Aaron Steelman has an “Interview” with Douglas Irwin in the Econ Focus journal published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond (2017, Third Quarter, pp. 20-25).

On the genesis of his most recent book, ” a comprehensive, more than 800-page history of U.S. trade policy, Clashing over Commerce“:

“I distinctly remember being in my Chicago office in 1995 when Michael Bordo gave me a call (email was still a novelty) and asked if I would write a paper on U.S. trade policy during the Great Depression. I really hadn’t worked much on U.S. trade policy up to that point, though I had the latent interest. I thought it would be a really easy paper to write because I assumed that there would be a large literature on trade policy during the Great Depression. But when I did my literature survey I discovered — to my horror — that there was almost nothing really analytical on the period. So I actually had to write something like five background papers just to write this one conference volume paper. After that, I started doing a lot of analytical and empirical work on various episodes in U.S. trade policy history. Once I had written enough papers, it became obvious that I really ought to synthesize them and turn it into a book. That was around 2000. After various delays, I came close to finishing the book in 2006, but then 2007 came, and like many economists, my work got diverted by the financial crisis and I returned to looking at issues related to the Great Depression. After more delays, I finally got back to the book around 2013 and pushed it through to completion. … The last major book of this sort was The Tariff History of the United States by Frank Taussig. It’s a great book, a classic, but it’s been a long time since his last edition.”

On tariffs as the main source of government revenue in early US history: 

“Under the Articles of Confederation, Congress did not have the power to levy taxes. The federal government was broke and couldn’t pay its bills, leading the country toward a crisis. So one of the major reasons for the Constitutional Convention was to give Congress the power to raise revenue. The Tariff Act of 1789 was really just a revenue measure to pay debts and to finance the spending of the federal government. Revenue remains the major issue in trade policy through the antebellum era. … There was a consensus among the Founders that it was the most efficient way of raising public funds as well as the most politically acceptable. Consider sales taxes in the early post-colonial period. They were very controversial and very costly to enforce; just think of the Whiskey Rebellion. An income tax just doesn’t make sense at this time for many reasons. But imports were coming into a relatively small number of ports, such as Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston. So it makes sense that if you have a lot of goods coming into a small number of places, you just tax them right there, which is pretty easy to do. In addition, people don’t easily see the tax because it’s built into the consumer price, so there is less political resistance to it.”

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