The latest episode of Econception, my American Institute for Economic Research podcast, has a returning guest, Scott Lincicome of the Cato Institute. Before he came to the libertarian think tank, where he advocates free trade, he was an international trade lawyer. He saw firsthand how lobbyists and lawyers shape U.S. trade policy in their own interest, not the national interest. We discuss some of his stories from his own experience and why he would really prefer to be talking about anything else.

Next, I talk about my postelection Morning Jolt on Milton Friedman’s revenge. It’s pretty rich that a party that rebuked Friedman by name on the campaign trail, got elected, and enacted anti-Friedman policies ended up losing reelection partly because of . . . inflation. There’s a warning for Republicans in there, too.

For the third segment, I explain why milk is never on sale. It would make sense to mark it down as the expiration date approaches, as is common with other perishable items, but there’s a tangled web of state and federal price regulations that effectively prohibit doing that.

The Paper of the Episode is a fresh one from the National Bureau of Economic Research: “Did Tariffs Make American Manufacturing Great? New Evidence from the Gilded Age,” by Alexander Klein and Christopher Meissner.

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