
from the first term,
because Biden really didn't do anything
about the Trump tariff.
So we're now going on,
we're gonna be looking at 12 years
of pretty significant tariff increases.
Yeah, I guess these people are all graduates
of Trump University.
Didn't they have some Trump University?
They got sued and they had to pay a lot of money,
big fine, because of sort of a bogus paper mill,
diploma mill type of thing.
And maybe that's where they got their economic education.
Well, and of course here at the,
as I've said in a lot of our,
just our meetings about editorial policies and stuff
is just like, it's very hard to win on the tariff issue
because if you, on certain things,
anytime we say anything nice about Trump,
we're then accused of being like crazed MAGA cultists.
And then we turn around and we might criticize
some economic policy of Trump and we say,
hey, tariffs are bad.
Then we get a showering of emails
from people talking about how we all have
Trump derangement syndrome.
So it's, I mean, you just,
we can't win on the tariff issue,
but the fact of the matter is, is we're not gonna change.
Our position on tariffs has been the same
since for 40 plus years
because the reality of tariffs hasn't changed.
We're against tax increases at the measles too,
but it's amazing how many people
that seem confused by that.
Conservatives.
Right, no less.
People who tell me how they're against big government
come on and tell me why we should need tax increases.
But again, right, abolish the income tax
and then come back and we can start to negotiate
about what your tariffs can be.
But no one's really talking about doing that.
Crucial step first.
So, and one friend of mine,
he said really that he thinks that the discussion
about replacing the income tax with tariffs
and holding out tariffs as this substitute
for income taxes is really just a tactic
to get people to think more kindly toward tariffs, right?
There's no plan to get rid of the income tax
in any meaningful way.
It's just a way to speak more favorably about tariffs
and to get people more accepting of the idea.
And I think he's probably right.
Yeah, well, we have a history of replacing tariffs
with the income tax and vice versa.
We had income tax temporarily during the Civil War
and it was ended and so we went back to tariffs
raising most of the money.
And tariffs are always historically been most harmful
to farmers, disproportionately harmful to farmers
because if our trading partners overseas
become impoverished by protectionist tariffs,
they don't have enough dollars or as many dollars
to buy American goods.
And what are they buying?
They're buying a lot of agriculture,
a lot of agricultural goods, exports from America.
And so farmers have always known,
even in the 19th century and all my studying that era
of the economic history is even if they were unschooled,
literally going to school and learning economics,
they understood that whenever the tariffs were jacked up,
their business in Europe dried up
and they lost a lot of money.
And that happened after the Civil War
when we had these high tariffs
in the 55, 60% range on average.
And the farm lobby became more and more powerful
and they struck a deal.
The advocates of the income tax struck a deal
with farmers saying,
we'll cut the average tariff rate down
to something more reasonable, maybe 18 or 20%.
If you, the farmers politically support an income tax
and income taxes only could be on the rich people
anyway, the top rate originally was 7%,
but you had to make a half a million dollars in 1913
to pay 7%.
So the farmers bit, they went for it.
And so by the time you get to, that's 1913,
by the time you get to 1920 and World War II has ended,
the top income tax rate was 77%.
And shortly thereafter, the tariff rate went up.
In 1929, the average tariff rate went up to about 60%
because of the smooth holly tariff.
So the farmers ended up with a much higher income tax rate
than they thought they were gonna get
and high tariffs after that whole incident.
And that's what's gonna happen again
if we don't do, like you said,
abolish the income tax first
and then we can talk about tariffs.
Yeah, in the history of political bait and switches,
that's one of the most horrible.
So we'll go ahead and wrap up with that
for this episode of Radio Rothbard.
Thank you, Tom, for joining me today.
We'll be back more next week and we'll see you next time.