A new study of tariffs suggests they provided more benefit, all around, than revisionism, including Carney's, suggests

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I liked Mark Carney’s Davos speech, which was meatier than most such presentations, even if it did close with a bog-standard list of Great Things My Government Is Doing. And if he wants to dress up post-Trump ad-hocery as a new philosophy of “values-based realism,” both “principled and pragmatic,” I suppose that’s OK, though some of his airier aphorisms — “the power of the less powerful begins with honesty” — are mainly mystifying. That one in particular sits uncomfortably with his boast that his government has “the immense fiscal capacity to act decisively.” Immense? What honesty score would the Parliamentary Budget Officer give that?

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But I really don’t like his dead-certain declaration that the old order is gone for good. He’s no more reliable a fortune-teller than the lady with the rings and bandana in the fairground booth. Herbert Hoover signed the protectionist Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act into law in June 1930 (though he wasn’t especially happy about it, as he explained in a well-reasoned, unhysterical message to Congress of the sort presidents used to write) and yet just five days short of four years later, in June 1934, his successor, Franklin Roosevelt, signed the........

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