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Friday, January 06, 2017

TGIF: NPR Blows a Chance to Teach Sound Economics

This week, thanks to the Independent Institute (which lists me as a research fellow), I was interviewed by NPR's Marketplace for a piece on Donald Trump's threat to impose tariffs on goods that come from China. (It's the first story for the January 3 show here at 2:44.) The interviewer wanted to look back at the effects of the Reagan administration's protectionist policies against Japan. (In 1988 I wrote a paper for the Cato Institute on Reagan's appalling protectionism.)

I've done many media interviews, but this one really drove home the media's lack of interest in informing their listeners and viewers on important economic topics. Of course, the producers of the show would themselves have to understand economics in order separate what's important from what's unimportant. This may be a case of the blind leading the blind. At any rate, what follows is a lightly edited transcript of the interview and what was aired from the interview.

Read the full article at The Libertarian Institute. It's also posted at the Independent Institute.

TGIF (The Goal Is Freedom) appears on Fridays. Sheldon Richman, author of America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited, keeps the blog Free Association and is executive editor of The Libertarian Institute. He is also a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com. Become a Free Association patron today!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I think its apparent that npr's notion of education is similar to most of America's schools. That is, tell people what to think about an issue and not how to think about it.