I get a press release about three times a week from the lumber lobby’s PR shop, the upshot of each missive being that U.S. lumber producers are desperate to raise their prices but cannot because of competition from relatively cheap Canadian imports. It is cheaper to produce lumber in Canada than in the US, not because the Canadian firms are “subsidized,” as their U.S. competitors claim, but because of more fundamental differences in the way the two countries’ lumber markets are organized. …Lumber is expensive and awkward to ship, but it has a long shelf life, and there are lots of people all around the world who would like to buy that Canadian lumber. Tariffs on it are probably not going to transfer many economic burdens from US producers to Canadian producers—they are more likely to transfer an economic burden from US lumber producers to low-income young people who want to buy a house.