Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy - FDR’s New Deal: Good or Bad?

00:00:00.000 So, one of the more, let's just say, controversial areas of my new book was actually not a lot of the wisdom that I asked of the left, but actually some of the controversial areas of my new book was actually not a lot of the wisdom that I asked of the left, but actually some The fact that there is not one necessarily clear America First movement, but there are many strands of it.

00:00:28.000 And particularly one of the breaking points that's fascinated me is the distinction between the libertarian-leaning wing of the America First movement, what I call the national libertarians, and the national protectionists.

00:00:40.000 Both of us reject the historical neoliberal orthodoxies, but on slightly different grounds, right?

00:00:46.000 The old neoliberal orthodoxy on trade was that somehow we were going to spread democracy through capitalism and capitalism through democracy to places like China, that somehow if we traded with them, they would behave like us.

00:00:57.000 And what happened in the process is instead we increased our economic dependence on China, which has become our chief adversary, even as our own US military depends on them. 0.72

00:01:05.000 The old neoliberal school of thought had nothing to say about this.

00:01:08.000 We reject that type of blithe neoliberalism.

00:01:10.000 But what exactly is the response?

00:01:12.000 The national protectionist response is to say that we need to onshore everything in the United States and cease our trade relationships in general, China or otherwise, the free trade model is over.

00:01:21.000 Whereas the national libertarian view is a little bit different than that.

00:01:24.000 It says that it's senseless for us to depend on China for our modern way of life.

00:01:28.000 But at the same time, if we're really serious about that, that's going to require expanding our relationships with other countries like South Korea, Japan, India, the Philippines, and so on.

00:01:36.000 But if we're serious about that, that doesn't quite have the protectionist impact on the prices that American manufacturers are able to command if they're not shielded from the effects of foreign price competition.

00:01:45.000 That's a fork in the road.

00:01:46.000 Same thing with respect to the question on immigration.

00:01:49.000 The old neoliberal view was that the U.S. is just an economic zone, and the more the better, as long as it Increases the size of the so-called economic pie without regard for the effect that has on our national identity.

00:01:59.000 So the national libertarian, and here's the national and national libertarian, says that, no, the United States is not just an economic zone.

00:02:05.000 zone, we're a nation bound by a shared set of values, and that we need an immigration system that selects for more than just economic contributions, but civic contributions and ability to assimilate and speak the language of English and pledge allegiance, exclusive allegiance to the values of the United States of America, eliminating dual exclusive allegiance to the values of the United States of America, eliminating dual citizenship That's what that system would look like.

00:02:26.000 Which is different still yet from the national protectionist view, which says that actually immigration policy is not just economic policy, it is particularly labor policy.

00:02:35.000 And the job is to protect American-born workers from the effects of foreign price erosion when it comes to the labor market.

00:02:41.000 A slightly different view than if your top priority is actually focusing on civic integration and reviving our national identity.

00:02:48.000 And the biggest distinction of all, of course, is in our respective attitudes towards the regulatory state.

00:02:53.000 I lay this out in a more detailed way in my book, Truths.

00:02:57.000 Again, most of these are speaking hard truths to the left, but these are some hard truths for us to confront on the right, is the question of how we wish to use the regulatory state to advance our own pro-worker, pro-American, and you could call them conservative ends.

00:03:11.000 Do we want to replace the left-wing regulatory state with one that advances affirmatively conservative goals?

00:03:17.000 Or do we actually want to just get in there and dismantle that regulatory state?

00:03:21.000 You could say this about the regulatory state.

00:03:22.000 You could talk about it more broadly with respect to the nanny state, which I consider to be the superset of the regulatory state.

00:03:27.000 It includes the three-letter agencies, the administrative state, but it also includes the entitlement state, the foreign policy nanny state.

00:03:33.000 Are we actually serious about getting in there and dismantling it?

00:03:36.000 Or is the purpose instead a newfound purpose to redirect that nanny state or that regulatory state to advance some alternative vision for the good?

00:03:44.000 Not the left's vision, but a conservative or pro-American vision.

00:03:48.000 One that would empower the CFPB, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, to cap credit card interest rates.

00:03:53.000 That's a kind of price control that some Republicans are okay with, even as we rail against Kamala Harris's grocery price controls. 0.99

00:04:00.000 Or is the right answer to say that we don't want the CFPB meddling in the private sector, and by the way, telling small businesses as they do, that they've got to report their race and gender data to the government.

00:04:10.000 My own view on this, and I've been pretty open about this, is I think it's a little bit, not only hypocritical, it's contradictory.

00:04:16.000 And self-defeating for us to, on one hand, slap the CFPB on the wrist and say, we don't want you going woke and asking small businesses for their race and gender demographic data, which I think is disgusting and they shouldn't be doing, while at the same time saying we want to empower that same agency that Elizabeth Warren led, but now with a different mandate to cap credit card interest rates.

00:04:34.000 I don't think that we can have our cake and eat it too.

00:04:36.000 And in some ways, not only are we paving the way for the same shoe to fit the other foot when the left's in power, but we're also in some ways creating the very problem that supposedly we sought to solve.

00:04:47.000 And these are unresolved questions in the conservative movement, not exactly the stuff of cable news television discussions at night in the lead up to an election.

00:04:57.000 We are a couple of weeks away, and that's the most important thing for the future of the country, politically speaking right now.

00:05:03.000 But on the other side of the election, I do think a lot of these questions are going to percolate to the surface.

00:05:07.000 And I think the America First movement and the Republican Party and the conservative movement and the United States of America are all going to be stronger.

00:05:13.000 If we're able to have those discussions in a thoughtful, nuanced and And unafraid manner.

00:05:19.000 And to that end, it's why I've invited on today's podcast a guy who I've really grown intellectually respect over the years, become a kind of intellectual friend that we've actually never met in person.

00:05:28.000 It's only ever been in remote contexts like this one, though we intend to change that.

00:05:32.000 A leading thinker on the new right and the leading thinker behind even some of the premises undergirding the America First movement.

00:05:40.000 My friend Sarabh Amari.

00:05:41.000 And Sarabh, I'm excited to have you on.

00:05:43.000 And I know you've been paying attention to some of these conversations that both you and I have been having in recent years.

00:05:50.000 And I'd love to pick up where I left off and to hear your thoughts on first, how you would define the new right and what brought you to your own set of convictions.

00:05:59.000 And then we could talk about this distinction between what I think of as the national libertarian strain versus the national protectionist strain of America First.

00:06:07.000 And map out what each might mean for the future of our movement.

00:06:10.000 It is very good to join you, Vivek.

00:06:12.000 And like you said, we've always done these conversations remotely, so I look forward to doing them in person once and soon.

00:06:21.000 Look, the term the new right Is so sort of over-determined and laden with multiple factions' interpretation of it that I really don't know.

00:06:32.000 And by the way, the New Right today is the successor to other versions of the New Right, other movements that called themselves the New Right in decades past.

00:06:43.000 It's all a bit complicated, but I'll lay out my own trajectory and maybe that will shed some light on it.

00:06:48.000 So I began my journalistic career and my ideological sort of maturity on the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

00:06:56.000 I spent five years there preaching the gospel of Lower marginal tax rates, free trade, and an assertive American foreign policy in every corner of the globe.

00:07:09.000 And around 2015-16, I and my colleagues watched with horror as this guy, this former New York City real estate developer turned reality TV star.

00:07:22.000 This guy.

00:07:23.000 Absolutely.

00:07:24.000 Started, you know, saying things that completely defied all of our orthodoxies.

00:07:28.000 In my case, I was based in London at the time.

00:07:31.000 So I felt like I had been sent to, you know, fight this war for this set of ideas in foreign lands.

00:07:36.000 And then back home, the party, the Republican Party, was betraying them by embracing Donald Trump.

00:07:42.000 You know, he said...

00:07:44.000 I'm not going to touch your entitlements.

00:07:46.000 I'm going to protect your entitlements.

00:07:48.000 And the crowds roared.

00:07:49.000 The base of the Republican Party roared.

00:07:51.000 He questioned the Iraq war and said it was a disaster.

00:07:56.000 And the crowds roared.

00:07:58.000 He even hinted at a public option in healthcare in a famous exchange with Ted Cruz where he said, I'm not going to let people die on the streets.

00:08:06.000 To which Senator Cruz replied, well, that means you're a socialist.

00:08:09.000 Are you a socialist?

00:08:10.000 And he just said, I'm not going to let people die on the streets.

00:08:13.000 And again, the crowds roared.

00:08:15.000 And it was very disorienting, you know, because this was not the conservatism that I had made my own and promoted for a few years.

00:08:23.000 But then I tried to sort of get into the mindset, like a lot of people in the mainstream media, both the center left and center right media, there were a couple of months right after the President Trump's first election, where in 2016, where the media was like, well, what is happening with the working class?

00:08:41.000 Why are these people so, you know, why are they such malcontents?

00:08:47.000 And a lot of reporters and writers just moved on.

00:08:50.000 You know, by February, March 2017, it was full on waging kind of lawfare and backing the lawfare and attempting to undo the outcome of the 2016 election.

00:09:01.000 But I didn't move on.

00:09:03.000 I tried to think about what it is that where, for me, I had come as an immigrant to this country when I was 13, 14 years old.

00:09:09.000 We started out, you know, kind of very, very poor when we first moved here.

00:09:14.000 But within a decade, I was writing editorials for the Wall Street Journal and not even based in London.

00:09:20.000 But for lots of like my fellow citizens, that had not been the story.

00:09:24.000 It had been a story of Of dispossession of the loss of stable union, good paying union jobs, the loss of stable moral coordinates, the fact that working class has become synonymous with out of wedlock births and fentanyl addiction and opioid addiction.

00:09:42.000 And various other sort of dysfunctions and social pathologies.

00:09:46.000 So I stayed on that.

00:09:48.000 You know, sort of parentheses there.

00:09:50.000 I also became Catholic in those years.

00:09:52.000 And Catholicism, as you know, has this much more comprehensive account of what the state is for and how to organize.

00:09:58.000 And what was your religion?

00:09:59.000 What was your faith before that?

00:10:01.000 Basically nothing.

00:10:01.000 Everyone thinks because I was born and raised in Iran, people assume I was Muslim.

00:10:05.000 But I came from a very typical religion.

00:10:08.000 Super secular Iranian family.

00:10:11.000 Even when we were living in the Islamic Republic, my parents drank alcohol and watched foreign movies and read Western books and ideas.

00:10:20.000 So I wasn't pointing to Allah and then turning to Catholicism.

00:10:24.000 I came from nothing.

00:10:25.000 And it was a long process of reading and thinking and going to Mass and so on.

00:10:29.000 But Catholicism has this account, which it draws from the classical tradition, from Aristotle, of what the state is for.

00:10:36.000 Why do we form political communities?

00:10:38.000 And it is not to maximize individual liberty, but rather to secure the common good of the whole.

00:10:46.000 So the combination of the Trump phenomenon and then my own kind of faith journey and intellectual journey led me to a kind of conservatism where, fast forward now what has been seven, eight years, Unlike you, I think that the administrative state has troubling aspects.

00:11:06.000 There are things that need to be reformed.

00:11:08.000 It's certainly not beyond reform, but it is necessary, given the complexity of the economy and the power disparities it generates between workers and consumers on one side and producers on the other.

00:11:19.000 I take a favorable view of labor unions.

00:11:23.000 That doesn't mean that I'm happy with the fact that the American labor movement is so beholden to the Democratic Party and so into its kind of cultural agendas.

00:11:32.000 That's something that I've sought to change.

00:11:34.000 But I also understand why, given the history of the Republican Party, the labor movement finds itself the way it does.

00:11:40.000 I think that's something that can be changed.

00:11:43.000 And folks like Obviously, J.D. Vance and Josh Hawley and Senator Marco Rubio are trying to change that dynamic.

00:11:54.000 In some ways, you could describe me as a sort of...

00:12:00.000 European-style Christian Democrat, which is a tradition we really don't have in the United States.

00:12:04.000 But when it comes to the economy, that's a good way to describe it.

00:12:07.000 I'm also an adherent of the wisdom of the New Deal order, the New Deal order being that period roughly between 1945 and 1975 when the United States obviously had actually a very dynamic economy, contrary to some of the A sort of history that was told afterward, a productive economy, a manufacturing-based economy, where in short, and I'll wrap up very quickly, that's when you had what's called the Great Compression, where you had this sort of relatively mild redistribution.

00:12:38.000 Mainly through good wages and industrial jobs.

00:12:42.000 A middle class was created where your grandparents were able to, for the first time, take real vacations, enjoy disposable incomes, and access healthcare and so on and so forth.

00:12:53.000 So that doesn't mean we have to recreate every element of the New Deal order.

00:12:57.000 The macroeconomic conditions have changed.

00:13:00.000 I recognize that.

00:13:01.000 But the simple premise That an economy that works for working people should be the lodestar of a conservative movement, that this is actually a conservative goal, because just giving in to the market's wild kind of capacities to disrupt and sort of demolish certainties Is not necessarily a conservative view and hasn't been, certainly in continental Europe, has not been what is thought of as on the right.

00:13:28.000 But lots of people in the American tradition who were on the right came to accept this.

00:13:33.000 Dwight Eisenhower, President Nixon, who I think is actually a great underrated president, but we don't need to go into that.

00:13:38.000 But the bottom line is that that journey that I described led me to this place where I often find myself at odds with the libertarian wing of the right, even as people describe me as a sort of populist intellectual.

00:13:52.000 Well, look, one of the reasons I was looking forward to this conversation with you is that you're, perhaps because you're not in partisan politics or electoral politics, able to actually explain what your views are, rather than having to shoehorn them into what is palatable while also trying to have an ideology you're trying to backdoor in.

00:14:11.000 And I say that because at least you're open about a few things you just said, which I respect immensely, that You do think that some level of the continued existence of the administrative state is necessary, that you do respect the New Deal order.

00:14:23.000 These are things that I think many Republicans in elected office or pursuing elected office who share some of your convictions would find that difficult to say because of the position they're in.

00:14:33.000 But they act on it.

00:14:34.000 They don't act on the state or whatever.

00:14:38.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:14:38.000 Well, yeah, I mean, I think we...

00:14:40.000 That's actually my great frustration is people would say that they want to dismantle the administrative state, but don't.

00:14:44.000 But I'm actually saying something quite different is even on the new right political coalition, I think you're able to be far more...

00:14:54.000 Lucid in your statement of what actually it entails rather than effectively representing the vibe of that new right, but then walking it back because that's what the Overton window of the current Republican Party dynamic allows for.

00:15:06.000 And I think so.

00:15:07.000 Forget whether or not this is even conservative ideas or not.

00:15:09.000 I think you can make the case of whether these ideas have been on the right or on the left.

00:15:12.000 But let's just talk about the content of the ideas themselves.

00:15:15.000 Let's start with the topic of tariffs, okay?

00:15:19.000 So that's obviously been a big subject heading into this election.

00:15:23.000 There's actually not that for all of a big subject it's been where the left is trying to hit Trump on it.

00:15:28.000 The reason they can't is Biden actually kept all of the Trump tariffs that Trump put in place anyway.

00:15:31.000 So it's not a particularly distinguishing issue in this election.

00:15:33.000 But I think it will be an important issue for economic policy going forward.

00:15:36.000 I view the tariff discussion as falling into three separate possibilities of what your view of the future could be, right?

00:15:43.000 One possibility as you go to the libertarian fantasy land that the United States should operate as though we live in a global free market, even under conditions where other countries are not actually playing by those same set of rules.

00:15:57.000 So I had an exchange actually just the other day on a campus I visited with a Hayek adhering libertarian.

00:16:04.000 I like Hayek too, but he self-described adhering of Hayek, who said that he was his words, not mine.

00:16:10.000 I said, what do you think if the other countries on the other side of these trades are engaging in state subsidies when we're not?

00:16:15.000 Are engaging in indirect tariffs while we're not applying the same level of tariffs to them or even direct tariffs to us that we're not applying to them?

00:16:21.000 What do you think the right approach is to the United States?

00:16:22.000 I don't call that free trade.

00:16:23.000 And his word was, you know what?

00:16:25.000 I'm going to be honest with you.

00:16:25.000 I think we should still turn the other cheek because it's still value maximizing.

00:16:29.000 So it was sort of the turn the other cheek version of approach to tariffs.

00:16:32.000 That's what the classical older variety of what somebody thinks of themselves as a libertarian purist might say.

00:16:40.000 I reject that.

00:16:42.000 There's a second category, which is the one that I find myself drawn to from a policy perspective, is the idea that we really weren't really ever operating in a true global free market anyway, because the other trading partners we're trading with are playing by a different set of rules than we are with respect to state subsidies, with respect to tariffs they apply to us.

00:17:00.000 And so it's perfectly fair game for us to say that if you're going to do that and trade with us, it's not capitalism If one side is mercantilist on that trade, that's not real capitalism.

00:17:10.000 We have to play by the same set of rules.

00:17:11.000 So we'll apply the same tariffs, direct or indirect, that you apply to us, that we apply to you.

00:17:15.000 But the best solution for all might be to get rid of them altogether.

00:17:18.000 But so long as you're not doing it, we're not going to turn the other cheek.

00:17:22.000 We're not going to have our heads stuck in the sand.

00:17:24.000 We're going to demand that you play by the same set of rules and hold you accountable.

00:17:27.000 And that's really what I saw out of a lot of Donald Trump in that first term, which I respect and I'm on board with.

00:17:32.000 That's still quite different, and to smoke out this difference, from the idea that let's suppose we did have the other countries and our trading partners playing by the same set of rules.

00:17:41.000 What you might have is lower incremental labor costs in the trading partner country in India or China or whatever.

00:17:47.000 And China's complicated because they're an adversary now.

00:17:49.000 But suppose it wasn't even the CCP in charge, right?

00:17:51.000 And it was just a trading partner, but that was democratic for all intents and purposes, like an India situation, or you could take the Philippines or Vietnam or whatever else.

00:18:01.000 Even under those conditions, the true protectionist view is that even if the other side is playing by the same set of rules, rules, we want to apply a different set of rules ourselves to advantage American workers and American manufacturers who aren't forced to compete under the economic conditions set effectively by the sum total of our trading partners, which is a coherent view, but it's different than the category two, my view that I laid out.

00:18:25.000 And as I understand you and many others who would classify themselves in the new right, you're probably in category three I'm in category two.

00:18:32.000 We both reject category one, Blythe neoliberal libertarianism, because, you know, for the reasons I just laid out, but on slightly different grounds.

00:18:42.000 And yet we haven't really had that distinction between Category 2 and Category 3. And President Trump is unique as a leader in building a coalition that includes both of those strains in the same movement that we call America First.

00:18:53.000 So I want to give you a chance to react to that and parse what you see as the distinctions between those views and maybe make the argument for your side.

00:19:00.000 Yeah, to be honest, I think that I'm somewhere between two and three, and you'd be surprised the extent to which I'm not full three.

00:19:10.000 But here's what I'll say for starters, is that for most of its history, for most of its history, the United States has been a protectionist country, specifically concerned about import substitution, and especially concerned with import substitution in manufacturing.

00:19:28.000 Alexander Hamilton founded something that's called the Society for Useful Manufacturers.

00:19:33.000 Of course, it was about promoting domestic manufacturing.

00:19:36.000 And this regime that he created, the Hamiltonian system, It wasn't just about tariffs.

00:19:45.000 There were other elements to it as well, but tariffs were a very important dimension of it.

00:19:49.000 It was obviously, as you know, historically, always the agricultural South, which didn't have a manufacturing capacity that opposed historically opposed the tariff regime.

00:19:58.000 And those are the fights between, you know, throughout the 19th century between between pro and anti tariff Americans.

00:20:07.000 But it's important to note that the immense industrial capacity that the United States had states had built up had been built up in the context of tariffs being the norm.

00:20:19.000 But I think we I you know, so so and so insofar as that's the case today, I think we are whether or not we like it or not.

00:20:27.000 I think much of the West is moving away from number one.

00:20:31.000 Not just the United States under both presidents Biden and Trump, but even a lot of our European partners are looking at a Sort of smaller globe, and they're thinking, they're more and more going back to thinking of the globe as blocks, B-L-O-C blocks, right?

00:20:48.000 Because of the experience of the pandemic when we suddenly realized that, oh, shoot, we can't manufacture our own masks.

00:20:54.000 We can't We still, even to this day, some of the most basic components that go into our medicines are still manufactured in China. 0.94

00:21:03.000 We can't manufacture personal protective equipment.

00:21:06.000 What happened to our manufacturing capacity?

00:21:09.000 So there's that kind of strategic fear that states have, all states have, and which, you know...

00:21:15.000 Led to a condition in which the Biden administration, as you noted, kept in place President Trump's tariffs and indeed expanded them in the case of electric vehicles and electric vehicle components.

00:21:26.000 So I think that's the general trend that we're moving toward.

00:21:30.000 The question is, okay, where do we hash out the details?

00:21:36.000 And the thing to remember is what are tariffs for?

00:21:41.000 Are aimed at promoting certain domestic industries.

00:21:45.000 It's basically saying, what do we want to produce in this country?

00:21:48.000 What products do we not want to give up the production of in this country?

00:21:53.000 Whether that's for strategic reasons, whether it's because, and I believe this, that manufacturing is associated with just a different kind of job, right?

00:22:04.000 Gigified, precarious service jobs don't have the same stability and dignity and actually, frankly, higher wages that are associated with manufacturing jobs.

00:22:15.000 So that's part of it.

00:22:16.000 There's a pro-labor component to it.

00:22:18.000 There's a national security component to it.

00:22:20.000 And there's just industrial know-how, right?

00:22:23.000 What we learn as we're trying to, for example, arm Israel and Ukraine is that, you know, even as Congress is Throwing more and more money.

00:22:32.000 Whether you agree with those policies or not, I don't want to get into the substance of it.

00:22:35.000 But even as Congress is throwing money into the Pentagon to build more shells and stuff, it takes time to ramp that up.

00:22:43.000 Why?

00:22:43.000 Because for two decades, we neglected our industrial base.

00:22:46.000 And we have workers whose skills have atrophied, who've lost the game in terms of workforce development.

00:22:54.000 So...

00:22:56.000 These are the goals that you want to address with tariffs.

00:22:59.000 And if you have that in mind, then you can be strategic about it.

00:23:02.000 You can say, okay, well, on some areas, yeah, we still want to be able to take advantage of comparative advantage, especially when there's, as you say, a real fair trade policy.

00:23:15.000 You have a fair play going on and not one side playing a mercantilist game while we're pretending like we live in Milton Friedman's utopia.

00:23:23.000 Fine, we can have that.

00:23:25.000 As long as, for example, those third countries that we consider allies don't become platforms for Chinese investments that are aimed at doing the same thing they were doing before, which is undermining our industrial base.

00:23:37.000 Fine, we can have that discussion.

00:23:39.000 Can you define industrial base?

00:23:43.000 Because that word gets bandied around a lot.

00:23:45.000 And sometimes I think we're maybe non-specific about what it actually means.

00:23:48.000 It's plants and the entire kind of apparatus that goes around for a plant to be able to produce whatever it is, what X industrial good you care about.

00:23:59.000 It involves infrastructure, roads, supply chains, all those things that make it possible for raw materials, et cetera, et cetera, to go into the plant and for the product to come out.

00:24:12.000 It's not just the plant itself.

00:24:14.000 It goes with a wider sort of ecosystem.

00:24:17.000 Maybe think about it as an industrial ecosystem.

00:24:19.000 And that's been eroded.

00:24:21.000 And its erosion is apparent in, you know, figures like the fact that today, depending on whom you ask, manufacturing makes up 8% to 11% of American gross domestic product.

00:24:32.000 For Germany, it's 24%.

00:24:34.000 The OECD average, the organization, economic, whatever, the OECD average is 18%.

00:24:40.000 So the goal here is to...

00:24:42.000 And what was it in the United States in like 1990?

00:24:45.000 I believe it was closer to the average.

00:24:50.000 I'm almost certain it was closer to the 18% average.

00:24:53.000 I'm sure it was further back in time.

00:24:57.000 I'm actually like much more interested in like the 1990s.

00:25:00.000 The turn in 1990s.

00:25:02.000 Probably the most damaging effects came with NAFTA in 1994, I believe.

00:25:09.000 And then the entry of China into the World Trade Organization in 1999-2000.

00:25:14.000 Those are when you'll see the drop-offs.

00:25:16.000 And by the way, if you take a map of the counties in the United States that today are the most...

00:25:21.000 Sort of exposed to fentanyl and the sort of various kind of opioid pathologies that we associate with the Rust Belt.

00:25:29.000 And if you overlay a map of counties that were most exposed to the China trade shock, it would be uncanny how much overlap there is between those two maps.

00:25:38.000 So manufacturing, it creates a certain kind of community.

00:25:42.000 The local industrialist has a different relationship with his community Frankly, than leaders in distant Wall Street or Silicon Valley.

00:25:53.000 They're the ones who...

00:25:55.000 That's a claim.

00:25:56.000 That's an assertion.

00:25:57.000 I think it's probably true.

00:25:59.000 Manufacturing bosses were the ones who would sponsor the local theater, the local library, the local arts group.

00:26:06.000 It's a whole...

00:26:07.000 Way of life that goes with the production of tangible goods that you just don't get in other modes of production.

00:26:15.000 I want us to lead in finance.

00:26:17.000 I want us to lead in high tech.

00:26:19.000 But I just don't want us to lose manufacturing, either because it's just a source of...

00:26:25.000 National strength of good, stable jobs, etc., etc.

00:26:28.000 But just to go back to your question, basically, I'm kind of a 2.5.

00:26:35.000 Libertarian, one.

00:26:37.000 Vivek, two.

00:26:40.000 National Libertarian, two.

00:26:41.000 And then full-on hard autarchy.

00:26:44.000 Of course, that doesn't sound right to me.

00:26:47.000 I'm somewhere between two and three.

00:26:50.000 I think the key is in the coming years to just...

00:26:53.000 You know, carve out a smaller block, BLOC block, right? 0.99

00:26:58.000 Where that includes...

00:26:59.000 We have to think about whether the allies we're dealing with are...

00:27:02.000 Whether they're democratic, whether they really have free market societies, as you said, because if we have a free market society and they're, you know, pumping, you know, billions and billions in subsidies, that's a problem.

00:27:14.000 That's not a free market.

00:27:14.000 I'm sorry.

00:27:15.000 Whether or not we are prepared to combat it if they allow their territories to be used essentially as Chinese platforms. 0.91

00:27:26.000 See, I think so much of what happens with our discussions on the right, and it'll happen in this case of this discussion on tariffs, I see a similar dynamic on immigration, which I'll tell you about in a second, is that we use our shared vehemence of opposition to the yesterday view.

00:27:43.000 either neoliberalism or even liberalism outright, To avoid a little bit of the discomfort of crossing the terrain that you and I are crossing here of actually parsing out where we land and the actual substance of our policy.

00:27:56.000 So we both agree that that, like, blithe neoliberal vision of somehow believing that if another country were playing according to state-sponsored subsidies and applied high tariffs to U.S. goods, that somehow we're engaging in free trade if we apply no tariffs back to them and aren't subsidizing our same industries.

00:28:11.000 That's not.

00:28:12.000 And we reject that.

00:28:13.000 But I think that the vehemence of our agreement there I think risks confounding, I think a slightly different worldview that you and I have with respect to conviction in an actual fair market, which is not what we have right now, an actual free and fair market, for what that would do for American manufacturers and workers versus this,

00:28:31.000 what I take to be, and I say this to be, you know, overstate the case of confrontation here, but to be able to elicit a response to get your view on the table, overstate the case for some sort of narrative of like an idyllic If I may say, hand wavy account of, yeah, we had this era of some industrialist and because he's making things there, the local theater is also better off.

00:28:55.000 I mean, those are just not the kinds of claims that are sufficiently reliable around which we can actually build a sustainable, credible economic policy.

00:29:05.000 Also, the question of how much.

00:29:06.000 I mean, right now, if we open the door to say, okay, well, Yes, we want to play by a level playing field.

00:29:10.000 I can tell you what a level playing field looks like, is that the other countries play by the same set of rules that we actually do.

00:29:14.000 Climate regulations aren't disproportionately applied to the U.S. versus another country.

00:29:17.000 Tariffs aren't applied disproportionately to the U.S. manufacturers versus other countries' manufacturers.

00:29:21.000 They don't get to subsidize an industry when we don't.

00:29:24.000 Level that playing field.

00:29:25.000 I can tell you what that looks like.

00:29:26.000 But then we need to go further and have some type of more muscular state sponsorship and or regulatory and or New Deal vestige apparatus.

00:29:37.000 I think demands an answer of at least how much and how do you know which is the right amount of that?

00:29:42.000 And how do you know whether you're going to get the result of the local libraries and theaters being sponsored just because some guy happens to make something in a particular location?

00:29:50.000 Like, what if that doesn't follow and you're left with a guy who's coming out of Silicon Valley or a financial industry that's actually sponsoring the theater in Cincinnati, Ohio instead?

00:30:00.000 I just want to understand.

00:30:03.000 With greater specificity, how you translate your desired end with the policies that you would propose to actually get there.

00:30:09.000 I'm not contesting the end.

00:30:10.000 I'm contesting whether or not we have the specificity of actually having kind of policies that restore that more idealized vision you've laid out.

00:30:18.000 First of all, on the point about manufacturing employers being anchors historically of their community, that's not the primary benefit.

00:30:26.000 I mentioned that as a side thing.

00:30:28.000 It's not like I'm saying now there's going to be a...

00:30:32.000 Well-funded public theater group in every town.

00:30:34.000 I mean, that's...

00:30:35.000 However, it is true.

00:30:36.000 We can go to towns where historically there were, you know, manufacturing employers and they were associated with a kind of philanthropy and a kind of culture.

00:30:44.000 It wasn't just that sort of, that was the factory.

00:30:46.000 It was the associated union hall, which was a place not just of, well, that's where we go to like lay out collective bargaining, but also it was A place of community and solidarity, et cetera, et cetera.

00:30:57.000 That's all been decimated.

00:30:58.000 And there are towns I can tell you to go to, like Steubenville, Ohio, where you see what it looks like when that's been lost.

00:31:05.000 And we agree that that's not an end state that we want.

00:31:08.000 Of course.

00:31:08.000 Maybe we're talking about competing visions of how to actually...

00:31:10.000 The local libraries thing was not my main contention.

00:31:14.000 Fair enough.

00:31:15.000 Illustrative, though.

00:31:16.000 And then, you know, on the other point, I mean, look, I think For starters, the tariffs that we've put in place under the Trump administration and maintained under the Biden administration, because we're talking about protection here, right?

00:31:35.000 I would maintain those.

00:31:38.000 And I'm worried about the fact that Kamala Harris, I think, comes closer from the neoliberal wing of the Democrats than the kind of wing of the party that Biden Whether it's Biden himself or whoever was around him calling the shots, prioritize.

00:31:54.000 And I always joke, I would have an easier time.

00:31:58.000 I would do a better job laying out what Bidenism got right than Kamala herself.

00:32:04.000 She's saying tariffs are a tax on consumers.

00:32:07.000 It's terrible.

00:32:08.000 She doesn't know what she's saying.

00:32:10.000 Do you know your own administration imposes tariffs?

00:32:14.000 Yeah, I mean, the existence of Kamala Harris, I think, is a great risk for us, not because I think we're going to lose electorally.

00:32:21.000 We'll find out if I'm wrong about that, but I don't think so.

00:32:23.000 But because it actually, like the level of intellectual clarity about her own party or supposed movement's goals is It's so obfuscated that it actually sets such a low standard of what we can expect for ourselves and stops us from having intelligent debates on the right because we just end up falling into the trap of dunking on Kamala Harris, which is just too easy to do.

00:32:44.000 But let's just take this question on what accounted for that loss of the industrial base.

00:32:50.000 Because part of it, I would put at the feet of the idea that the US was held at different regulatory standards than other countries, and the US was over-regulated in the first place that caused many of those manufacturers to go to conditions where they could either be in less regulated or more You know, more business friendly environments,

00:33:06.000 not just as it related to labor costs, but even as it relates to things like emission standards, if you're tracking that in the United States, but not in another country, that's actually part of the reason, among other regulatory factors, too, that account for the industrialization as they move to countries that were closer to the Wild West of what the United States used to be during the time that we had, the first time we had a frontier, and the first time we had an industrial revolution, when those were not constraints on US businesses.

00:33:31.000 And so I guess part of my objection then to the vision of believing in muscular state intervention, and even in part backstop by some level of a regulatory state to create that optimistic vision of re-industrializing America, is that that was the very source for the de-industrialization in the first place.

00:33:50.000 And we can't possibly trust that bureaucracy to somehow Magically willing to existence an alternative vision when, in fact, that was at least among the causes for deindustrialization in the first place.

00:34:02.000 So what would be your response to that national libertarian claim from your vision for what you think is the right kind of industrial policy we need in this country?

00:34:13.000 Well, I mean, we've...

00:34:16.000 Tariffs aren't necessarily industrial policy.

00:34:18.000 They can go hand in hand.

00:34:20.000 So we've see into industrial policy and maybe the existence of the regulatory state as such.

00:34:26.000 I welcome that.

00:34:27.000 But let's just be clear about that.

00:34:30.000 It's an adjacent topic to the tariff topic.

00:34:32.000 There's a guy, his book is off the frame here, but his name is David Harvey.

00:34:37.000 And he also agrees that there was too much sclerosis, regulatory sclerosis, and even he would say that American unions were too inflexible during that key period of the 1970s when the real transformations began to happen.

00:34:52.000 David Harvey happens to be a Marxist, but I think he's like an eminent Marxist.

00:34:56.000 But just to your point that, you know, if you take my view, you don't have to say I'm going to defend every element of the regulatory state.

00:35:04.000 So here's what I would say.

00:35:07.000 But complex economies always go hand in hand with complex administration.

00:35:13.000 This is unavoidable, right?

00:35:16.000 Because complex entities like nation and indeed globe-spanning corporations have such complex operations and their interests and the interests of the wider national community are so intertwined that you cannot but have an administrative state.

00:35:38.000 The question is, you know, what we do with that administrative state and is it sufficiently responsive to the political demands?

00:35:48.000 So here's my general stance on the administrative state.

00:35:52.000 On the one hand, when people say, I want to collapse the administrative state, I want to destroy the administrative state, the first thing I'll say is like, okay, well, you take the first flight after the FAA has been abolished, because I would be hesitant to do that.

00:36:06.000 Or you eat the first can of can, you know, can of sausages after we've been liberated from under the tyrannical yoke of the Food and Drug Administration.

00:36:15.000 I'm not going to do that because it's going to be scary.

00:36:17.000 And there was like a reason why all this sort of apparatus was built up in the late 90s.

00:36:22.000 But what about the 50th?

00:36:23.000 What about the 50th can or the 50th flight?

00:36:25.000 You know, that might be...

00:36:26.000 That's a different story.

00:36:27.000 Well, no.

00:36:28.000 What you're saying is basically some people will crash and die and then we will make different choices about which...

00:36:36.000 But people are crashing and dying already anyway, is part of my point.

00:36:40.000 Is there a transition cost to a new equilibrium?

00:36:44.000 They'd be dishonest to say that there couldn't be.

00:36:46.000 But the question is, are we going to be in a better place where that's actually governed through other forces Right.

00:36:56.000 Right.

00:36:56.000 If you believe it's better, then it's a question of what transition cost.

00:36:58.000 We went through this in the 19th century, in the late 19th century and 20th century, and the nation decided in a pretty decisive way, beginning under, in some cases, under Republican administrations.

00:37:11.000 For example, Hoover had elements of the New Deal, certainly Wilson, and then, of course, the New Deal.

00:37:17.000 That became so embedded as a necessity for dealing with modern capitalism that it's never going to happen.

00:37:25.000 To me, debating the administrative state is like debating the weather.

00:37:29.000 I don't like that it's rainy today, but the fact that I gripe about it doesn't mean it's going to go away.

00:37:34.000 However, there are things we can do.

00:37:36.000 Just to Build agreement rather than sharpen disagreements.

00:37:40.000 I do agree and I think you would agree that one initial step that everyone on the right and even maybe some people on the left agree with is that we want greater political control over the administrative state.

00:37:51.000 So I'll give you a funny example.

00:37:53.000 I was on a An interview with PBS about J.D. Vance.

00:37:58.000 My segment didn't air, but they asked me, we've heard J.D. Vance...

00:38:03.000 You're too smart.

00:38:04.000 I don't know.

00:38:05.000 We've heard J.D. Vance say that he wants the president to have control and sort of...

00:38:12.000 Over the administrative side?

00:38:14.000 I'm like, well, you understand the administrative is an extension of the executive branch.

00:38:17.000 Of course we want that.

00:38:18.000 And it's...

00:38:19.000 You would agree on this.

00:38:20.000 It's a bad thing that the chief executive cannot exert his will over the bureaucrats.

00:38:25.000 And I think we should change that.

00:38:27.000 If he wants to be able to fire them, I'm all for that now.

00:38:30.000 I think, like, talk of mass firing of bureaucrats or, like, de-authification is...

00:38:35.000 Crazy and it's not going to happen and it would result in a lot of bad things.

00:38:39.000 But the point is, I'm willing to say, let's adjust the administrative state.

00:38:44.000 You're right.

00:38:45.000 If we want to have industrial policy, some of the environmentalism has to give.

00:38:50.000 I'm open to that because I'm not a green alarmist.

00:38:53.000 And that's one of the shortcomings of the Inflation Reduction Act.

00:38:56.000 This is the Biden industrial policy in a way.

00:39:00.000 So much of the investment is going toward green kind of investments rather than other things.

00:39:08.000 So anyway, I think that's the bottom line.

00:39:10.000 And here, your listeners should know that I'm sort of definitely the outlier here because even the most...

00:39:17.000 Sort of more of a protectionist America first, as you mentioned, are fairly hostile to the administrative state.

00:39:24.000 Because of my job, I'm not a politician.

00:39:26.000 I'm not an office seeker.

00:39:28.000 I'm just a writer, you know, whatever.

00:39:30.000 I could just say, like, I just don't think dismantling the administrative state is ever going to happen.

00:39:36.000 So, like, ever.

00:39:37.000 Yeah, so I think the question of, I hear this argument a lot about, is it going to happen?

00:39:41.000 And the American people decided, they decided in like 19...

00:39:45.000 I mean, starting with Woodrow Wilson and Coleman further extending through FDR and then further even through LBJ in some ways through Richard Nixon.

00:39:53.000 That doesn't mean that those decisions of the past were the right decisions then.

00:39:57.000 That doesn't mean that even if they were partially the right decisions then that they're necessarily the right decisions now.

00:40:02.000 And just because those decisions have been made in the past, we've radically reordered a lot of things in this country that were unimaginable back then, or what they did back then was unimaginable 100 years before.

00:40:12.000 So this idea that it is or isn't going to happen, I think, is, for me, less interesting than the question of whether it should happen.

00:40:20.000 The fundamental reason this came about is because modern capitalism is not the kind of agrarian Arcadia that is described in most Econ 101 textbooks that Econ 101 students Read in college.

00:40:39.000 I don't know if they read textbooks in college anymore, but there used to be kids, something called textbooks that you read and got information from.

00:40:46.000 And in Econ 101, the picture that is painted, it's a kind of neoclassical tradition, whatever you want to call it, it has different names, libertarian, etc., is basically that, you know, every market Is intensely competitive.

00:41:01.000 There are numerous sellers and buyers on every side.

00:41:05.000 And the fact that there's this much competition means that you can always find a better deal elsewhere.

00:41:10.000 Therefore, markets, all else being equal, markets are generally non-coercive.

00:41:15.000 Now, there was a period in the development of capitalism when this was true.

00:41:19.000 Like I said, in the late 18th century, there was this period of called the masterless men, artisans, yeoman farmers, etc., who would deal with each other at arm's length.

00:41:28.000 And really, that picture that I just described really described the reality.

00:41:32.000 But ever since the Industrial Revolution, most sectors are dominated by a handful of large players.

00:41:42.000 The name that the economist Joan Robinson coined for this is oligopoly.

00:41:47.000 It's not monopoly.

00:41:49.000 Even free marketeers agree that monopoly should be curbed.

00:41:52.000 It's oligopoly.

00:41:53.000 It's just two or three players.

00:41:54.000 So that by the late 19th century...

00:41:56.000 Otis Elevator controlled 90% of its market.

00:41:59.000 British American Tobacco controlled 70% of its market, etc., etc.

00:42:03.000 When you're dealing in a situation like that, the economy is coercive because the price is no longer this pristine index of supply and demand, but rather an index of relative bargaining power between consumers and sellers, between employers and employees, and so on.

00:42:22.000 Can I pause with you?

00:42:24.000 Because I think you and I are tracking each other well.

00:42:26.000 Now...

00:42:28.000 Isn't your claim of this vision a little bit in tension with your view of inhibiting competition in the form of international sellers in those same markets into the United States of America?

00:42:40.000 So on one hand, if our concern is the concentration of market power, and yet on the other hand, our concern is not enough American manufacturers are doing it, therefore we need to protect from the effects of the competition.

00:42:49.000 Isn't there a bit of talking out of both sides of the mouth?

00:42:52.000 I don't aim for going back to a...

00:42:55.000 I don't think it's possible to go back to that Arcadia of many, many sellers, many, many buyers in every market.

00:43:01.000 It's just not possible.

00:43:03.000 It is not rational to have...

00:43:07.000 Many sectors organize that way anymore.

00:43:11.000 In the late 19th century, you had this sort of bloodbath of railroads, and as few railroads emerged out of that.

00:43:19.000 Why?

00:43:19.000 Because you either have factory effects or network effects, and in both cases, they actually promote bigness.

00:43:27.000 In factory effects, that just has to do with increasing returns to scale.

00:43:31.000 It's why, you know, you don't really have like tire manufacturers that are mom and pop shops.

00:43:36.000 Tire manufacturing has to be on an enormous scale.

00:43:39.000 Or the network effects are industries that sort of connect people and goods in different ways.

00:43:44.000 So, for example, a railroad, it doesn't make sense for 100 railroads to connect 200 different towns.

00:43:51.000 It's much more rational for like two or three lines connecting each about 70 of those towns in some regional formations.

00:43:58.000 So that's the reality of modern capitalism.

00:44:01.000 And that's fine.

00:44:01.000 Like I said, it's rational in many ways.

00:44:03.000 We don't want intense price competition, all that kind of 19th century capitalism, because it's destabilizing and all the sort of wild cycles and so on that we lived through in the 19th century.

00:44:15.000 So we realize we're going to have these kind of consolidated, enormous concentrations of power.

00:44:20.000 However, if we're going to have them, then we should countervail their power by other forces in society.

00:44:26.000 Labor unions, one, and of course government, administrators, and so on, regional wage boards, civil society, non-profit.

00:44:33.000 This is the model of mid-century America, which coincided with this period of great, like I said, productivity and dynamism and mass prosperity.

00:44:46.000 I don't see how in 2024 conditions have changed.

00:44:49.000 Capitalism in an industrial age will just involve large concentrations.

00:44:55.000 And we need socially to be able to sort of exert our will over these entities, even as they benefit us.

00:45:03.000 And I realize that they benefit us.

00:45:04.000 So that's the theory.

00:45:05.000 And I just don't think you say, well, just because it was enacted in 1934 doesn't mean that it's...

00:45:11.000 Well, the basic kind of conditions of industrial capitalism haven't changed.

00:45:18.000 I drew two possibilities back then.

00:45:20.000 One is it was the wrong...

00:45:21.000 Policy at the time and the second is even if there were aspects of which it was right, it's a different economy today.

00:45:26.000 I think both of those are my beliefs.

00:45:28.000 I think that the idea that just because you had, obviously the Econ 101 text is not, the people who take that as a description of the way the real world actually works are missing the point.

00:45:39.000 It was offering an intellectual framework from which to have a discussion.

00:45:41.000 At least that's what I think it should have been intended to do.

00:45:44.000 It's a spectrum of whether or not you live in a truly liquid, fully competitive market on both sides of the trade where everybody's a price taker versus some people who are price makers or price setters or exercising market power.

00:45:58.000 It's a spectrum in between, right?

00:45:59.000 It's scalar.

00:46:00.000 It's not a quantum choice of one or the other.

00:46:03.000 Now, the question of whether or not that state of affairs – And I'm also with you to sort of sharpen our agreement rather than disagreement, that the further you get towards a monopoly state of affairs, the less ideal that is in terms of overall social welfare.

00:46:18.000 The question, though, is certainly it points along that spectrum short of monopoly, because that's a whole separate discussion.

00:46:23.000 But as you veer away from the spectrum of a truly liquid...

00:46:28.000 Infinitely competitive market to a monopoly, but getting somewhere at least into the zone of what you would even call oligopoly.

00:46:33.000 And what you call oligopoly, is it two?

00:46:35.000 Is it ten?

00:46:36.000 You know, what counts as oligopoly?

00:46:38.000 And does it matter if it's an American-made oligopoly alone or if it consists of some international actors?

00:46:44.000 If you veer into some territory that's a little bit murky, the question is whether the cost...

00:46:48.000 What you and I will agree is that's a less than perfect system.

00:46:52.000 But in a menu of least imperfect options, how do you pick the one that's least imperfect?

00:46:58.000 Not to say the most perfect, but the least imperfect.

00:47:00.000 And the question is whether the cost of regulating that Will systematically, at least in principle, if not in practice, exceed the benefit of doing so time and again?

00:47:10.000 And I think that's the question we've got to ask.

00:47:11.000 Not wishing into existence some sort of idealized vision of the past, which I do think has a rose-colored vision.

00:47:18.000 You know, lens through which we've used some sort of past where you were able to have living in harmony through some sort of state-sponsored capitalism that corrected for these failures.

00:47:28.000 But the question is whether the cost of doing so would actually exceed the benefit of trying to correct for that oligopoly state of affairs as well.

00:47:36.000 And I think that argument I don't think has yet been fully made or fleshed out in this pro-industrial policy vision for the new right.

00:47:44.000 I say this in hopes that what I think comes out of a good dialogue like this where we're both maybe on the America first right is that we're able to push each other such that maybe there is a sharper case that can be made in the future.

00:47:55.000 But one of the things that I see is missing is we can't hold this side of the economic debate to a different set of standards for the rigor that we expect by merely indicting the other side for its failed rigor and actually failing to account for its results.

00:48:10.000 And so I guess I'll throw the question back to you is, how do you make the case that the cost of creating that regulatory apparatus, the very one that you and I will agree has suffered from a failure of democratic accountability and the existence of that bureaucracy itself is in some ways created to avoid democratic accountability and has done things that you and I would the very one that you and I will agree has suffered from a failure of democratic accountability and the existence of that bureaucracy itself is in some ways created to avoid democratic accountability and has done things that

00:48:37.000 How do you make or what is even the framework for offering an argument that the cost of doing all of those things and the risks you take, including the social risks in the process, still outweigh the benefit of aiming for an alternative vision of the good?

00:48:51.000 good.

00:48:52.000 Yeah, look, again, I have history to point to, which is that It's happened in the past.

00:49:00.000 The social cost of not having one was an unbelievably chaotic economy.

00:49:07.000 To give you a specific example, in the early Republic, the Hamiltonian system generated this institution called the Second Bank of the United States.

00:49:19.000 It was a successor To the first bank of the United States that Hamilton himself founded.

00:49:24.000 What was the problem with the second bank of the United States?

00:49:27.000 It was seen as the overwinning regulatory entity.

00:49:29.000 It could be used by certainly advantage like Northeastern elites and sort of large slavercrats at the expense of At the time, the people who were mad at the institution were urban workers, proletarians, and then you had smaller entrepreneurs and Western and Southern smallholders.

00:49:52.000 But what was the Second Bank of the United States doing?

00:49:56.000 Well, it acted as a sort of quasi-central bank.

00:49:59.000 It disciplined the flow of credit because it was the only institution whose notes could We're nationwide, whereas the others, you know, all other state banks were limited by the state lines.

00:50:16.000 And it was being used, again, by the elites in some ways, but it also was doing a decent job of disciplining the flow of credit and ensuring a flow of credit in a new republic.

00:50:28.000 The Jacksonians set out to reform this, but Andrew Jackson knew only one thing, and that was how to wallop and smash.

00:50:36.000 And he did wallop and smash the Second Bank of the United States.

00:50:40.000 He won what's called the Bank War.

00:50:42.000 But the result of it was that Basically, you had a period of intense wildcat banking and therefore inflation.

00:50:49.000 You had a minor depression.

00:50:51.000 And for about 80 years, the United States didn't have a central banking system of any kind.

00:50:58.000 And they had a much more fragmented and sort of messy banking system.

00:51:02.000 Compared to other industrial states about the same time.

00:51:05.000 And if you look at the chart of banking crises during that period, the United States just had much more frequent banking crises than comparable industrial states like England and France that have more centralized banking regulation.

00:51:19.000 And then we got the Federal Reserve System, kind of a taboo entity on the right, but basically it came to fulfill the functions of the Second Bank of the United States, but in a much more centralized and direct way.

00:51:32.000 However, you know, it didn't have that element of, you know, the Second Bank of the United States, which I didn't mention earlier, which was that it was also a profiteering entity in the money market.

00:51:42.000 So what was outrageous to a lot of people in the 19th century was that the bank both acted as a sort of quasi-central bank and was a...

00:51:53.000 Itself a money-making, profiteering entity.

00:51:56.000 So we got the Federal Reserve.

00:51:58.000 And we've, you know, we've had the financial crisis we had.

00:52:01.000 But compared to the 19th century, since then, the frequency of banking crises in the United States is lower, much lower.

00:52:08.000 So...

00:52:09.000 That's what I turn to you is like, you know, what's the cause of not regulating?

00:52:14.000 The market can generate kind of pretty wild outcomes.

00:52:17.000 And, you know, people who are wealthier can withstand, although not even them all the time.

00:52:23.000 But lots of ordinary people cannot.

00:52:25.000 And that's why we have this.

00:52:26.000 So I just would turn around the question and say, what are the costs of not having some oversight over these kind of behemoth entities and market forces?

00:52:35.000 Look, I think that where we find a lot of common ground in the framing of the discussion is a menu of options of imperfect systems or imperfect alternatives.

00:52:45.000 Now, I would say that even this gets into sort of deeper vision of Philosophy of virtue, but if our own needs matched our wants, if we wanted what we needed and really there was not a gap between the two, capitalism would be the perfect system, right?

00:53:01.000 But the gap between what we need and what we want accounts for that delta is this thing we might call an approximation of virtue and I think that a lot that goes wrong with capitalism in part is explained by the way in which our own innate human wants don't always match our needs.

00:53:16.000 What we actually manifest or revealed preferences in the market don't always actually represent what we ultimately need for a fuller realization of ourselves.

00:53:24.000 So I think that we agree that as a matter of policy, we're choosing between less imperfect options.

00:53:30.000 But I do think that the case has at least been more rigorously made over the body of work of the last 100 years of libertarian economic scholarship.

00:53:41.000 Fantasyland, though some of that may be, in a way that is missing for what the exact quotient would be of exactly how much of a regulatory apparatus without being too much, exactly how much competition we want while also restricting the international dimension of it.

00:53:57.000 And I think that perhaps that puts the new in the new right, right?

00:54:00.000 And so perhaps this is being developed, you know, and intellectualized as we speak.

00:54:05.000 Partly.

00:54:08.000 On my side, you have to turn to, because the right has, you know, there were conservative or Republican figures who made their piece with the vision I described, most notably, I would say, Eisenhower and Nixon.

00:54:21.000 And I kind of placed Trump as an inheritor of, he skips over in a way the Goldwater-Reagan, you know, George W. Bush tradition.

00:54:31.000 Donald Trump is a sort of inheritor as more of a Dwight Eisenhower Nixonian president.

00:54:37.000 But they didn't theorize what they were doing.

00:54:40.000 They didn't write down like kind of a book of like, here's why we're doing this kind of strange making of the piece with the New Deal order.

00:54:48.000 I think partly it was political necessity and partly, you know, a lot of these people had lived through the Great Depression and come to realize why markets need restraints.

00:54:58.000 But so therefore, who are the people who have theorized the vision that I'm putting forward?

00:55:03.000 It's actually kind of New Deal economists like John Kenneth Galbraith or historians like Arthur Schlesinger and, you know, Richard Hofstadter.

00:55:13.000 So it's odd because those are often my touchstones in public writing about these issues.

00:55:19.000 And, you know, some people will be like, well, you're basically citing a liberal historian.

00:55:24.000 You're on the left.

00:55:25.000 That, to me, is not a...

00:55:28.000 But just to say that there is a body of work that's very rigorous and has a place of eminence on the mainstream or the center-left, but that within the conservative tradition, what I'm trying to carve out is sort of under-theorized, so I agree with you there.

00:55:44.000 Yeah, it's under-theorized as to how that would otherwise inevitably, a conservative might say, that framework inevitably leads to the advancement of liberal substantive goals.

00:55:53.000 And is there a possibility of advancing a conservative alternative vision using the same instruments, I think, is maybe under-theorized.

00:56:00.000 To me, union workers having... 0.81

00:56:04.000 You know, stable jobs, being able to support a family on one or one and a half income, being able to have the peace of mind to go to church, to retire in safety, that's a conservative outcome.

00:56:17.000 Yeah, I agree with you on that.

00:56:19.000 I fully agree with you on that.

00:56:20.000 I think the question is, you have those in the sort of national libertarian strain who might believe that the reason we want to advance these policies is because it's consistent with an ideology.

00:56:31.000 I reject that.

00:56:32.000 I don't value these principles because they're more important than looking after the American worker manufacturer.

00:56:37.000 I care about actually, in part, reviving a vision of true free trade of a kind we don't have.

00:56:43.000 That's category two that highlighted at the very start, because I think that's the best way to advance the interests of American workers and manufacturers rather than overexpanding the regulatory state.

00:56:52.000 You know, with that being said, we didn't even get to touch on immigration, which was the topic I was looking forward to getting into.

00:56:58.000 We're out of time today.

00:56:59.000 Well, I'll just very say, very quickly, I'm...

00:57:01.000 Well, I was going to say, if you were open to it, if you were open to it, we could actually have this part two of this.

00:57:06.000 Yes.

00:57:06.000 We could have part two of this, you know, because that's going to be a whole separate animal discussion, which I'm really looking...

00:57:12.000 Exactly.

00:57:12.000 And I thought all this was the buildup to that, and we ended up taking our near full hour on this alone.

00:57:16.000 So I appreciate it, Saurabh.

00:57:18.000 And if you're up for it in the next couple of weeks, let's pick this up where we left off and Same principle of discussion and exchange as applied to the question of immigration.

00:57:26.000 Let's do it.

00:57:26.000 I'd love that.

00:57:27.000 Thank you, Vivek.

00:57:28.000 Thank you.

00:57:29.000 Take care, my man.

Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy - October 23, 2024

FDR’s New Deal: Good or Bad?

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