Contrary to conventional wisdom, the United States is not some sort of libertarian, free trade utopia. While average U.S. tariff rates are low, the federal government restricts foreign trade and investment in many other ways, thus harming American workers, farmers, trading partners, and the economy overall – and breeding political dysfunction along the way. For decades, Cato has documented this protectionist madness, but our scholars have long disagreed on which policy is the most reckless and damaging of them all.
So, now we’re asking you to help us decide.
Starting today and running through April 6th, 32 terrible U.S. trade policies – each unfortunately still in force – will go head-to-head in a classic, single‐elimination tournament to ultimately decide, once and for all (or until we do this again), which protectionist measure is the worst of the bunch.
It’s Protectionist Madness 2023. And here’s how it works:
We split 32 bad U.S. trade policies across four separate regions (each named for a famous American protectionist or two), and then seeded each region’s trade measures from 1 to 8, based on their odds of winning the whole thing. Each trade policy has been matched up against another policy, with the public (i.e., you) voting for the worse policy in each matchup. If you don’t know about the policy, no problem: You can click on it to learn a little more or follow the provided links for detailed Cato research on the topic. Learning is fun!
After 48 hours of voting (72 hours for the Championship Game), the top vote-getter from each matchup – the policy that a majority of voters think is more misguided and harmful – will advance to the next round. Voting will start and end at 3am EDT and occur over several rounds, scheduled as follows:
Go here to start voting in the first round of matchups. To stay on top of things, you can download a complete tournament bracket and schedule here, or you can enter your email address at the tournament page to receive reminders about the voting rounds and results.
And, of course, be sure to tell your friends about the tournament, so they can play too.
We’ll announce the Protectionist Madness 2023 tournament champion on April 6, 2023. I’ve already picked my preferred champ (it’s such a bad policy). Which one do you think it should be?
