Return of the Tariff
How tariffs shaped American history — and why they’re back now
When he was making Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, John Hughes needed a scene that established how terrible high school can be. He wanted to show the poor students who were stuck in class staring at the clock, falling asleep, or losing their minds from boredom while Ferris prepared to steal a Ferrari and have a delightful outing in Chicago.
So Hughes asked Ben Stein, a lawyer and speechwriter who he just happened to know, to come in and be the off-camera voice of a teacher calling the roll. Stein’s deadpan delivery (Bueller?… Bueller?…) was so exquisitely tedious that Hughes asked him to appear on camera and teach the students a little economics lesson off of the top of his head. Stein did, discussing the Great Depression, including the “…Anyone? Anyone? The Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act.”
According to Stein, after he finished his little impromptu lecture, “Everybody on the set applauded. I thought they were applauding because they had learned something about supply-side economics. But they were…
