Trade with Britain: It's Trump's yuge-est opportunity yet

When President Trump talks of a free trade deal with the United Kingdom, he does so with his trademark superlatives. It’ll be a beautiful deal, he says, a yuge deal. No one – trust me – does trade deals like Donald J. Trump.

And you know what? This time, he might have a point. I spent most of last week on Capitol Hill, and found few issues that united pro- and anti-Trump Republicans like the prospect of a comprehensive trade deal with Britain. One senior administration adviser told me, “He is personally invested in this one, like no other.”

So, what might this big, bold, beautiful deal look like? Well, imagine a trade accord that didn’t just tidy away a few tariffs and duties, but that worked as a mechanism for domestic deregulation.

Suppose, for example, that the U.S.-U.K. deal stipulated that any pharmaceutical product approved by the Food and Drug Administration could automatically be sold in Britain and vice versa. Imagine the impact on the price of drugs once the cartel was broken.

Think of the gains if the same approach were taken to occupational licensing, so that someone qualified to practice as an insurer or an architect or a reflexologist would automatically be able to work in both jurisdictions. There’d be fierce resistance from some of the closed guilds, but who can doubt the general benefit? Sooner or later, the more restrictive rules would be dropped. The barriers to entry would be lowered. The idea that you’d have to train for two years to qualify as a hairdresser in California would become unsustainable.