Oren Cass: How Trump’s Tariffs Are Reversing the Foreign Policy That Doomed America’s Economy

The point of the postwar global economic order was never to help the United States, says economist Oren Cass, and in the end it didn’t. Thankfully Trump just blew it up. (00:00) Introduction (01:20) What Really Is Conservatism? (05:16) How Did America Lose Focus on Family Values? (11:45) The Societal Problems Dividing Generations (30:09) Are Trump’s Tariffs Working? (46:12) Why Did They Try to Destroy Pat Buchanan? (51:07) The Deep State’s Economic Model Was Really About Foreign Policy Paid partnerships with: ExpressVPN: Go to https://ExpressVPN.com/Tucker and find out how you can get 4 months of ExpressVPN free! Masa Chips: Get 25% off with code TUCKER at https://masachips.com/tucker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:27Tucker Carlson?

  In the next five years, we're clearly going to have some kind of economic reset. People will get poorer. What's your position on Trump's tariffs? Are they working?

• 0:36Speaker 02

  We should have them, but you should phase them in. There are going to be obstructions. If you are somebody who wants to do business in America, you need to start planning for that. If we want our economy to work well, the way to make a lot of money in America is by making things in America.

• 0:51Tucker Carlson?

  Well, this is the most interesting thing I've heard in a long time. So you're saying that our economic model was not primarily, an economic model was an instrument of foreign policy. It was like the centerpiece of the global order, post-war global order. It wasn't like designed to help the United States as much as it was to preserve stability around the world?

• 1:08Speaker 02

  If there's any group to whom we should be focusing resources on, it is families raising kids who are the ones who have been, I think, most squeezed by these economic changes. We will have to pay for that. And the people who will pay for it are the people who are earning a lot of money and don't have kids back here.

• 1:25Tucker Carlson?

  I'd love that you said that out loud.

• 1:48Tucker Carlson?

  Oren Cast, thank you very much for coming. So you've got a book called The New Conservatives, which tries to answer, I think, and I'll speak for you, the question, you know, what is conservatism? What is the Trump movement? Where, who's on what side? And probably not a better, it's not really an abstract debate anymore. It's like all of a sudden you find yourself, I find myself like on the same side as people with whom I don't think I have anything in common. So what's your definition of conservative?

• 2:22Speaker 02

  That's the hardest question in conservatism, I think. And, you know, for me, it comes down to a focus on what actually matters. And sort of, you know, all of our policy debates are about the means. What, what should we do? I think at the end of the day, what defines conservatism and what separates it from progressivism is, is the definition of the ends. What, what do we actually think is the good life? What are we trying to achieve? And I think for conservatives, there's a, a very deep recognition and belief that, that the good life is about more than just the individual liberty and autonomy and consumption of stuff. Obviously, we care about those things too, but that it is much more balanced against

• 3:05Speaker 02

  a recognition that, you know, the, the well being of families and the conditions in which we're raising the next generation and the strength of our communities, ultimately the strength of our nation, the ability to carry forward traditions, that, that all of those things are equally probably more important to people's actual well being. And that as we think about what government is for, what public policy is for, those are the things we actually have to have in focus.

• 3:32Tucker Carlson?

  So paint the picture of what the end result of a well organized society is.

• 3:39Speaker 02

  Well, I think first and foremost, it is the family that at the end of the day, everything is oriented toward this question of how do we raise a next generation that is able to do what we have done, hopefully more than we have done, to enjoy what we have enjoyed, hopefully more than we have enjoyed. And that, that that is a sort of fundamental obligation that we all have. It's not a choice, a consumption choice, right? Some people go to Greece, some people raise the next generation. I mean, as, as a descriptive matter, it is, it is true, but as, as a normative matter, as a question of should. That is what should happen and that is what needs to happen. And so the question is, well, okay, what are the conditions in which that can and will happen?

• 4:22Speaker 02

  We need to have the conditions where young people can see a future for themselves. Forming families, being self-sufficient, supporting kids, being able to provide them a good environment. They need to be in communities that have not just, you know, strong institutions and good schools, but also just a basic sense of a common culture and a culture that is going to be a healthy one for kids to grow up. We obviously therefore need an economy that provides those kinds of jobs. There need to be good jobs available to anybody who wants to work and is willing to work hard,

• 5:02Speaker 02

  regardless of what their particular aptitudes and interests are, regardless of where they live. Right? The idea that, well, we'll get more growth if everybody moves to a big city is highly corrosive to the idea that we will actually have a world of people raising strong families. And then as you sort of keep zooming out, ultimately you get out to the level of the nation and you recognize that, you know, at the end of the day, you do have to have a country. A country is not just a market or, you know, an Olympics team. It is actually something with an identity within which people owe obligations to each other.

• 5:43Speaker 02

  And not everybody is raising kids, but if you're not, you have some obligation to the folks who are. You have some obligation to those kids and as those kids grow up, they will in turn have obligations back to you. And if you can't maintain that structure, and I think a lot of what you see in the modern West is struggles to maintain that structure, things start to fall apart.

• 6:10Tucker Carlson?

  That sounds like socialism, Warren.

• 6:13Tucker Carlson?

  No, I'm just kidding. It sounds beautiful, actually. And I should say for people who don't, I'm not going to give your home address or anything, but you kind of live that personally. You live in a smallish town, far from, very far from a city. You have a family, you're involved in the town on like an official level.

• 6:31Tucker Carlson?

  You are living the life that you describe.

• 6:34Speaker 02

  I try to. I think it's, and I think it's important at that level because I think that, you know, what I'm describing isn't sort of the ideal that I hope somebody goes and does. I, I think it is, as I said, sort of that obligation that everybody should feel that they have, and also that I would underscore that, that people can fulfill in lots of ways. You don't have to live in the middle of nowhere. You can do these things in a, in a city too.

• 6:59Tucker Carlson?

  For sure.

• 7:00Speaker 02

  You can do these things with all sorts of jobs. You can do these things in a family where both parents are working, in a family where only one parent is working. But I, I think a lot of what we need to aspire to, and the, you know, the fancy term for it is pluralism, is the idea that having all of those different options is a good unto itself. The fact that, that people can see that option set and find one that works for them is part of what leads to human flourishing, part of what makes it all work. And one of the things that, that our markets have pushed against, the market just looks for the most efficient solution. And that might be fine if you're just trying to sort of maximize

• 7:41Speaker 02

  your GDP growth. But if the most efficient solution is to push everybody into any particular lane, especially the kinds of lanes we've been pushing people into, you don't actually get the outcomes you care about, which is the ability for people to live good lives.

• 7:58Tucker Carlson?

  It's interesting you use the, the word obligation, our obligation to others, to our children, to our neighbors, really sort of old fashioned Protestant talk that I haven't heard in a long time from Protestants or anyone else. It's not a worldview that like Ken Griffin, you know, talks about or probably believes in. Where does that, well, why don't we talk about that anymore? Where does that obligation come from? And how do you restore people's sense of it?

• 8:25Speaker 02

  Well, I think it's common to a lot of religions, right? You're right, there's the Protestant, you know, you certainly find it in Catholic social teaching. Yes. I think you certainly find it in Judaism, which, you know, my reading of it is especially oriented around raising that next generation. And so, you know, not by coincidence do the world's great moral traditions have this embedded. Well, that kind of is the moral tradition, right? Well, yes, that's right. There's a common thread there. You know, I think you don't see it as much today for two reasons. One is that it is constraining, right? The entire premise of obligations and duties, as opposed to merely rights and privileges,

• 9:10Speaker 02

  is that there are things that you should be doing, even if they are not the thing that is the most fun at that moment in time, even if they are not the thing that you personally want to be doing at that moment in time. Sometimes just because it is the right thing to do and it is, you know, something that is important to the well-being of those around you. A lot of times, I think what you find in these moral traditions is that also in the long run, it is good for you too, that there's a recognition that humans are frail, flawed people, and simply pursuing, you know, what the economist would say is optimizing your well-being at every moment in time, leads people to choose all sorts of things that

• 9:54Speaker 02

  are not actually good for them at all. And, you know, that's what I find fascinating about speaking about these kinds of concepts of obligation and duty and the good life, is some people get very skeptical of this, say like, "Oh, yeah, but, you know, no one's gonna choose that when they could just have all this other stuff instead." But you step back and you look at all of the available data and you say, "No, no, they will actually be happier if they choose all this stuff." The, you know... People who are married are happier. People who have kids are happier. People later in life who have done these things live fuller lives overall. They also tend to earn more money. They have whatever it is you actually want to achieve in your life. It is almost

• 10:37Speaker 02

  certainly the case that making these kinds of decisions will be good for you too. The problem is just that in the moment when you're 23, that it's not necessarily a thing that you're gonna choose. That's right. And in a sense, and this goes back to where you started with, you know, what is conservatism? It's a recognition that for people to lead good lives and make good decisions, they need to be operating within this structure. They rely on institutions, their own families,

• 11:08Speaker 02

  ideally an education system, ideally the broader culture to shape and form them and help them make these kinds of decisions that will benefit them, they themselves in the long run. We're not just asking for fixed bayonet charges, you know, into machine guns. We're talking about things that will be good for them, will be good for those around them, will be good for their own kids. But that we know are not things that they're just automatically gonna choose by themselves. And so just, you know, this is the other thing that you just like, just like, well, why, why aren't we doing this? Part of it is people just don't like being constrained. Part of it is we have adopted this sort of what I call market

• 11:51Speaker 02

  fundamentalism, where economists and their way of thinking have somehow persuaded a lot of people that, no, no, no, just everybody choosing what they think is, is good for them at every moment with, with no constraints, is actually the way to optimize welfare for themselves, for the nation, for the economy. And that's just not true.

• 12:14Tucker Carlson?

  Everything you said, well, you've described the basis of any civilization. You know, no civilization can continue ignoring what you said. So it's obvious. I mean, nothing's radical that you described. It's like fundamental, but it does feel like the generation that began in 1946 kind of like didn't know that or something, spent the country into bankruptcy, sort of dying in their condos in South Carolina, leaving nothing to their children or grandchildren. It does seem like things change, those assumptions changed with the baby boom.

• 12:52Speaker 02

  I think that's right, and I think part of the answer is, is the sort of more skeptical or cynical one that, you know, this generation has not been especially thoughtful and obligation oriented.

• 13:08Tucker Carlson?

  Man, you ought to join the State Department. That level of diplomacy is awe inspiring.

• 13:13Speaker 02

  That's, many of my friends are Boomers. Let me say. But I also think part of what we saw happen is that we went through, the Boomers lived a life where everything did just seem to work.

• 13:28Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 13:29Speaker 02

  That, you know, if you look, and sorry, I kind of, I always come back to the economics side of these arguments because I see them sort of infecting our culture. You know, you had these folks like Milton Friedman is a classic example of someone who was sort of making this very public case that literally his, his best work is called Free to Choose, right? That, that was the mantra. And, and what Americans were experiencing in American society was that this just worked, that, that because we weren't paying attention to and were instead taking for granted all of that institutional capital we had built up in the American culture, because we were taking for granted that we were the dominant

• 14:08Speaker 02

  industrial power, you know, far and away ahead of anybody else, it felt like, oh, you don't have to worry about these things. You can just leave people free to choose. They will just make these kinds of decisions, you know. Investors will just invest in the best things. We will get the best innovation. We will create the good jobs. This is just how things work. A magic hand. Just that, well, this is right. And this is something I write about a lot, right? Adam Smith, the, you know, father of capitalism, had this idea of the invisible hand, which if you go back and look at what he was actually talking about, what he was describing, it like literally in the paragraph where he writes about the invisible hand, he has all these requirements like,

• 14:49Speaker 02

  if people prefer investing domestically to invest investing in foreign countries, if people focus on doing the things that will lead to the greatest outcome, you know, the greatest output and most jobs, then the economy will work. And in this generation, just all that got erased. It's actually interesting. In the leading economics textbook, it literally got erased. They just elapsed it out. And just left with the part that the invisible hand leads to this stuff. And so it it sounds like a magical force. Well, yeah, I call it magical. It's like the Holy Spirit. Exactly. And and that and this is why I call it market fundamentalism, because it it, you know, it sounds like a derogatory term. Obviously, I'm using it somewhat derisively.

• 15:31Speaker 02

  But it's a it's a descriptive term. It is a fundamentalism, just like a religious fundamentalism that that misinterprets the original texts and ideas to create this very absolutist, easy to live by framework, even though it's probably not actually true and probably isn't actually very good for people. And that is the course that that that the US set itself on and American culture set itself on in a period where things were working well, right? You can get away with it for a while. And then, especially as the Cold War ended, as we sort of moved into this new world,

• 16:11Speaker 02

  it, I would say, just it went off the rails and we started making choices in our foreign policy and our economic policy that assumed a whole bunch of things that certainly weren't true anymore, even if they ever had been true. And and I think in both our culture and our economy, we're now sort of grappling with the consequences of it.

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• 19:42Tucker Carlson?

  Tucker. Um, yeah, I guess the good news is the consequences are now so obvious and so dire that I, you know, I don't think anybody really is in favor of continuing to do what we've been doing for the last 50 years.

• 19:55Speaker 02

  Unfortunately, a lot, unfortunately, there are, there are many people who still are.

• 19:59Tucker Carlson?

  Really?

• 20:00Speaker 02

  Yes, among those for whom this has all worked. Right? Because there, there is still a class of people, certainly in the United States. If you are highly educated, um, you know, living in certain regions.

• 20:13Tucker Carlson?

  Older.

• 20:14Speaker 02

  Older, if, um, you know, certainly if you are the beneficiary and have all the savings from the golden era.

• 20:21Speaker 02

  But you know, there's, there are plenty of people in their twenties and thirties. If they got, you know, were in the right place, have the right education, get the right kind of job.

• 20:33Speaker 02

  They're doing very well and they have immersed themselves in a culture that says, well, we are here because we deserve to be here. Right? In our wonderful meritocracy, it is we who are supposed to be the winners and the ones who sort of make the decisions for everybody else. And.

• 20:56Speaker 02

  Let's look at just some economic statistics like our TVs are bigger than ever. We have more stuff than ever. And so let's keep, let's keep the good times rolling. That's, you know, I, I think there's a lot of-

• 21:12Tucker Carlson?

  It's such a small percentage of the country, though.

• 21:14Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 21:14Tucker Carlson?

  It's in that position. So that's what I find baffling. It's like, I mean, of course, famously, life is unfair. It's not exactly clear how real free will is. I mean, there are like lots of deep questions that arise when you think about how wealth is allocated. Luck plays a role or providence or whatever, but it's still hard. If you're in that percentage that's been benefiting and continues to benefit from the current arrangement, it's hard to understand how you don't look around and think to yourself, this isn't working for like the overwhelming majority of people and that's bad. Like if that doesn't occur to you, what does it say about you?

• 21:53Speaker 02

  It's a fair question. I guess, you know, one reason I have maybe sympathy is strong, but, but a, a sense of it is I even look at, you know, my own trajectory, going through a lot of these same institutions and kinds of jobs. You know, I ended up working for Mitt Romney's presidential campaign.

• 22:15Tucker Carlson?

  After graduating Harvard?

• 22:16Speaker 02

  Yes. Well, actually, I was still in law school at Harvard. Was in charge of domestic policy for the Romney campaign. And we started, questions would come in, what are we going to do about the opioid epidemic? And I'm, I'm embarrassed to say this, I'm hopping on Google. Like what is an opioid, like, like opium? I mean, I literally had no idea. And at that point, it had already been the deadliest drug epidemic in American, you know, probably for going on a decade at that point. And it was extremely easy to not even know it existed.

• 22:56Speaker 02

  To have, to have absolutely no contact with or familiarity with those kinds of challenges happening in other parts of the country. It was extremely easy, if you had taken your economics class where they tell you that free trade benefits everybody. And, you know, maybe you lose a job, but it's okay. You get a better job, to then be working in a big city, surrounded by other people of good jobs and just kind of assume that that happened. And I think, you know, one of the really important things about Donald Trump's success is that I do think that represents a point at which you can no longer say, well, you could reasonably be sitting around, just not understanding. At that point, you,

• 23:39Speaker 02

  I think you face a choice. You either have to recognize, wow, there are some things I did not understand that are serious problems that, that we need to focus more on, or, and plain people did this, you conclude, wow, I just don't like my country. The people must be too racist, or xenophobic, or just not understand how good they have it, and good riddance. And let's be honest, again, you're right, it's a small share of the population. But among those with power and money and influence, it's a large share of the population that, that even with Donald Trump's success, even now, went in that direction. And they

• 24:19Speaker 02

  call it, you know, a term, they call it grievance anomics. If you, if you think there are problems out there that things are not going well, you're just feeding the grievances of those who should take opportunity.

• 24:32Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, I just, I think that's a moral crime, that attitude, and I hope the people who have it are held responsible at some point. Sorry, I can't, I have to, I've asked you this before, you've never given me a real answer, so I'm just gonna ask you one last time. Given your profile, your, your life history, the merit badges you collected, the fact you went to Harvard Law School and worked for Mitt Romney, how did you wind up with these views? You're like, the only person who, J.D. Vance, okay, but, but he had a childhood that was different from yours. You, more than anybody I've ever met, like, took a path that was not obvious at all, given, why did you do that?

• 25:09Speaker 02

  It's a good question. I, I don't try to avoid answering. I don't necessarily have a great answer. I, I think the, if I were to pick two things, one is, I ended up sort of hitting all those important checkpoints, but I kind of had a much quirkier upbringing. I mean, I give my parents a lot of credit. They, they were Americans, but they grew up overseas, met overseas.

• 25:37Tucker Carlson?

  Where?

• 25:37Speaker 02

  In Israel. And so, you know, met at the American school, my dad lived on a kibbutz, they got married there. And so, they moved back to the US. I was raised in the US, but with a, just sort of... Different outlook. They hadn't come through that, that model that we were just talking about in the, you know, in the sixties and seventies. They weren't here. And so They were growing things? They're literally, that's right. Uh, my dad was, my dad was head of irrigation on a desert kibbutz. And so like, pipe, you know, like literally nozzles on pipes. Um, and so, you know, I, I look back and I realized

• 26:16Speaker 02

  that I've been incredibly fortunate to have been given at once both a lot of the sort of superficial, um, accompaniments of the standard meritocracy, but also an outlook and set of values that from them really did focus much more on, you know, question one is, is family and what you're doing there? And how you structure a job and a career comes around that and Amen. So on and so forth. Were they religious? No, not, not especially. Um, you know, I think the, uh,

• 26:58Speaker 02

  this thing you see a lot and the, you know, the Israeli connection is interesting there. On one hand, it's very religious. There's also just a very strong sort of secular culture, um, that I think exists there. And so, so I had that. And then the other thing I had and, and my grandfather was an extraordinary trial lawyer and from the age of about four, he, my age of four, he just, whatever I wanted to say, he would just immediately take the other side of it and start arguing with me about it. Uh, my, my first book is, is He was willing to argue with a four-year-old? He, yes, that was, if that, if that was who was, if that was who was available to argue with, that was who he was going to argue with.

• 27:40Speaker 02

  My, um, my first book is, is in memory of, of Irv, who always liked a good argument. That was, and I just grew up loving that. And the idea that everything was always up for argument and testing both sides of, I think, just left me at every stage reflexively unwilling to

• 28:01Speaker 02

  Accept the, you know, sometimes in a very unhealthy contrarian way, but also in a healthy contrarian way insisting on arguing about it and pushing on it from all directions. And so, you know, I think those two things then left me kind of moving up through standard Republican conservative politics, but a little bit as an outsider and looking at saying like, well, like, why is that? I'm not sure that makes sense. That's not what I thought we were here to do. I thought conservatism meant the things we've been talking about here, not tax cuts. And that led me down a lot of interesting paths.

• 28:38Tucker Carlson?

  Well, it led you away from like, everybody in your world. Because, I mean, I've lived here the whole time. The, the path for conservatives at Harvard Law School is well trod, not a huge number, but there are, there have been a lot over the years and they're all, you know, I'm a socially liberal but economically conservative. And you literally took the inverse position. It's like the single most unpopular combination of the, that you could have.

• 29:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't, I guess that's true.

• 29:10Tucker Carlson?

  You guess that's true?

• 29:11Speaker 02

  Now that, now that you

• 29:12Tucker Carlson?

  That's definitely true.

• 29:12Speaker 02

  Now that you mention it, um, I do think though, and, and this is been my experience with, with all the work that, you know, we've been doing at American Compass over the last five years, uh, which is my organization that sort of works on, okay, what is, you know, what is conservatism? What should it mean going forward? Um, I find that as long as you're willing to sort of engage people in good faith and try to understand what they think and tell them what you think and argue about it. Again, this is back to the, you know, our, our mantra is intellect, intellectual combat with, with personal civility. Yeah, there are the people will be like, oh, well, I don't like that. Like, I don't like that person anymore.

• 29:57Speaker 02

  The vast majority of people are actually really interested in it. And so, you know, I, I guess it would be interesting to be sitting here like telling you about the huge personal cost I've paid for doing these things. Frankly, there hasn't been the personal cost at all. It's been very

• 30:16Tucker Carlson?

  You did give up a lot of money, just in point of fact, but, but whatever.

• 30:19Speaker 02

  Oh, well, certainly to do public policy instead of going and, you know, being business, whatever. But that's always been, ever since I was a high school debate nerd, I was always, always wanted, like I said, always wanted to be arguing about stuff.

• 30:31Tucker Carlson?

  So, okay, you managed, I think, to, in the four years, four years that you've

• 30:38Speaker 02

  Five years.

• 30:38Tucker Carlson?

  Five years you've been running it, okay. To remain pretty civil and people are civil back and like, it's all interesting until the tariffs happen, at which point it becomes pretty emotionally charged, I would say. So, what's your position on Trump's tariffs? Are they working? And what kind of response have you received as like one of the best known tariff proponents?

• 31:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, it has been a fascinating time since sort of the administration started, especially after Liberation Day. You know, my view is that the, the direction that, that Trump and the administration are going is exactly the right one, that, that the willingness to focus on how globalization failed, that free trade isn't real, it has not worked out the way it was promised, we need to move on to something else, is exactly right. The fact that they're willing to acknowledge it has costs and that we should bear those costs is extraordinary. I mean, how long has it been since we had politicians who were actually willing to stand up and say, yes, this isn't just a free lunch, there, there are actual costs here and we think they're worth it.

• 31:47Speaker 02

  And I think that's right, too. It's such a good point. And it's the irony, of course, is it's exactly the, you know, the very important people, very serious people in the newspaper columns and so forth, who've been complaining like, oh, we politicians won't do this, they won't be serious. You finally get, you know, President Trump and Secretary Besen, people who are willing to say these things, and immediately everybody attacks them. How dare you suggest we should accept any costs? How, you know, like, look at these fools saying, you know? And it's like, no, this is, this is exactly what actual leadership looks like. This is what we need if we are going to get back out of the hole that we've dug. I think that being said, you know, especially when you are doing this kind of thing that

• 32:30Speaker 02

  does have upfront costs, you're, you're kind of making an investment for a payout down the road. You have to be really careful to keep those costs as low as you can and make sure you're setting yourself for as much of the return as you can. And, you know, I think in some of the sort of frankly, chaos that we've seen in changes in the policy, in a lot of people not necessarily being clear on, okay, where are we going and why? I think in some cases, the costs have been higher than they have to be. And I think it's been really encouraging to see, you know, really after Liberation Day, a bunch of shifts that have improved things. So I'm somebody who thinks tariffs are good, we should have them, but you should phase

• 33:15Speaker 02

  them in. You should give people time to adjust. And so now we've started doing that, right? Tariffs were paused, so we have negotiations with China, they've now come back down a bunch, so we can have negotiations. I think what we should have is a very clear commitment that down the road, two or three years out, for the long run, countries that are not playing by the rules, obviously China, you know, countries that are not willing to take a balanced approach to trade, yes, there are going to be tariffs, there are going to be obstructions. And if you are somebody who wants to do business in America, you need to start planning for that. And you need to invest more in America.

• 33:57Speaker 02

  And going back to Adam Smith and what the paragraph about the invisible hand actually says, if we want our economy to work well, it has to be one where the way to make a lot of money in America is by making things in America.

• 34:12Tucker Carlson?

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• 34:56Tucker Carlson?

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• 35:38Speaker 00

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• 36:35Tucker Carlson?

  So for example, China.

• 36:38Tucker Carlson?

  I heard the estimate from someone in manufacturing yesterday makes the world's magnets. They're used in everything. We have about two weeks left supply in the United States. China's cut off all shipments of magnets to the United States. How long till we build a magnet plant? Like, what, how does that resolved?

• 37:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. These things take time. I think it's funny, you know, you said earlier, like, well, the good news is people are starting to realize how big a mess we've made. The other thing I always say is the good news is that we've done it to ourselves, which is, I guess, mixed news, but it's good news in that it is policy choices that we made that have led to this situation, which means we can make other policy choices. You know, there are some things, if you think back in the 1970s with the oil crisis, oil embargo and so forth, there was a situation where in the foreseeable period, we just didn't have oil. Now, it turns out, we actually did have massive reserves of oil.

• 37:46Speaker 02

  It took technological innovation to access it, but at least in the short to medium term, you could say like, look, we just don't have the oil and our economy runs on oil. Like, that's just a sort of geographic reality. The problems that we have created with trade are not about actual geography, right? It's not like, oh, shoot, we can't grow avocados where we get the avocados from. The problems are all a result of our country's decision that we didn't care what we made or whether we made anything at all. And other countries, China being obvious, but you know, it's also Korea and Japan and Taiwan and Germany saying, no, it's actually really important to what we make.

• 38:28Speaker 02

  And so we are going to be the ones that invest in making it. And as a result, all of that investment, all of that technology went to those places. But if we make the other decision, if we say, no, actually, we care at least as much at those places, we are going to make things here too. We certainly, we have the natural resources, we have the innate skill in the workforce, we have the capital, we can do it too. And, you know, just to sort of... Two, two really good examples of this. One is Reagan actually did this, right? People think, oh, Ronald Reagan, free trader. Like, not true. The Libertarian Cato Institute, when Reagan left office, Cato called him the worst protectionist since Herbert Hoover.

• 39:13Speaker 02

  You know, especially vis a vis Japan, Reagan had no patience for the trading relationship as it was working. And under threat of tariffs, just as Trump is doing now, Reagan went to the Japanese and said, "The way that you are flooding our market with Japanese-made automobiles cannot continue." And the Japanese, not wanting the tariffs, said, "Okay, we will voluntarily cap how much we import into the United States, and we will instead send Honda and Toyota to go invest in the United States." And the entire American auto industry in the American South is a function of, of that, of us, of Reagan saying, "Free, free trade does not work here.

• 39:58Speaker 02

  You need to come invest here." And lo and behold, American workers can build great cars, including Hondas and Toyotas. Toyota actually has, Toyota Camry has more American-made content in it than anything coming out of Detroit. And that was an extraordinary success. Really? Yes. Because it wasn't just, so the first thing that happens is the assembly plant comes over. Once this is a place where you're assembling, well, now it makes sense to move the supply chains over. Now it makes sense, even now they have research and development facilities here. If, this is how these countries got everything from us. They, they took the American manufacturers and said, "Come over here instead." And it all moved. In a case where we've actually said, "No, you have to bring it here," that works too.

• 40:41Speaker 02

  And, and the other great example we're seeing now is with semiconductors, right? We have what's called the, the CHIPS Act, where we basically said, "Wow, it's a huge mistake that America, inventor of the semiconductor, pioneer of, of pretty much everything CHIPS related, we just said we didn't care. We let all go overseas." Right? The reason Taiwan, there, it's not because Taiwan's beaches are made out of silicon. There's, there's nothing special about Taiwan. Taiwanese government said, we're going to lead in chips. And now that the US has said, no, we're going to lead in chips and Taiwan Semiconductor is is making, you know, 60 billion, now another 100 billion of investment in Arizona. Their first plant is coming online and they actually said the yield's coming out of it.

• 41:24Speaker 02

  So basically the quality of the chip manufacturing in Arizona is already better than in Taiwan. So, so we can do it, but it's a policy choice of whether we care and whether we're going to do it.

• 41:35Tucker Carlson?

  So, um, you know, we can't make everything. What should we make? So if you were in charge of reshoring manufacturing to the United States, what would be the industries that would get priority?

• 41:50Speaker 02

  So I think there are a few that you really give priority to because they have some kind of unique strategic value, either for, for defense purposes or because of, of the way supply chains grow up around them. And so chips is a great example of this. Critical minerals, you mentioned the magnets, it's a great example of this. I think batteries, whether it's for electric vehicles, for electric grid generally, for all sorts of uses, is probably one of these things. And so there, there are a few particular things you want to identify and say, we have to have this. And, and that's where I would use what's called industrial policy, right? You just literally say, we've decided this industry is important and government, you know, people call this picking winners and losers.

• 42:32Speaker 02

  It's not picking this company wins, this company loses, but it's picking, we actually have a point of view as a country that we want this thing. Beyond that, one of the things that's so great about tariffs, it's funny, I'm, I'm having a lot of fights about people with this right now because in my view tariffs are actually the free market approach. A tariff, it can be a very broad based. Policy, you're not picking a particular industry. You're just saying, look, we are going to give an advantage to things made domestically. So whichever things make, relatively speaking, the most sense to make domestically will come back. The things that, relatively speaking, make the least sense to make domestically will stay elsewhere.

• 43:17Speaker 02

  We don't have to tell people what to invest in. We can just tell people, all things equal, we're giving a 10% advantage to making things here. Now go. And I think that creates a much healthier economic system. It's much closer to Adam Smith's invisible hand. And it means we have to have less regulation, right? We don't have to go around figuring out, oh, whatever, what's every other country doing? What do we have to correct this way or that way? We don't then have to say, oh, and let's not forget all the losers. We have to now have a whole other set of programs to help everybody who isn't succeeding because we don't have this stuff.

• 43:56Speaker 02

  We just say, we actually want to have a free market in the United States, but it has to be one that makes things. And so we hereby give an advantage to whoever wants to make something here. And then, as, as the Chinese would say, let, let the flowers bloom.

• 44:13Tucker Carlson?

  Why is that so hard to do? That seems pretty straightforward. I would imagine it would have overwhelming popular support. Like, what's the process by which that gets done? And why hasn't it been?

• 44:25Speaker 02

  Well, the, the reason it hasn't been is because our point of view was that nothing that I just said was true. Right? Our point of view, in terms of the underlying assumptions, our point of view was that making things doesn't matter. There's a very famous quote attributed to Michael Boskin, who was the, George H. W. Bush's chief economic advisor. He literally said, potato chips, computer chips, what's the difference? If that is your economic theory, then yeah, who cares? If the idea is, well, anything that China can make more cheaply, we want China to make it, then why on earth would you put a thumb on the scale to make something here?

• 45:06Speaker 02

  And so that model persisted for a very long time, and it persisted partly on the failed, on the very foolish assumption that we just don't care if we can make anything. It also persisted on the foolish assumption that, don't worry, these things will sort of self-correct and work themselves out. So, you know, the best way, I think, to see how badly things have gone is our trade imbalance, right? We get, you know, we bring in more than a trillion dollars more stuff from overseas every year than we sell to the rest of the world. That suggests that trade isn't working very well. Paul Krugman famously said, "Trade deficits are self-correcting." There was an economic theory that said such imbalances won't persist. They will take care of themselves.

• 45:51Speaker 02

  You know, Krugman, I was actually, this was a discussion I was part of with him, and I said, like, "Why do you say that?" And he said, like, "Yeah, that was naive." Like, just, "Sorry, we built an awful lot on that idea, and that was just wrong." You see the same thing, you know, Janet Yellen, who was Biden's Treasury Secretary, has recently said, "Look, the standard economic model was if someone will send you something for cheaper, you just send a thank you note." And she said, "I would never say that again." That just wasn't true. And so, one reason we have not done it is because we actively believe things that were wrong, and we are fortunately now starting to realize that and try to fix it.

• 46:33Tucker Carlson?

  I would argue that's all clearly true. Slightly more complicated, though, because it wasn't just that people believed something that was wrong, now demonstrably. It was that the people who argued it was wrong... Weren't just like debated in good faith, they were destroyed as people. So the two biggest advocates of the position you're describing now were Ross Pro and Pat Buchanan. And both of them were kind of driven from public life on the basis of claims that they were like, not just wrong on economics, but like dangerous, bad people. What was that?

• 47:06Speaker 02

  It's a great point. And I'm using Krugman again as an example. He actually has a fascinating essay where he says, look, some people won't understand this, stuff that we now know is not true. And you're not going to convince them. So the best tool you have is ridicule. That, that if you-

• 47:24Tucker Carlson?

  He wrote that?

• 47:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. It's right, right, still up there on the web. That it's not going to work to persuade them, but with sufficient ridicule, you can either essentially force them to stop saying it, or make sure that nobody else listens to them.

• 47:37Tucker Carlson?

  And it worked in both cases.

• 47:39Speaker 02

  There's another, I guess this is Krugman, this is the Krugman segment of the show. There's a very famous anecdote. Danny Rodrick, who's an economist at Harvard and one of the very few people who has always been skeptical of globalization, tells the story of sending out his manuscript to, for a book about this to Krugman to ask his feedback. And Krugman writes back, you know, the, the substance of this is all fine, but you shouldn't do it. You're, you will give ammunition to the barbarians.

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• 48:50Tucker Carlson?

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• 49:06Speaker 00

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• 49:35Tucker Carlson?

  So that's what I don't understand. So why, I mean, typically even was the debate between, you know, the Keynesians and the Milton Friedman people. It didn't get to that level of like, let's just wreck the person. Let's make, you know, let's make his wife divorce him. But it did, no, but it did on, you know, I mean, it, it kind of wrecked Ross Perot's life, wrecked Pappy Cannon's life. Like, why were the stakes so high on this one question?

• 50:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I'll give you, I'll give you my theory for it because I've, I've tried to go back and find like, where did these economic arguments come from when they're clearly just not true? And as best I can tell, what happened particularly after World War II, and this was in this, you know, era where people kind of were rightfully saying, you know, never again, obviously about the Holocaust, more broadly about World War II, we, we can never go back to that kind of conflict. You have the United Nations, you have all of these sorts of, right? Like that is everybody's focus. And that is when the arguments about free trade actually start to emerge. And they emerge not actually primarily as economic arguments.

• 50:45Speaker 02

  They emerge as a sort of new model of a, of a global world order. Um, and, you know, one thing people looked at, they-

• 50:54Tucker Carlson?

  Now you're getting to the heart of it.

• 50:56Speaker 02

  Well, you know, one thing, so people look at, you know, what happened after World War I, the way Germany had been treated, the idea that, you know, sort of holding them down rather than supporting them helps lead to World War II. So how are we going to rebuild the world after World War II? How are we going to build a sort of inclusive market that builds these companies up? How are we going to rebuild Japan as a democracy? How are we going to rebuild Germany as a democracy? How are we going to combat the Soviet Union, which remember is out there now putting out this ideology that says markets just can't work at all? We are going to put forward this vision. And the best illustration of this is Guy Paul Samuelson, Nobel Prize winner, sort of writes the The Standard Economics textbook that comes out in 1948,

• 51:39Speaker 02

  right after World War II. Remember, I mentioned the invisible hand gets ellipsed. That's in this textbook.

• 51:45Tucker Carlson?

  Which was the textbook for generations.

• 51:47Speaker 02

  Textbook, exactly. And you, you know, I have a copy now. I went and got like, you go through it and you you say, okay, like, well, how does he make there going to be a free trade? And what you find is that he really doesn't. He actually acknowledges all the ways that free trade might not work, that it might be bad for the United States, especially if other countries behave a certain way. And he says, quite bluntly, basically, so what? That if if we actually want to build this kind of global economy that we all agree we need, the United States basically just needs to take the lead and push this forward. And

• 52:27Tucker Carlson?

  Wow.

• 52:29Speaker 02

  And look, again, and maybe I'm being too charitable again, but like, I can see why someone would say that in 1948.

• 52:36Tucker Carlson?

  I totally agree. And I got to college 40 years after that book was written and it was assigned, it was the first book you read in economics class.

• 52:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. And and by the way, you could even say it was right in 1948, that that, and this goes to the point about the boomers, that the policy as we pursued it into the 50s and 60s did accomplish a lot of what we wanted it to. There's a very famous article in in Foreign Affairs in 1971, where one of the kind of leaders of international economic thinking says quite, quite explicitly, he says, you know, the case for free trade has always been primarily a foreign policy case, not an economic policy case. And then, of course, you get to that when we get to China, right? The entire argument, the entire argument for welcoming China to the WTO. I mean, economists said like, oh, this will create good jobs for Americans and whatever.

• 53:26Speaker 02

  But the actual argument was, this is going to fix China. This, this is the way we democratize China, we liberalize China. And if that happens, if China does become a liberal democracy and we do bring them forward in this way, then won't it be wonderful that we have trade with them and and won't it be great that everybody prospers? And again, that that wasn't it like, if that had happened, that might have been a good idea, too. The the problem is that in the post-Cold War era,

• 53:59Speaker 02

  This model fell apart very quickly.

• 54:02Tucker Carlson?

  Can I say, why have I never heard this before? It's like the most interesting thing I've heard in a long time. So you're saying that our economic model was not primarily an economic model was an instrument of foreign policy. It was part, it was like the centerpiece of the global order, post-war global order. And it wasn't like designed really to help the United States as much as it was to preserve stability around the world.

• 54:28Speaker 02

  Yes. I know, there are other people who say that. I've written an essay about it. It's called the, the free trade origin myth that kind of goes through the, the chapter and verse on all these various.

• 54:39Tucker Carlson?

  The way it was presented to me as someone who was always conservative and for markets and repeated all the slogans and all that, and was living in the world where like I didn't know a single person who disagreed, talk about a bubble, was that free market economics in the way that the United States was doing it was not really an instrument, wasn't even a theory, it was like a physics principle.

• 55:01Speaker 02

  Right.

• 55:01Tucker Carlson?

  It's just, it's just true. Okay. So, and to the extent that you deviate from it, you get punished. To the extent that you hew to it, you're rewarded because like gravity, it's just real.

• 55:10Speaker 02

  Right. And this is, this is the fundamentalism.

• 55:13Tucker Carlson?

  Never. But I just, I, I had no idea that this was like, like the UN, something that people who are understandably like horrified by what they'd just gone through, the world war.

• 55:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:26Tucker Carlson?

  It was part of their reaction to that. And they're like, this will prevent that from happening again.

• 55:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, and another good example is, so if you go back, so Samuelson is the key post-world war textbook. There's a, a prior textbook by a guy named Alfred Marshall, who's kind of seen as the father of like modern economics, right? Like Adam Smith is like the original guy.

• 55:45Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 55:45Speaker 02

  Alfred Marshall is a, a British economist, probably the first one to actually be called an economist. No one would have called Adam Smith an economist back in the day. So Marshall writes probably the first economics textbook, comes out in like 1890. And he says essentially nothing positive about free trade. He actually has a whole section, you know, the comparative advantage is this idea that oh, free trade, you know, works out great for both sides. And it's attributed to a guy named David Ricardo, who was a great, you know, early 1800s economist. Marshall has a whole section called "The Narrowness of the Ricardians", where he specifically says, "Look, Ricardo has this nice theory, has some good math associated with it,

• 56:30Speaker 02

  but it only works in very limited circumstances. It makes a lot of sense that Britain, as a global empire, is promoting it, but there are lots of people it doesn't work for. The Americans don't believe it. The Germans don't believe it." And he even has this hilarious footnote where he says, "A lot of these ideas basically seem to be used as a way for, like, people to put one over on the working class." And so, like, again, all of this, and then if you even go back to Ricardo, like, and Adam Smith, these guys, as I was saying, Adam Smith knew the invisible hand didn't work automatically. Ricardo, when he's talking about free trade, he gives the example of how it could work. The famous example is England specializes in cloth, Portugal specializes in wine,

• 57:13Speaker 02

  and here are all the great ways it works them to trade. Right there on the same page, he says, "By the way, this only works if capital is immobile", meaning if the British clothmakers can't pick up and go make the cloth in Portugal. It's, it's, it's right there. And he, and then even more, he notes, "And he hopes that never changes", that, that the idea that, basically, people were going to be stuck investing and doing business in their own countries was one of the, the core premises of, of any of this working. So, it's all there, and it's only post-World War II that you get, partly for the foreign policy reason, and then building on that, people looking around, like Milton Friedman, and like Friedrich Hayek,

• 57:56Speaker 02

  and just saying, like, "Wow, like, this is all just working", right? Friedrich Hayek used this term, "The Self-Regulating Market", and he actually, it's funny that Hayek is one of these libertarians who's now associated with the right of center, and people say, like, "Oh, like, conservative economics", Hayek has a very famous essay called "Why I Am Not a Conservative", in which he specifically mocks conservatives for not being comfortable enough with the idea that markets are just self-regulating and will automatically deliver good answers. And so, it, there's sort of this weird way where the ideas morph into, "Well, it's working. Well, it must work automatically." All the way to this fundamentalism where, like you said, it's just like a law of physics.

• 58:40Speaker 02

  And if you don't understand that, you must be an idiot. And more importantly, you must be a heretic. And heretics are the one thing we cannot have.

• 58:47Tucker Carlson?

  Boy, I mean, well, that that's just, we watched that happen. We watched that happen. And I participated in the slander, by the way.

• 58:55Speaker 02

  I did, I have my, my, you know, my original college economics paper. I've got like, here's my two pages and why, why free trade is good. And I have this great sentence that's like, you know, while some workers will lose their jobs, they will find better ones. Like, A, correct, correct answer. That's what you were supposed to say.

• 59:17Tucker Carlson?

  So what's the reaction to the administration's tariffs in Washington? And my, my sense is not positive, but you're closer to this.

• 59:29Speaker 02

  Well, it's interesting. Washington is changing. I mean, you now write the Trump administration. I think one of the very cool things about and most encouraging things about the second Trump administration compared to the first one is that there is now an entire team of people who understand this stuff are aligned on it, are carrying it out. Right in, in Trump's first term, Bob Lighthizer, who was, I think you had him on recently.

• 59:53Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 59:53Speaker 02

  US Trade was a wonderful guy. He's been incredible mentor to me. He wrote a wonderful book called No Trade Is Free. That talks about his whole history working on this, but especially then, you know, in the Trump administration, how even just within the senior Trump team, the, like, these ideas that we're talking about were incredibly controversial. There were a lot of people who were still like, nope, free trade, you know, how little, like, let's just make sure Trump doesn't disrupt things too much. And now you have a team from Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, Stephen Mirren, the head of the Council Economic Advisers, Jameson Greer, the US Trade Representative, obviously JD Vance, Howard Lutnick at Commerce, all of these people.

• 1:00:36Speaker 02

  Are on the same page that this needs to change and they're going to push forward this new approach. And so, you know, and they have teams that understand that and are working on that. And so there you actually have a whole administration and then an ecosystem of organizations around them working on this stuff that are supportive. In Congress now, you know, they've been trying to bring these resolutions of disapproval and Democrats vote to disapprove just because they disapprove of Trump, even though like, isn't that funny that all of a sudden Democrats are now the, you know, free traders, like literally Democrats are now fighting with labor unions over this because the labor unions to a degree are like, oh yeah, like, hey, this is actually the kind of stuff that we wanted, that we were

• 1:01:21Speaker 02

  talking about back in the 90s when we were shamed for it. And now the Democrats are shaming them for it. But the Republican Party, generally speaking, is quite supportive of it. Some are mostly supportive because it's the party line, but you have a really great set of especially, you know, younger Republican leaders, folks like Josh Hawley, like Bernie Moreno, like Jim Banks, who are being very outspoken and effective advocates for it. And so there, unlike in the past, there is a Washington that is actually supportive of it. And then there's what you would call the blob.

• 1:01:59Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:02:00Speaker 02

  Right. And the blob obviously hates all of it.

• 1:02:05Tucker Carlson?

  Is the blob, is it your sense, is the blob getting less powerful or more effective and organized?

• 1:02:12Speaker 02

  Oh, I think the blob is getting much less powerful.

• 1:02:15Tucker Carlson?

  Good. My sense too.

• 1:02:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's partly, there is more division within it. You know, I was describing some of the things that someone like a Janet Yellen or a Paul Krugman has said recently. It is starting to dawn on folks that the status quo just is not defensible. And it's funny to see the kind of ridicule argument flipped the other way. At some point, standing up and just being like, free trade with China is great, is now the position that's subject to ridicule. And, and if there's anyone who cares about ridicule, it's the blob.

• 1:02:47Tucker Carlson?

  No, that's totally right.

• 1:02:49Speaker 02

  And so that's actually very powerful. And then I also think there's just a way in which, you know, one thing that, that Trump is demonstrating, that folks like Vance and Rubio have demonstrated, is that the blob just doesn't have power over you. That the blob has been so discredited by everything it has gotten wrong, that when the blob tries to apply its ridicule to a JD Vance, right? To be like, forget about them talking to each other, to the extent that it's just performative for the rest of America. America's not going like, oh, well, this former State Department official, you know, says, says JD Vance is wrong, I guess JD Vance is wrong.

• 1:03:33Speaker 02

  They're going like, like, is this the former State Department official who got us into Iraq?

• 1:03:38Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, where are you in jail?

• 1:03:39Speaker 02

  The one who screwed up the Afghanistan withdrawal, or the one that like embraced China, right? Like, and so, look, there are some ways in which it's a huge problem for the country that our, that our experts have been so discredited. It would be nice to have credible experts. But to the extent that it's happened, I think it just does not have the same political power that it used to.

• 1:04:01Tucker Carlson?

  So what, just to go back to your amazing point. Sorry, you've got a dog there.

• 1:04:06Speaker 02

  Oh, welcome.

• 1:04:08Tucker Carlson?

  Hey, Al.

• 1:04:08Speaker 02

  He's a tariff supporter, I think.

• 1:04:11Tucker Carlson?

  Tariff supporter. Sorry, you were nice to the dog in the way in and, and you're marked for life. Your amazing point that these were post-war institutions self-consciously designed to keep order.

• 1:04:27Tucker Carlson?

  How has that worked? Like, leaving aside, and there's really no debate in this room anyway about the effects on the United States. Look at it. It didn't work for us. Did it work for the world? And do we risk conflict by abandoning it?

• 1:04:43Speaker 02

  Really good question. I mean, there's one way. So one way in which it obviously did work for the world is that it obviously worked for hundreds of millions of Chinese subsistence farmers.

• 1:04:54Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:04:54Speaker 02

  Who have now benefited from China's growth.

• 1:04:57Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:04:57Speaker 02

  And China is the top example, but lots of countries have benefited from this system and to the extent that the US was happy to kind of be the consumer for other countries as they developed. In some ways, we obviously benefited from getting to consume a lot of stuff, too. So I think it's important certainly to acknowledge that. And I think it's even important to say, you know, good US policy, right? America first policy isn't America only policy. I think we should want a policy that lifts other people up when we can.

• 1:05:32Tucker Carlson?

  For sure.

• 1:05:33Speaker 02

  But I think it's important to be honest about the trade offs and say, you know, look, if we do X, this could have this great effect. It's also going to have this cost and who's bearing the cost. So there have been those benefits. I think during the Cold War era, there was obviously enormous benefit in defeating the Soviet Union. I mean, in that sort of an existential conflict, holding together the American alliance, making sure that it was seeing broadly shared prosperity within it, proving that markets could work better than communism. Those were all extremely important things. And by the way, it did

• 1:06:17Speaker 02

  work. We did win the Cold War. I mean, that's always the one piece of credit I will give the market fundamentalists as I'm, as I'm decrying them. You know, the reason this became the standard economic thinking on the right of center is because Reagan brought it in. Reagan said, you know, my coalition is this kind of, you know, free market economic thinking, even as he himself was not a fundamentalist on it. The more traditional social conservatism and the Cold War hawks. And what actually did all those folks have in common? They hated communism. And gosh darn it, they succeeded. And so like, it's very important to give that its due.

• 1:06:59Speaker 02

  I think where things go off the rails is once you don't have that existential threat anymore. And you see it in the foreign policy context too, right? Where all those hawks are now like, well, let's go like find other wars to start in ways that are neither conservative nor good for the nation.

• 1:07:14Tucker Carlson?

  No.

• 1:07:15Speaker 02

  And the economic folks say like, well, like, great. How can we like continue to carry this further? Well, like now we need the WTO. Now we need free trade with China and on and on. And so I think it's, it's sort of, it's, it's the classic pendulum swing from something that, you know, a world of no trade isn't a good world either. Some good ideas were introduced. They did accomplish some things and then it just sort of kept on swinging all the way to the other side. And, you know, that's where I think we, we got stuck. And where it's now very helpful to see we've kind of dislodged it and, and we're, we're swinging it back.

• 1:07:55Tucker Carlson?

  Specifically on China. And they were open about it in the early seventies when Nixon famously went to China, that this is, this will be good for the world because it will de-radicalize China, which is the height of the Cultural Revolution when he said that. So I'm pulling back from that and starting a trade war with China. Does, does that increase the, the chances of a conflict, a military conflict with China?

• 1:08:23Speaker 02

  I don't think so. I think other things have increased the chances of conflict, right? The chant, the, the fact that since the year 2000, China, rather than liberalizing, has become more authoritarian with more expansionist ambitions, with a massive military buildup.

• 1:08:40Speaker 02

  That makes it more likely that we're going to have a conflict. But I think one of the the key failures of the blob is that it always tends to to live in the world as as they wish it were.

• 1:08:53Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 1:08:53Speaker 02

  Rather than the world as it is. Like, I wish we were in a world where China had liberalized. That sounds great, but we don't. I wish we lived in a world where, you know, the US was still the the superpower that could essentially dictate terms. I mean, when we did a bad job, that was bad, but all things considered, it would be great for the United States.

• 1:09:14Tucker Carlson?

  You want your country to be on top.

• 1:09:15Speaker 02

  Absolutely. But that's just not the world anymore. It's not it's not a question of should, it's a question of is. And so in the world that we have, the idea that like, well, higher levels of trade with China is what's going to diffuse conflict, that's just like a cliche that people say. Like, you know who had like really close relationships in trade? France and Germany and the UK before World War I and World War II. Like, this idea that countries that trade don't go to war with each other isn't actually a a thing. And so, you know, conversely, when we entirely decoupled from the Soviet Union, we had a war that stayed cold.

• 1:10:00Speaker 02

  And so, you know, I think the United States needs to make its decisions about the economic relationship with China pretty much independently, not believe that one choice versus the other is the way that we're going to manage the the foreign relations. All things considered, I think our best chance of maintaining stable, peaceful foreign relations is to make clear that we are, first of all, is to reindustrialize and make sure that we are capable

• 1:10:29Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 1:10:30Speaker 02

  of deterring China. But then also to make very clear that we are not going to buy into this gobbledygook, that we are going to be realists and we are going to look at the world as it is. And one element of that is not to pretend that you can have free trade with an authoritarian communist regime.

• 1:10:49Tucker Carlson?

  So how does the tariff story end? Or, I don't know, end, but like, in the next five years, we're clearly going to have some kind of economic reset, people will get poorer, that's kind of guaranteed, I think, I expect it anyway.

• 1:11:03Tucker Carlson?

  Do then we evolve past that and become more prosperous and more cohesive? Like, how does, how does this trend?

• 1:11:08Speaker 02

  I think we do. I think the best way to understand what's going on is to, to think about this kind of world order that we've been talking about a bunch and recognize that what we are going through is a transition out of US as sole superpower to, I guess you would call it a multipolar world where, you know, China is a kind of peer competitor and adversary. Secretary of State Rubio has actually been talking about this a lot. And all of the assumptions we made, we've been talking about the fourth policy case for free trade. In a world where the US was the power, you could make a case that it was worth accepting these various costs for sort of maintaining that status.

• 1:11:53Speaker 02

  In the world where it, where it is no longer, we're, we're seeing in real time how it breaks down, how you can't just be the benevolent open market when China is now bigger, bigger than you and more technologically advanced in some ways. And it, it can't go on that way. And so, you know, I think the tariffs are the sort of tip of the spear of saying that system is over. What do we want to have replace it? And I think what, what the United States should want, and what I see the administration pointing toward and pushing toward is basically, look, we still want to have strong allies. We still want to have free trade among our allies. Right?

• 1:12:35Speaker 02

  When I was talking about that idea, if you have a tariff on the outside, you can have a freer market on the inside. Ideally, that's not just the US alone. Ideally, that goes for a set of countries that actually are market democracies and do want to play by the rules. And so what the US is doing with the tariffs is saying, look, the open season, everyone does whatever they want and unconditionally gets benefits of American defense, American market. That's over. New system, we would like to have strong alliances and relationships and low tariffs, but there are now conditions. Condition one is balanced trade.

• 1:13:17Speaker 02

  And again, that's this idea that free trade is great if you're actually trading stuff for stuff and you're doing it in a way that fits with with the economic model where it's supposed to work. And so, you know, countries that have been basically taking the most valuable industries for themselves and just selling to us, that's over. Piece number two, on the defense side, everybody needs to pull their own weight and actually lead in their own areas. You want to deter Russia, Germany, go figure out what you need to do to deter Russia. You want to deter China, Japan, go figure out what you need to do. Don't be looking over your shoulder, sort of, have I done enough homework to go outside and play? Like, actually get it done.

• 1:13:59Speaker 02

  And it's actually interesting, you see the Trump administration, Stephen Mirren, who's the Chair of the Council on Economic Advisers, gave a very good speech talking about what are we actually looking for in these negotiations? And he said, this is economic and security. These are not separate conversations. This is a question of whether you are in for both. And by the way, one way you could balance your trade with us would be to buy a whole bunch of American weapons and pay us for the security services we provide, because it ain't going to be free anymore. And then piece three is China is out. That more like in the Cold War system, you can't have these sort of entangled systems

• 1:14:42Speaker 02

  where, okay, the US doesn't want Chinese supply chains, so they just go set up in Mexico and it comes in through Mexico.

• 1:14:48Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly.

• 1:14:49Speaker 02

  Mexico, you know, and this is actually, I think, why Trump started the way he did with Mexico and Canada. Mexico and Canada with the US, you should be the core of this alliance we're talking about, but you need to understand that it can't work the way it's been working. It's going to have to work on these terms. And so you see, you know, someone like Treasury Secretary Scott Besett specifically saying, you know, Mexico, we need to see the same tariffs toward China that we're putting toward China. Canada, we need to see that same policy because it can't be a sort of screen door.

• 1:15:23Tucker Carlson?

  I mean, I think it's dawning on a lot of people that China has enormous influence over the political structures of Canada and China, particularly Canada.

• 1:15:34Tucker Carlson?

  Um, in some real way, kind of controls Canada. So is it, is it too late to, to bring those two countries into?

• 1:15:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't, I don't think it's too late. And you know, the, the funny thing about this sort of set of demands, right? Is that like the, the blob gets very uncomfortable with this, like, oh, like you can't, you know, you'll drive these people into China's arms. And you actually step back and you look at it objectively and you say, this isn't some, you know, exploitative client tribute regime. This is a set of demands, which by the way, we hold ourselves to. We, we, we are not asking them to switch to a trade relationship where we get all the advantages. We're just asking for a balanced one. We're not asking them to pay for our defense. We're just asking them to do their fair share. We're not asking them to keep China out so we get all the fun with China. We're saying we all need to keep China out.

• 1:16:29Speaker 02

  And while there are obviously a lot of people who are very sore at the moment with how they're being treated by the Trump administration, anybody who actually steps back and look at, looks at this, if you are a market democracy that wants to remain a market democracy, this is your chance, right? By the way, not only are these not unreasonable demands, these things are good for you. You should want to be moving to balanced trade. You should want to have the will to get China out. And the US is frankly, helping you by giving you a way to go in, you know, in your own domestic politics to say, look, we can't keep pursuing this compromised relationship partly with China.

• 1:17:09Speaker 02

  If we don't get real about this, we are going to end up outside of the US perimeter and then stuck with China. And I think whether it's Canada and Mexico, uh, you know, Japan, India, Australia, Korea, we've already seen with the UK now the start of a deal. I think that's sort of a no brainer. I think the one where it's hard is Europe. I think Europe is probably more compromised. Uh, they've shown more willingness already to just take the short term.

• 1:17:41Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:41Speaker 02

  Gain, right? You see, the crazy thing is the, the group most opposed to keeping Chinese, cheap Chinese cars out is the German automakers.

• 1:17:49Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, I know.

• 1:17:50Speaker 02

  Because they want to make five more years of money in China before they get thrown out of there. And so I don't know if Europe has the civilizational will. I don't know if they have the understanding of their interests. And because of the way the EU is structured, I don't even know if they have the, you know, this is something that could also pretty much break apart the EU. You could have some countries that say, well, wait a minute. We do want that deal with the US. And if, if we can't get that through the EU, then, then the EU doesn't work anymore. That's where I think you're going to see the most tension. And then you'll see countries that are going to be in China's sphere, right? Pakistan, um, you know, I think a country like Vietnam is a very interesting question, which direction they might go.

• 1:18:33Speaker 02

  At the end of the day, the idea isn't that we sort of are going to be able to get the whole world to gang up on and oppress China. The idea is that we're going to be in a world with two powers that have two very different economic and political systems and different spheres of influence.

• 1:18:47Tucker Carlson?

  Boy, that is best case if, if we wind up there.

• 1:18:50Speaker 02

  And that goes back to your, you know, the, the question about like, well, but isn't this going to start a war or whatever? It's like, no, that this is the best case. This is the formula for actually having, I think, a much more sustainable equilibrium.

• 1:19:02Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, like a peaceful multipolar world.

• 1:19:04Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:19:05Tucker Carlson?

  Which, by the way, we've had for all of history, you know, up until it ended in 1991.

• 1:19:11Speaker 02

  Well, and this is, that's, that's such an important point that people keep raising this as like, like, what is this strange unprecedented thing? And the, like, the crazy Donald Trump is doing. It's like, no, no, no, like, first of all, like, this literally was US policy for the Cold War, right? And like, not to mention, this was the way foreign affairs always worked for however many hundred years before the Cold War. It is only people who think the world started in 1991 that don't understand what is happening.

• 1:19:36Tucker Carlson?

  The problem, though, is like a deeper problem, and I hope it's, I mean, I pray it's resolvable, but it's like, how do you pull back from hegemony? How do you scale back an empire without?

• 1:19:49Speaker 02

  Becoming Great Britain. Yes. Well, and that goes to your question about sort of the costs because there obviously are costs here. You know, some of them are the sort of direct just consumer costs. If you were relying on cheap stuff from China, you don't want to do that anymore. At least in the short run, there is going to be higher cost. I think in the in the medium, not even just like the well someday, but you know, within the five to 10 year window, you actually see the benefits over well, Matt. You see that if you actually return to an economic model that does encourage domestic investment, that does focus on, you know, prosperity in places that aren't just a few big cities, that that is oriented toward creating good

• 1:20:33Speaker 02

  jobs for everybody. You actually get more growth that way. I mean, the dirty secret of this post-Cold War period is we're supposed to take globalization and efficiency and growth. Growth just keeps getting slower. No, I know. Investment keeps going down. In in manufacturing, productivity has actually turned negative, which should not be possible in in a capitalist economy. We are literally getting worse at making things. You need more labor in an American factory today than a decade ago for the same amount of output. And so this just isn't working. And going back to the kind of economic model that did drive our prosperity for so long, I think

• 1:21:14Speaker 02

  will be much better. The point about what happens after empire, that's bigger than the than the economic question. If this were just about the numbers and the production, I think you you can see a very clear way out. The social and political and cultural question of what does the United States become? Can it return to the idea of a republic as in fact, far superior to and more desirable than an empire? On paper, that sounds great. It shouldn't be a problem at all. In in practice, for anyone who studied history knows, no one has ever really stuck that landing. And and that is the challenge we have. Why do you think?

• 1:21:57Speaker 02

  I think probably for a lot of the reasons we're seeing now in our politics, which is that for the political class, for people who run things, going from empire back to republic is not desirable, that the entire push toward empire, then the push toward sort of globalism is a better end state if you are the emperor. If, right, if, right, if you are that set of people. And, you know, for me, ultimately, this is kind of the best way of understanding populism. Because I think everyone agrees something like populism is happening, right?

• 1:22:36Speaker 02

  And it is used often in a very sort of derogatory way, like, oh, populism means, you know, just telling the masses what they want to hear, or ignoring experts, or something like this. Certainly, there are plenty of bad forms of populism, but I think at its core, what, particularly in a democracy, what populism means is that you have a situation where the elected representatives and the other elites, people with power in the society, are no longer fulfilling their own obligation, which is to use that power on behalf of everybody, that they, in fact, have a privilege to be in those positions.

• 1:23:17Speaker 02

  And with that comes the obligation to rule not just in their own interest, but in the interest of the entire nation. And when they lose sight of that, when they think, well, now that we have attained these positions, it is for us to do what is best for us, the response to that is a populism that's entirely healthy. It's to say, well, if the people who are in charge are not going to act on behalf of everybody, we are no longer interested in having those people in charge. And frankly, we will take anybody at all if they at least will start with that commitment that we are here to act on behalf of the broader interest. And so I think what's so, you know, what's so encouraging about the US situation.

• 1:23:59Tucker Carlson?

  What you just said is like, that's the heart of it right there.

• 1:24:02Speaker 02

  I think, I think it is, and I, it really dawned on me speaking to the faculty of a university recently, who were like extremely, like, they don't understand what's going on at all, and. You know, not talking about electoral, just talking about the university as a university saying, look like you guys are a sort of quasi-public institution, you sort of have a, you know, operate in the public trust. And at some point in the last 20 years, you just decided you don't actually have to run this place in the interest of the nation anymore. You're going to run it in the like, interest of yourself and your friends. And your policies are going to be the ones that you like best, not the ones that are best for everybody. And so like, yeah, like either you self-correct somehow, and I don't see

• 1:24:45Speaker 02

  that happening, or this gets done to you. And, and that is a natural and necessary step. And if, if there's a reason to be optimistic for the US, I think it's to contrast what is going on in the US with what is going on, let's say, in Europe, where for all of our political problems, our political system is actually proving itself to be extremely flexible and extremely robust. I mean, it is actually responding to what people want.

• 1:25:15Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:25:16Speaker 02

  And it is bringing new leaders with different ideas and those, and it has been painful and messy, but the ship is in fact turning. You contrast that to what's going on in Europe, where you have frankly, among the population, a very similar set of frustrations and desires. And you have that political class at the top banning, banning political parties. And this is why I think JD Vance's speech at the Munich Security Conference was so important, and gets exactly to the heart of what is going on, of what the Trump administration represents in this respect, where he was saying, look, the biggest problem that, that we all have here, isn't some external adversary, it is our, it is our own capacity

• 1:25:58Speaker 02

  to actually navigate these challenges. And probably better than any country in history, for, for reasons that is driving the blob, the elite absolutely nuts, the US is actually showing some ability to respond. And if we can pull that off, that, that would be pretty exciting.

• 1:26:16Tucker Carlson?

  It'd be amazing. And I agree with every word you've said, and said so, so well. My last question refers back to what you first said, which is about the point of the system, which is to encourage and support and sustain healthy families and bright-eyed, impressive children who continue on the civilization. I don't think any person could disagree with that, and thank you for reminding us of it. What are specific policy changes in the next five years that could help that?

• 1:26:50Speaker 02

  It's a great question, and I think it's important to think about it expansively because it's great that we now have a "family policy" discussion in the US, but a lot of the times, it is basically a, "Well, how big should the child tax credit be?"

• 1:27:05Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly.

• 1:27:06Speaker 02

  Discussion. And to be clear, that is an important piece of it. And this goes back to the boomer discussion as well. We have a system of taxation and distribution in this country that overwhelmingly brings resources to retired people.

• 1:27:22Tucker Carlson?

  I've noticed.

• 1:27:24Speaker 02

  And I don't think we should stop giving resources to retired people. I think, the fact that we have Medicare, that we have Social Security are great things, but if there's any group to whom we should be focusing resources on, it is families raising kids, who are the ones who have been, I think, most squeezed by these economic changes. And I don't think we should believe, "Oh, well, if we manage to get them more resources through some sort of child benefit or child tax credit, that's going to make people have more kids in the short run," right? I don't think that works very well. I don't think we want to be in the business of saying, "Well, if we pay you a little more, will

• 1:28:06Speaker 02

  you have another kid?" But what it will do is make the experience of being a family raising kids better. And in the culture, it will begin to shift what it feels like to be doing that and what people see about people who are doing that, not this constant struggle and getting squeezed, but a little more something that is actually viable and desirable and that we all have committed to supporting. And so, both for the sake of the families and for the sake of the culture, I think that does make a big difference. I also think it's important to note that we will have to pay for that, and the people who will pay for it are the people who are earning a lot of money and don't have kids,

• 1:28:48Speaker 02

  which is the direction of distribution we should be leaning toward.

• 1:28:54Speaker 02

  More broadly, I think than, and this is, it's great that we're sort of landing back here.

• 1:29:00Tucker Carlson?

  I love that you said that out loud.

• 1:29:02Speaker 02

  What?

• 1:29:03Tucker Carlson?

  Well, I mean, the people who will pay for that are the people who are earning a lot and don't have kids, but they're the ones who are constantly saying, well, I don't have kids. So like, why should I have to pay for other people's kids?

• 1:29:15Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:29:15Tucker Carlson?

  To which you'd say, what?

• 1:29:17Speaker 02

  Because that is your obligation as a citizen of the nation. And it is all our obligation to raise the next generation of kids. And whether someone is not called to do that, whether someone is not able to do that, not everybody is going to be doing that. But the idea that you can disavow it and say, not my problem is just not true. I mean, there are very specific like math and demographic related reasons it is your problem, but.

• 1:29:43Tucker Carlson?

  But you're making a moral case, you're making a case about the obligations of citizenship.

• 1:29:46Speaker 02

  Yes, and, and I would say, you know, this, it's very interesting. Whenever you talk about an obligation, the question is like, well, where does that come from? Like, well, just because like somebody said it. And so I do think you have to attach it to something. And, and I think it attaches to two things. One is this obligation of citizenship and the idea that if, you know, insofar as you think you are better off living in America than like having been dropped naked in a jungle somewhere. Like you didn't, you know, you didn't cause America to come into being yourself. You are part of this larger system that if you want to benefit from, you probably need to contribute to. But then also broadly, I have this crazy ideas.

• 1:30:28Speaker 02

  The, the more specifically, you know, you as an individual came from somewhere. Like you're only here because some other people actually chose to take the time and dedicate their life to having and raising you. And so, you know, either you could say like, well, I'm just going to like stick that in my pocket and go on vacation to, on vacation to Greece. Or you can't pay it back. You can never repay your parents for what they gave you. The only thing you can do is pay it forward and do the next thing, the, the same thing for, for the next generation. So.

• 1:31:04Tucker Carlson?

  Whether they're yours or not.

• 1:31:06Speaker 02

  Whether they're yours, that's absolutely right. And, and, and if they can be yours. Ideally, they will be. And if everybody says, well, I'll just support somebody else's, obviously, it doesn't work. But I think that's the sort of dual individual and communal commitment that supports all of this. And so that just, you know, we talked about the kind of narrow family policy of tax policy and

• 1:31:31Tucker Carlson?

  I can see why you're successful because you say these radically countercultural things with the kind of like, of course, you know,

• 1:31:39Speaker 02

  Just putting, just putting ideas out there for whoever wants to pick them up.

• 1:31:44Tucker Carlson?

  So when you go back to Harvard and you say stuff like that, how do people respond?

• 1:31:48Speaker 02

  Interesting question. I actually just did a talk at Yale Law School about this. And one of the really things that's interesting that's going on with younger conservatives is that they are very attuned to this.

• 1:32:01Tucker Carlson?

  Yes, that is true.

• 1:32:03Speaker 02

  There's an extraordinary divide, sort of, really, once you're under 40, certainly once you're under 30, you've just grown up in such a different context that the Cold War Reagan-style conservatism makes no sense. And the things we've been talking about here are just much more responsive to the problems you see out in the world.

• 1:32:21Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:32:22Speaker 02

  The funny flip side of it, then, is that you always get the few progressives who want to sort of come show up. And to your point about like, well, like, nobody could disagree with this. In fact, you will have the few progressives who either somehow like, think this must be a conversation about gay marriage somehow, even if like, they can't, they're not sure how, but they would like, they would like it to be. Or they will just more broadly sort of try to interpret the principles as by implication oppressing some out group. Which is right. I mean, look, that's sort of the core of progressivism.

• 1:33:05Tucker Carlson?

  But there's only one template. I mean, there's other, other things going on that don't affect the trans community. Come on, stop.

• 1:33:11Speaker 02

  Well, even just, you know, this goes to the question of rights and privileges versus duties and obligations. Like, part of the reason progressives get very uncomfortable with that side of the discussion is because

• 1:33:26Speaker 02

  Well, like, wait a minute, that you just like infringed on something. And so there is a lot of, especially a place like Yale Law School, there's a lot of sensitivity to like, well, what like, who, like, who are you infringing on with this view? And the answer is like, everybody.

• 1:33:47Speaker 02

  Like, to be clear, I am an equal opportunity infringer on, I value liberty and would like to protect it, but I am an equal opportunity infringer on all liberty to the extent that it is being claimed to the exclusion of, of all of these other things that matter too, if we are going to have a society and a civilization at all. And it's, that is, in my mind, what, what conservatism meant for most of modern Western history, and it's very exciting that a lot of people are now focused on it again.

• 1:34:24Tucker Carlson?

  I can't improve on that. Or in cast, thank you.

• 1:34:27Speaker 02

  This was so much fun.

• 1:34:27Tucker Carlson?

  Amazing.

• 1:34:34Tucker Carlson?

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