Richard Reinsch on the "New Right" Movement Towards Populism
Summary
Investment Themes: The podcast discusses the tension between consumer-focused and worker-focused economic policies, highlighting the debate over free trade versus industrial policy.
Market Insights: Richard Reinsch critiques the shift towards protectionism and central planning within the conservative movement, arguing it could lead to suboptimal economic outcomes.
Company Discussions: The conversation touches on the U.S. government's potential equity stake in Intel, raising concerns about government intervention in private sector decisions.
Policy Critique: The podcast criticizes the adoption of tariffs and industrial policies, suggesting they may harm the broader economy by prioritizing certain sectors over others.
Economic Philosophy: Reinsch emphasizes the importance of consumer choice in driving economic prosperity and argues against the Marxian approach of pitting workers against consumers.
Historical Context: The discussion references historical economic schools of thought, such as the German historical school, to illustrate the dangers of central planning.
Key Takeaways: The podcast advocates for defending free markets and consumer-driven economics as essential for a prosperous and virtuous society.
Transcript
Capital Record, where we defend free enterprise and capital markets because we believe in the dignity of the human person. Hello and welcome to another edition of David Bonson's Capital Record brought to you by National Review. Uh am excited today to have my friend Richard Ranch coming on. Um I know that we have not done a lot of guests this year. A couple weeks ago we had Dr. Lacy Hunt on. It was the first outside guest we've had on Capitol Record all year. Uh but Richard wrote an article that I read uh a few weeks back uh in law and liberty law and liberty.org and we have the link uh in the show notes for you called reading the new conservatives. And he struck at some of the issues that are so fundamental to our podcast that it opened up, you know, a kind of plethora of conversation topics I really wanted to talk about. And so I asked Richard to come on. So, we're going to devote this uh podcast today to a conversation with me and Richard about the state of the new right and what it particularly means uh in our need to be defending the free society uh where things stand in this age of populism and post-lberalism uh how we can essentially maintain our advocacy for the free and virtuous society and do it in the optimal way. Uh, very few people I like having in this fight with me more than Richard. Let's bring Richard in now. So, with that said, allow me to welcome just our second guest of the year here in the Capital Record podcast. Uh, as we have changed our format this year, we've done less and less with guest and yet today we're in for a special treat because I'm very excited to have a past guest of Capital Record back into our orbit, Richard Ranch. Richard, welcome back to Capital Record. >> Hey, thank you for having me. Wonderful to be on your show. >> Well, Richard, we're uh putting into the show notes the link to an article that you had written that came out here just uh a little less than a month ago. Uh the name of the article was Reading the New Conservatives. and you offered a a kind of response to a book uh the new conservatives that had come out from American Compass. Uh, Capital Record listeners are probably familiar with the uh, fact that American Compass is run by Orin Cass, who's also been on this podcast uh, a number of occasions uh, in in friendly debates with yours truly, myself, on various aspects of labor policy and and uh, financial policy and whatnot. Um, so American Compass published a book called The New Conservatives. you wrote a review and I would love it if you could offer a little summary to listeners as to what the book was about and what your review was about. >> Yeah, you know, it's interesting for me personally. Um, I debated Orin Cass u gosh six years ago now at the first national conservatism conference in Washington in 2019 and it was on the subject of free trade uh versus industrial policy and and and I made uh you know the best arguments I could find for free trade and also you know at that time industrial policy as an idea and concept was still new to many on the right and and there were many people gravitating towards it uh who were near the Trump administration and and near this idea of national conservatism if you want to call it an idea and you know um in that in that moment it it seemed that um a lot of things were just being assumed as true you know manufacturing jobs had been eviscerated we didn't make things in America anymore uh nations that were economically prominent like Germany uh and including our our competitor adversary China all had industrial policies all favored their manufacturing had stolen you know say software manufacturing from us etc and you know it was interesting when I debated or cast in 2019 he was um an opponent of tariffs uh said they were a dumb policy said protectionism did not achieve the results that he wanted to to achieve as a smart advocate for industrial policy and for the government making targeted investments uh and subsidies towards certain industries and sectors in the economy and he was also about the worker and the family and so I it was kind of with interest as I've you know various friends of mine including you David who have debated him and keeping up with or cast reading him and he's now come around to the position that uh tariffs are actually needed in the American economy and so with that sort of spirit I I turned to this book which is uh I don't know maybe 75% essays written by Orin Cass but purportedly uh the book is um the collection of scholars as a whole around American compass but it's very heavily Orin Cass and you know throughout this book we have industrial policy uh we have pro-UN policy we have the need for Silicon Valley and Washington to be tightly aligned uh in terms of investment and research uh we also have this you notion. Um, uh, I'll just say in general that antitrust should be should return to the progressive uh, spirit of the early 20th century which was jettisoned about 50 years ago by free market thinking uh because it really can't give you a standard for juristprudence and evaluating these economic relationships. And so you had you had uh courts really making it up or trying to be pro competitive, but pro competitive always meant you favored the smallest competitor uh in in in the in the suit. And and so you were trying to just aim at decentralization or something like that. And you know, as I read through the book, I I just thought um you know, again, there didn't seem to be a lot of critical reviews that that I could find. There were some, but it it seemed to me I could I could spend time talking about all the ways in which I disagree with these policies or I could really focus on what I think is the core position. And I think this this position um sort of launches into all of the other uh approaches that American Compass takes. And that is is economic policy about the consumer or is it about the worker? and and that is to say um if we focus on the consumer, we're doing something that is inherently to the detriment of American workers and their families and their communities. And I wanted to say, you know, the reason why we're focusing on the consumer is actually because uh that's the best way we know to be proworker. That's how we figure out comparative advantage. That's how we figure out prices. That's how we figure out where to invest. That's how we know um where the action is, where goods and services uh where's the best place to produce them. All of that sort of thing comes through the choices of consumers. And then sort of the thought, you know, uh if if I don't focus on the consumer and I focus on the worker, well, we're we're all consumers, but we're not all manufacturing workers or we're not all workers in this sector or that sector. So inherently I start playing a government game. I I start playing a special interest game and I start thinking that you know this administrative state that we're all rightly oriented against or wary of and wanting to uh limit and I think that's one area where the Trump administration has been for the most part right. We can quibble about the means in which they've used to do that. But inherently, we're going to be relying on the knowledge and the information and the incentives of people in the administrative state to make investments in certain companies and certain sectors of the economy as if they know better than private investors where to put capital. And you know that that just simply is going to if it does quote unquote work, it's it's also it's going to be very limited and it's also going to come with a lot of other costs. And it's also going to involve businesses making what I would think are inherently suboptimal choices about their organization, their labor, their costs, their future pursuits. All of this isn't going to work. And so I wanted and it occurs to me as well what's happening with American Compass, what's happening with much of National Conservatism, including I also review another book in the essay by the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, uh, by Don's Early Light, originally entitled Burning Down Washington, now Taking Back Washington. Um all of these guys are sort of caught up in uh thinking uh they're all sort of they're in this moment that somehow there's a tight nexus between the economy, the virtue and and the government itself. And that's really where we need to be focused on if we want to rebuild our country and our communities and our families. And I think the evidence just isn't there. There's a primary movement in economics in the 19th century in Germany called the German historical school. They make the same move and they criticize in ways in which are very similar to the criticisms that people like you and I face now. They criticize the Austrian school of economics which at that time is just organizing because the Austrian school is saying you have to allow the subjective knowledge of consumer and prices guide economic production. uh there it's there is no objective way to identify what people are going to do. You have to let them freely associate with one another while you have these concrete protections through the rule of law, force and fraud, all of these sorts of things. But you want to let people freely move around economically. And you know the the German historical school took from this we'll use data uh we'll to to form our economic understanding not theory not not any sort of notion of prices and once we do that we'll understand how to reform our countries and make the social sphere work better. And they they lose that argument. and and one they they lose that argument uh ultimately in in the American sphere and in the British sphere. uh but they you know for the for the for certain parts of German history uh particularly in running up to World War I uh they do sort of capture the moment there which uh many you know we can talk more about that and it seemed to me that's we have to push against that uh that sort of mindset if we're going to prevail and defend a free market in this country which now faces multiple multiple pressure points. So when you look at the the sort of whole context of um how these things have moved over the last 10 years, I think guys like you and I were were concerned about where things were 10 years ago and then four years later and then a couple years after that and now now here we are. We you're describing a certain evolution in even the the way that guys like like Orin Cass have gone. Would you say that you're surprised at the evolution or that it is a logical uh byproduct of that that uh trajectory that that kind of point of view that inevitably moves that way? Um, I I think I have other questions about those in the traditional conservative right and where some of that Overton window may have moved, but in terms of those that are starting off with a viewpoint that they're identifying as more nationalistic or more populist and again couching it as saying we want to shift our economic policy priority to workers versus consumers. uh that there is something that might seem benign on the surface of that. Would you argue that what we've seen happen over the last 10 years in this progression is anything other than benign? >> No, I I certainly I I don't think it's benign. I don't I'm not going to necessarily attribute um bad motives. I don't I don't think you are either to uh people in the national conservative front. But I think there is I will say this there is something tantalizing about power and there is something um that we are as flawed human beings when we start to sense that the application of centralized power could affectuate real positive changes that tends to fire us up. I think the question is and I think what you're asking is is when you move when you shift the focus to the worker and you inherently start to say no, we need an industrial policy if we're going to if we're going to take on our adversary like China, that's the which is kind of like the starter kit. Um once you make that move, uh then are you now open because you've said prices aren't going to limit us. We're not going to be determined by whether companies stand or fall on their own. we're not going to be determined by the the cost of capital and where does capital actually want to go and all these sorts of things. Do you not now open yourself up to the moment where we're seeing Kevin Hasset argue in favor of taking a 10% stake in Intel by the federal government and oh by the way there will be more uh such quote unquote investments by our federal government. I think that is inevitable. I think that that movement downstream uh is going to happen and is happening right now. And there's there's and there's the it's it's the question of of believing that somehow the economy needs not just protection for price for contracts forced and fraud but actually needs as Vil Helmki talked about you know if you have you have the you have the people acting in the economy and you're protecting them from abusing and manipulating one another to now the government takes control of the whole for its better ordering. Then once once you've made that move, then all sorts of things start to make sense. >> And that and that's where I was going with this is it you're talking about them deciding that things that we have historically believed as conservatives matter a great deal. that there's a kind of economic cogency in price discovery and in capital allocation and that out of this sort of process of various uh spontaneous ordering of affairs that we gather information that affects decision- making and that there's something less aair to it but it it is helping to drive an optimal condition for productive decision- making. you and you're saying once you say you want to ignore some of those things, bad things can happen. But it's also what they proactively invite in that not just in ignoring price discovery and capital allocation but essentially replacing it with central planning, not with the skeptical eye that um classical conservatives would have had or or a traditional um valued free enterprise system would have in in in yet at this what I guess what I'm getting at is the notion that central planning would be a friend, not a foe, to these outcomes strikes me as brand new for those on the right. um not new at all for those on the left. But in fact, at least the way I've always understood it, the deciding difference between those on the right and the left in matters of economic policy was those who believed they could be centrally coordinated and those who believed that they not only could not be but should not be. And um Hayek referred to this as a fatal conceit. It strikes me that now there are those identifying as on the right that are adopting the fundamental thesis of the left. I think that's that I mean when when we look at the tip of the spear right now of the Trump administration whether it's the tariffs the this newlyannounced policy of taking uh a stake in a private company ostensibly for national security reasons although you just said you had to have export controls on Nvidia for national security reasons but now you say they can sell uh to China their >> product fairness. I'm not being I'm not being a smart alec, but in total fairness and honesty, are they still saying national security with the >> That's what I'm getting to. I mean, that's what I'm getting to. Yeah. >> And then then like the national security with Nvidia. Oh, but now you can sell. You just give us the give us a 15% cut. So we the the ration shift and change. >> Yeah. But the government creeping into the the business sector continues a pace and now we see we're going to have we're going to have a sovereign wealth fund. We're going to have this idea of bringing we're bragging about bringing in more revenue. It's going to help us expand government services and programs. It's going to help us pay for entitlements rather than thinking about how do we bring down uh our entitlement state. I see no principled limit at this point in defenders of what the Trump administration is doing for any limits on government power short of pragmatism uh short of what you think is going to work or won't work. And that leaves you into the situation of of how do you tell the distinction between the private commercial sector and the public sector which is you know something that JD Vance said a couple of years ago that there is no difference between the private and the public anymore and that's a good thing. we should recognize it. Or think about the author of the other book I reviewed who said, "We're going to make the corporations do exactly what they we want them to do and it's going to be glorious." That all seems to be coming to fruition in a ways in which when I heard this in 22 and 23, I really didn't think would happen. U but now we're here. >> So So this this is really important. I think listeners know where I stand on a lot of this and and I don't mind sharing for listeners that as I've gotten to know Richard over the years and and and followed his material, you you can assume for our purposes here that he and I are pretty aligned on most of this. So, so now I want to ask you um not theoretically or hypothetically or for the purpose of getting to where we already know we agree, but really out of my own curiosity, um I am not sure that there is a uh significant movement that is with the administration on the Intel deal. Um, now I would have maybe guessed that 10 years ago there wasn't a significant movement on the tariff side and then I would have been proven wrong and and I believe that maybe Trump more than Trumpism did significantly move the right >> on free trade. But I would point out that to do it, they had to facilitate a total intellectual schizophrenia in the right to allow it to happen. Because even if 80% of people on the right now talk negatively about free trade, 20% of them are doing it for one reason, 20 for another, 20 for another. But to your point of either using a national security canard or protectionism or um intellectual property rights or or various other things that flip around, they did it incoherently. But I would grant that they did it successfully that they really have moved the right on trade. But I do wonder because I look at a lot of the other issues that guys like you and I have pushed back on Josh Holly on credit card fee limits. um you know JD Vans saying he wanted a higher federal minimum wage. I don't think there's any ground swell of support um even if a couple people on stage at Natcon say so for those issues. So I guess what I'm wondering is is this equity stake thing in Intel and sovereign wealth fund and we want to do it in other sectors and uh Howard Lutnik saying that there's companies that we're a huge customer for, we should own a piece of them. is this may be a moment that could be a blessing in disguise for guys like you and me because it will be a enough is enough moment for many on the right who we haven't yet found an enough is enough moment. >> Well, I mean I I I I could see it I could see it both ways. I mean I'll just go back to kind of where we started in this conversation which is how rapidly things have progressed in the last five years um uh 10 years to five to 10 years. The more you lay the groundwork for the government ordering relationships in the private commercial sector, the more those players in the private commercial sector start to make decisions to please people in the government, to please bureaucrats, to meet requirements, to get capital, to get purchases, to get contracts, etc., etc. You start to get us more and more comfortable with the idea that there is no public private distinction. And once you start to play that game, then you're in the realm, I don't think I'm exaggerating, you're in like Japanese 1970s, 1980s industrial policy realm where um, you know, essentially your national champions are effectively tools of the government and they are going abroad to spread, you know, Japanese commerce and it and and and remember the verdict at the end of all of that, the Japanese government said, "We thought our industrial policy was the source of our success. uess we came to find it was the source of our ruin. Could that now could that could those principles and that logic and that habit that behavior of thinking spread to other sectors? I mean the newly elected senator I live in Ohio um Bernie Moreno is now advocating to put workers on uh company boards, publicly traded company boards. He I think he has legislation to that effect he sponsored with the Democrat. Um, >> that that's an old that's an old Orin Cass idea as well. I think >> that's an or Cass idea. It's also a Josh Holly idea. Now, do those sorts of things start to spread? Now, I'm also from the South and Southern Republicans are very different on all of these questions. And for the most part, I think are are uh dis pre, you know, predisposed to to challenge this stuff. But it all becomes kind of a conversation and it, you know, the the the window can start to shift and move again on even those questions. I mean, remember JD Vance comes into the Senate and wants to um and basically favors labor union legislation on railways and and found a lot of Republican co-sponsors. Now, it ultimately died, but those sorts of things start to happen because again, it's it's sort of like the one big beautiful bill. I don't think there was any Republican senator who even had the language, the ideas, and the terms to talk about why work mattered. And we wanted to move people off of Medicaid and move able-bodied adults off of Obamacare uh and and resist the notion that they were being vilified for having this legislation that kind of did that with the requirements that it uh you know, it stiffened the requirements for those welfare entitlements. And I think that's already you see a Republican party that can't talk about the benefits of work over welfare anymore because they've lost those habits. They've lost that way of thinking as we've moved into government and government and the social and the business are kind of aligned together. And you know it's and again it's this if the fundamental problem of our age uh is we've got to rebuild community and there's something definitely wrong there. We've got to rebuild family. we we need to we've got to rebuild our country. All this sort of stuff and you don't make the clear articulations for the ways in which government can and cannot aid in that process. And you assume it's all the same like we have to have transfer payments to families in order to rebuild the family. This is in Or Cass's book, but it's also in Kevin Roberts book, the president of the Heritage Foundation. All this sort of stuff gets muddled along the way. So, so you're you you see it in some of the legislation from guys like Holly. To my knowledge, nothing Holl's ever proposed has uh become a bill that became a law. >> No. >> Um that that you know on a real sincere legislative standpoint, even tariffs, they couldn't and certainly didn't pass them through Congress. Um, I'm not trying to play glasses half full, but I just am more wondering out loud. >> Yeah. if where they've had successes have been behind the cult of personality of Trump the highly successful magnetic charismatic figure uh celebrity and that there is although you've seen movement in some of these think tanks and organizations and yes you have explicitly seen certain things proposed from the vances and holl of the world that would have been just completely unfathomable some period of time ago. I still have this hope that the general ground swell of something more resembling Reaganite conservatism is still the majority view on the right and that what they the quote unquote new right and this book the new conservatives refers to what they've been able to do is more of a marketing feat than an ideological one is that is is come off with the impression that they represent a new majority that has been highly distorted by the the phenomena that is Donald Trump versus a genuine change of opinion in in the right and its psyche. Now, I say that as uh hopefully recognizing that an issue like trade and tariffs is one is a tough bogey to overcome. that there was and is a a a pretty significant uh acceptance of protectionist rhetoric that pits consumers against workers and adopts marxian argumentation to get there. And that isn't something I ever thought I'd see. And I think that's been pretty well embedded. >> Yeah. >> The deeper you go into industrial policy though, the more opponents we pick up along the way. But you brought up antitrust earlier and there was a sense in which a lot of the pro-antit folks uh gave up as you said they there was not a standard uh as to what it necessarily meant. They had to jettison it. But there was a time that we at least knew what a necessary standard was if not sufficient of harm to consumers. Mhm. >> And it strikes me that even on the antitrust side now there is a significant amount in this so-called new right that have adopted a textbook answer for this subject from the far far left >> which is that anything big has become monopolistic. >> Yeah. >> Do you see antitrust issues as another uh battlefield here? >> Yeah. I mean it's been interesting inside the Trump administration. uh Trump's head appointed head of the of the FTC kept at the beginning of of the administration Lena Khan's sort of merger guidelines and and that raised a lot of eyebrows and yet it it seems not to have mattered nearly as as much things a lot of mergers a lot of acquisitions seems to be seem to be going through the pipeline although they seem to be going through in a very Trumpian way. They seem to be going through with a lot of meetings, with a lot of gives, a lot of negotiations, not just a clear, you know, rational test based on consumer welfare being sort of the pre-clarance model that uh, you know, lawyers would would use. So, that's that's of note, but more seem to be going through. There's also seems to be some, you know, more than anecdotal evidence that lawyers who went in with this sort of pro- antitrust model seem to be frustrated right now. That's all that's all good. I I think you know the the question then comes back to whose principles are going to will out and not not just in this moment but in time to come and who's sort of capturing people's imaginations. We know where the left is and and we know where you know even I think moderate Democrats are going. Look at you know the Biden administration's policies with Lena Khan. JD Vance said that Lena Khan was the best um official in the in the Biden administration. So you think about who's going to be setting the principles uh of the debate and there I I think that really comes down to those of us continuing to keep them alive in public argument. Um in addition to you know hopefully finding the right people, right lawyers, right right uh administrators to to carry those forward in the Trump administration. So that that process, you know, goes on. But certainly the the Silicon Valley problem, the ways in which the Silicon Valley aligned with the left, I think really opened up the imagination for a pro- antitrust policy and sort of cultivated this this sort of belief in the small and the decentralized has sort of being the ideal of the economy and anything big we needed to knock down. That of course also goes to the banks. I think the way large financial houses were perceived as being a part of and and were in some cases ESG and and also persecuting conservatives and debanking and things like that. So we also need to see corporations play things a lot smarter as well. Um, you know, I we Sam Greg and I wrote a piece recently in national affairs thinking about, you know, the CEO of Kroger's came to Washington lobbying to push through an acquisition that Kroger wanted to make or a merger I think with maybe Albertson's and, you know, Senator Tom Cotton uh, in a hearing basically mocked it and and said, you know, where were you when you know, you're you were firing your Christian employees in Arkansas who didn't want to wear the LGBTQ flare while they were on the clock. They were fired. Uh, and now you come here. It's kind of like the godfather. Now you come here wanting my protection and I'm not going to give it to you is basically what he said. He said, I'm I'm sorry uh that this is happening to you. Good luck. I mean, in effect, that's what he said to him. So that's I think that's also all working in this antitrust spear of reasons and motivations. But I think what we have to do is find ways to rearticulate what the consumer welfare standard was about and why that actually leads to a more dynamic economy and one where more people can participate in it. So that's that that sort of involves argumentation uh that that that people aren't even aware of really. I I think in that uh incident with Kroger and and Senator Cotton, it was this opportunity where guys like you and I could have felt very comfortable saying all at once, yes, why were you blocking your employees rights and religious liberties and also yes, Kroger should be allowed to merge with Albertson's. >> Yeah. you know that that we but but to your point these guys are their own worst enemy sometimes when when they behave badly they're they're not winning friends and influencing people. I think I think that uh there's a constant need as you pointed out a moment ago to to be persuasive to to to win the arguments. And it is one of the areas with this general protectionist strand that um I'm tempted to not pick on our side that much that oh we didn't win the argument and then they they ran away with the tariff side because we really were victims of an incredible whack-a-ole. Um you know I could never win an argument on protectionism when the argument didn't stay on protectionism for 30 seconds. >> Yeah. before it then moved to national security or human rights abuses or other things. And this is where I think there's an opportunity for many of us and you mentioned Sam Greg and whatnot to point out that in the end it is very clear at this point that those who advocated you mentioned Kevin Roberts he had tweeted early on that what we were after was a full unambiguous decoupling from China. >> Yeah. The results of this now here appear headed to more trade with China than ever before, including selling them more semiconductors than ever before and buying more rare earth minerals than ever before with the only difference being better terms of trade. That's the opposite of decoupling. That's re-uping your coupling. And >> and so >> no, I was I was just going to say also, you know, if you if you go back 10 years, I think we had the right policy in place with China, the the Trans-Pacific Partnership Act and China because we were going to form >> uh economic deeper economic relationships uh and other kinds of relationships with countries in that Asian sphere as a way to pull them away from China to give them a reason to come into our sphere. and both parties turned against that policy. Uh and and and and that would have been the way you slowly decouple in a national security sense because there was a recognition that assumptions made 20 years ago weren't coming true with China. And now what are you going to do about it? And and you can't just decouple overnight, but you can create conditions by which important realms of commerce can leave China and can do so on profitable terms. But that's gone. And so what you know you look at the these >> well and by the way Richard with that to your point on TPP so that people can at least have a non-revisionist remembrance of this all the talk about reciprocity >> and how it was un we were getting ripped off by Vietnam and South Korea and other countries all of that was addressed in TPP as well. We would have now gone for 10 years with significantly lower barriers of entry to trade reciprocally had we pursued TPB. >> And now we're punishing these nations. >> Yeah. >> With with with the new tariffs. So none of we're punishing Japan. Um you know none of this makes any sense. Countries like Indonesia that we need to help bring. So I I fail to understand the rationale in any of this. What I noticed is it started with national security and then it goes to like small towns in western Pennsylvania. We need to recultivate um and then it goes to, you know, the family and we need to get our young men employed again and if they're employed, they'll be marriageable and we'll have more children and Toqueville and all this stuff. Yeah. >> And it it never sticks. At the end of the day, it does seem to me it's about we have to have the government engaged in creating conditions of of of economic abundance again. And then what what really you know what what makes you just sort of scratch your head is just sort of basic evidence you know that I that I present that many others present when you look at the growth of incomes over the last 30 years or 40 years the growth of the manufacturing productivity total factor productivity all of these sorts of things you can quibble with it but they fly in the face of this narrative of uh you know China shock of we emptied out the middle class emptied out jobs for men. None of this is true. And it starts you start to see it's like I'm not I'm not saying that they're lying when they're making these arguments, but they they aren't remotely true. And it does sort of make you think there is some sort of intoxication with a narrative, its connection to power, and what it's going to do for you and for your political cohort once you gain power and and help you attain power. as opposed to thinking through the broader picture of our American economy and the type of manufacturing sector we need and the parts of our economy like the service sector that are incredibly product um competitive internationally where we have quote a surplus but you don't want to even talk about that for a second none of this makes any sense to me >> well I I actually would my own observation would be that they started with protectionism and small town type arguments and national security came second. It sounds like you your observation would have flip-flopped the the sequence that they went through in their kind of rationale movement. But I agree that they have then ended with attempting to make this sort of moral argument about about the dignity of the worker. And I my frustration is not just the whack-a-ole of it and disingenuity and and and the um either fabricated or just massively mis construed uh statistical argument. My my concern would be that they end up proposing things that I think do the exact opposite of what they're suggesting. And it was one of the things intriguing to me to come full circle as we get ready to close to your article that um you're not making a consumer versus worker argument that says they believe in the uh uh superiority of the worker to the consumer in decision-m and I make the argument for the superiority of the consumer versus the worker. You're making the argument that in order to properly serve and consider the worker, >> yeah, >> one has to serve and consider the consumer. In other words, yours is not an eitheror, >> right? >> That yours is a both and. And here's the way the economic reaction function works. price discovery from failure reallocate to new resources. Adjust to the subjective preferences of consumers to drive productive activity that employs more people, creates wage growth, creates economic prosperity. It's a very classical economic argument that is just absolutely inarguable uh in the testimony of history. But I believe they're making an argument that is Marxian in the sense that it is replacing the pro the the entrepreneur uh the capitalist with the consumer but still holding on to that proletariat class envy argument that we are pitted against each other. that what is best for the um consumer is damaging to the worker and that it is time for the government to uh pick the worker over the consumer. Not only would I suggest, Richard, that your point is the superior one in terms of the validity of how to serve the worker, but I would point out that their construct is not about worker versus consumer. It's about some workers over other workers. >> Exactly. that that the workers in the service sector are also family people are also seeking marriage, seeking home ownership, seeking community tovillian experience, seeking dignity and human flourishing. And yet what they have said is essentially sometimes explicitly but much more often implicitly that we are to ignore the needs of the many in the services sector for the sake of fewer in in uh uh let's say goods manufacturing and even then very specific goods manufacturing because of the fact that they're willing to punish 40% of American domestic manufacturers who import unfinished goods in their manufacturing processes. Yeah. >> I I I wonder if we are sometimes only talking about an intellectual confusion and in fact talking about something far bigger because it strikes me as entirely irreconcilable with truth. >> I I think there's also a point here. They are the the the Marxist point is well taken. I think there is also an instrumentalization of people and of the economy that you're only thinking about the economy in terms of what it does what it produces in relationship to the power of the government and you know what it means for the nation overall but the the you know the subjectivity which of the economy it's it's the ways in which the economy allows us through our actions with one another whether that's as fellow workers manage Management and workers, consumers, investors, all the ways in which we interact with one another are ways in which freely on freely volunteer terms are ways in which we develop ourselves, that we find a path to flourish, that we act with freedom and virtue and freedom and responsibility. And there's something in this in this new right argument about economics where you're actually turning that inside out and saying the government is going to intervene direct order for the sake of uh an exterior or an ulterior end motive and that's the thing that matters. It's not all the stuff that happens in the voluntary peaceful commercial realm. uh that strikes me as something that flies in the face of I think the best encyclicals of the Catholic Church in the 20th century in particular centesses and also where I think the best of Protestant thought on commerce and its relationship to society and the government ended up as well and uh that point needs to be made I think more regularly that you're actually damaging relationships between individuals when you intervene in the in the manner in which they propose and conceive of the economy in the way that they do. >> Well, a amen. I I I couldn't agree more. Um the the piece you've written, Law Liberty, is is just fantastic. We we have the link in the show notes. So, reading the New Conservatives by Richard, uh please do read the article and and Richard, I I hope you'll be able to come back again. Appreciate the good work you're doing. I think you said it earlier. Um I don't know exactly where the political tea leaves are now. There's a lot of things out there that we're going to have to see where things go in the remainder of the administration and and what life looks like post Trump. But what we have to be doing is making the right arguments and and and winning those arguments and and I think you're doing a lot to drive that cause. So thank you. >> Thank you. You as well, David. >> Well, thanks so much for joining us in David Bonson's Capital Record. I hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did. I promise there will be other special guests in the future to give you that much needed break from my own monologue and voice. Uh in the meantime, we'll be back with you next week as always for a couple more editions of Capitol Record. We will continue doing our best to advocate, fight, defend the free and virtuous society.
Richard Reinsch on the "New Right" Movement Towards Populism
Summary
Transcript
Capital Record, where we defend free enterprise and capital markets because we believe in the dignity of the human person. Hello and welcome to another edition of David Bonson's Capital Record brought to you by National Review. Uh am excited today to have my friend Richard Ranch coming on. Um I know that we have not done a lot of guests this year. A couple weeks ago we had Dr. Lacy Hunt on. It was the first outside guest we've had on Capitol Record all year. Uh but Richard wrote an article that I read uh a few weeks back uh in law and liberty law and liberty.org and we have the link uh in the show notes for you called reading the new conservatives. And he struck at some of the issues that are so fundamental to our podcast that it opened up, you know, a kind of plethora of conversation topics I really wanted to talk about. And so I asked Richard to come on. So, we're going to devote this uh podcast today to a conversation with me and Richard about the state of the new right and what it particularly means uh in our need to be defending the free society uh where things stand in this age of populism and post-lberalism uh how we can essentially maintain our advocacy for the free and virtuous society and do it in the optimal way. Uh, very few people I like having in this fight with me more than Richard. Let's bring Richard in now. So, with that said, allow me to welcome just our second guest of the year here in the Capital Record podcast. Uh, as we have changed our format this year, we've done less and less with guest and yet today we're in for a special treat because I'm very excited to have a past guest of Capital Record back into our orbit, Richard Ranch. Richard, welcome back to Capital Record. >> Hey, thank you for having me. Wonderful to be on your show. >> Well, Richard, we're uh putting into the show notes the link to an article that you had written that came out here just uh a little less than a month ago. Uh the name of the article was Reading the New Conservatives. and you offered a a kind of response to a book uh the new conservatives that had come out from American Compass. Uh, Capital Record listeners are probably familiar with the uh, fact that American Compass is run by Orin Cass, who's also been on this podcast uh, a number of occasions uh, in in friendly debates with yours truly, myself, on various aspects of labor policy and and uh, financial policy and whatnot. Um, so American Compass published a book called The New Conservatives. you wrote a review and I would love it if you could offer a little summary to listeners as to what the book was about and what your review was about. >> Yeah, you know, it's interesting for me personally. Um, I debated Orin Cass u gosh six years ago now at the first national conservatism conference in Washington in 2019 and it was on the subject of free trade uh versus industrial policy and and and I made uh you know the best arguments I could find for free trade and also you know at that time industrial policy as an idea and concept was still new to many on the right and and there were many people gravitating towards it uh who were near the Trump administration and and near this idea of national conservatism if you want to call it an idea and you know um in that in that moment it it seemed that um a lot of things were just being assumed as true you know manufacturing jobs had been eviscerated we didn't make things in America anymore uh nations that were economically prominent like Germany uh and including our our competitor adversary China all had industrial policies all favored their manufacturing had stolen you know say software manufacturing from us etc and you know it was interesting when I debated or cast in 2019 he was um an opponent of tariffs uh said they were a dumb policy said protectionism did not achieve the results that he wanted to to achieve as a smart advocate for industrial policy and for the government making targeted investments uh and subsidies towards certain industries and sectors in the economy and he was also about the worker and the family and so I it was kind of with interest as I've you know various friends of mine including you David who have debated him and keeping up with or cast reading him and he's now come around to the position that uh tariffs are actually needed in the American economy and so with that sort of spirit I I turned to this book which is uh I don't know maybe 75% essays written by Orin Cass but purportedly uh the book is um the collection of scholars as a whole around American compass but it's very heavily Orin Cass and you know throughout this book we have industrial policy uh we have pro-UN policy we have the need for Silicon Valley and Washington to be tightly aligned uh in terms of investment and research uh we also have this you notion. Um, uh, I'll just say in general that antitrust should be should return to the progressive uh, spirit of the early 20th century which was jettisoned about 50 years ago by free market thinking uh because it really can't give you a standard for juristprudence and evaluating these economic relationships. And so you had you had uh courts really making it up or trying to be pro competitive, but pro competitive always meant you favored the smallest competitor uh in in in the in the suit. And and so you were trying to just aim at decentralization or something like that. And you know, as I read through the book, I I just thought um you know, again, there didn't seem to be a lot of critical reviews that that I could find. There were some, but it it seemed to me I could I could spend time talking about all the ways in which I disagree with these policies or I could really focus on what I think is the core position. And I think this this position um sort of launches into all of the other uh approaches that American Compass takes. And that is is economic policy about the consumer or is it about the worker? and and that is to say um if we focus on the consumer, we're doing something that is inherently to the detriment of American workers and their families and their communities. And I wanted to say, you know, the reason why we're focusing on the consumer is actually because uh that's the best way we know to be proworker. That's how we figure out comparative advantage. That's how we figure out prices. That's how we figure out where to invest. That's how we know um where the action is, where goods and services uh where's the best place to produce them. All of that sort of thing comes through the choices of consumers. And then sort of the thought, you know, uh if if I don't focus on the consumer and I focus on the worker, well, we're we're all consumers, but we're not all manufacturing workers or we're not all workers in this sector or that sector. So inherently I start playing a government game. I I start playing a special interest game and I start thinking that you know this administrative state that we're all rightly oriented against or wary of and wanting to uh limit and I think that's one area where the Trump administration has been for the most part right. We can quibble about the means in which they've used to do that. But inherently, we're going to be relying on the knowledge and the information and the incentives of people in the administrative state to make investments in certain companies and certain sectors of the economy as if they know better than private investors where to put capital. And you know that that just simply is going to if it does quote unquote work, it's it's also it's going to be very limited and it's also going to come with a lot of other costs. And it's also going to involve businesses making what I would think are inherently suboptimal choices about their organization, their labor, their costs, their future pursuits. All of this isn't going to work. And so I wanted and it occurs to me as well what's happening with American Compass, what's happening with much of National Conservatism, including I also review another book in the essay by the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, uh, by Don's Early Light, originally entitled Burning Down Washington, now Taking Back Washington. Um all of these guys are sort of caught up in uh thinking uh they're all sort of they're in this moment that somehow there's a tight nexus between the economy, the virtue and and the government itself. And that's really where we need to be focused on if we want to rebuild our country and our communities and our families. And I think the evidence just isn't there. There's a primary movement in economics in the 19th century in Germany called the German historical school. They make the same move and they criticize in ways in which are very similar to the criticisms that people like you and I face now. They criticize the Austrian school of economics which at that time is just organizing because the Austrian school is saying you have to allow the subjective knowledge of consumer and prices guide economic production. uh there it's there is no objective way to identify what people are going to do. You have to let them freely associate with one another while you have these concrete protections through the rule of law, force and fraud, all of these sorts of things. But you want to let people freely move around economically. And you know the the German historical school took from this we'll use data uh we'll to to form our economic understanding not theory not not any sort of notion of prices and once we do that we'll understand how to reform our countries and make the social sphere work better. And they they lose that argument. and and one they they lose that argument uh ultimately in in the American sphere and in the British sphere. uh but they you know for the for the for certain parts of German history uh particularly in running up to World War I uh they do sort of capture the moment there which uh many you know we can talk more about that and it seemed to me that's we have to push against that uh that sort of mindset if we're going to prevail and defend a free market in this country which now faces multiple multiple pressure points. So when you look at the the sort of whole context of um how these things have moved over the last 10 years, I think guys like you and I were were concerned about where things were 10 years ago and then four years later and then a couple years after that and now now here we are. We you're describing a certain evolution in even the the way that guys like like Orin Cass have gone. Would you say that you're surprised at the evolution or that it is a logical uh byproduct of that that uh trajectory that that kind of point of view that inevitably moves that way? Um, I I think I have other questions about those in the traditional conservative right and where some of that Overton window may have moved, but in terms of those that are starting off with a viewpoint that they're identifying as more nationalistic or more populist and again couching it as saying we want to shift our economic policy priority to workers versus consumers. uh that there is something that might seem benign on the surface of that. Would you argue that what we've seen happen over the last 10 years in this progression is anything other than benign? >> No, I I certainly I I don't think it's benign. I don't I'm not going to necessarily attribute um bad motives. I don't I don't think you are either to uh people in the national conservative front. But I think there is I will say this there is something tantalizing about power and there is something um that we are as flawed human beings when we start to sense that the application of centralized power could affectuate real positive changes that tends to fire us up. I think the question is and I think what you're asking is is when you move when you shift the focus to the worker and you inherently start to say no, we need an industrial policy if we're going to if we're going to take on our adversary like China, that's the which is kind of like the starter kit. Um once you make that move, uh then are you now open because you've said prices aren't going to limit us. We're not going to be determined by whether companies stand or fall on their own. we're not going to be determined by the the cost of capital and where does capital actually want to go and all these sorts of things. Do you not now open yourself up to the moment where we're seeing Kevin Hasset argue in favor of taking a 10% stake in Intel by the federal government and oh by the way there will be more uh such quote unquote investments by our federal government. I think that is inevitable. I think that that movement downstream uh is going to happen and is happening right now. And there's there's and there's the it's it's the question of of believing that somehow the economy needs not just protection for price for contracts forced and fraud but actually needs as Vil Helmki talked about you know if you have you have the you have the people acting in the economy and you're protecting them from abusing and manipulating one another to now the government takes control of the whole for its better ordering. Then once once you've made that move, then all sorts of things start to make sense. >> And that and that's where I was going with this is it you're talking about them deciding that things that we have historically believed as conservatives matter a great deal. that there's a kind of economic cogency in price discovery and in capital allocation and that out of this sort of process of various uh spontaneous ordering of affairs that we gather information that affects decision- making and that there's something less aair to it but it it is helping to drive an optimal condition for productive decision- making. you and you're saying once you say you want to ignore some of those things, bad things can happen. But it's also what they proactively invite in that not just in ignoring price discovery and capital allocation but essentially replacing it with central planning, not with the skeptical eye that um classical conservatives would have had or or a traditional um valued free enterprise system would have in in in yet at this what I guess what I'm getting at is the notion that central planning would be a friend, not a foe, to these outcomes strikes me as brand new for those on the right. um not new at all for those on the left. But in fact, at least the way I've always understood it, the deciding difference between those on the right and the left in matters of economic policy was those who believed they could be centrally coordinated and those who believed that they not only could not be but should not be. And um Hayek referred to this as a fatal conceit. It strikes me that now there are those identifying as on the right that are adopting the fundamental thesis of the left. I think that's that I mean when when we look at the tip of the spear right now of the Trump administration whether it's the tariffs the this newlyannounced policy of taking uh a stake in a private company ostensibly for national security reasons although you just said you had to have export controls on Nvidia for national security reasons but now you say they can sell uh to China their >> product fairness. I'm not being I'm not being a smart alec, but in total fairness and honesty, are they still saying national security with the >> That's what I'm getting to. I mean, that's what I'm getting to. Yeah. >> And then then like the national security with Nvidia. Oh, but now you can sell. You just give us the give us a 15% cut. So we the the ration shift and change. >> Yeah. But the government creeping into the the business sector continues a pace and now we see we're going to have we're going to have a sovereign wealth fund. We're going to have this idea of bringing we're bragging about bringing in more revenue. It's going to help us expand government services and programs. It's going to help us pay for entitlements rather than thinking about how do we bring down uh our entitlement state. I see no principled limit at this point in defenders of what the Trump administration is doing for any limits on government power short of pragmatism uh short of what you think is going to work or won't work. And that leaves you into the situation of of how do you tell the distinction between the private commercial sector and the public sector which is you know something that JD Vance said a couple of years ago that there is no difference between the private and the public anymore and that's a good thing. we should recognize it. Or think about the author of the other book I reviewed who said, "We're going to make the corporations do exactly what they we want them to do and it's going to be glorious." That all seems to be coming to fruition in a ways in which when I heard this in 22 and 23, I really didn't think would happen. U but now we're here. >> So So this this is really important. I think listeners know where I stand on a lot of this and and I don't mind sharing for listeners that as I've gotten to know Richard over the years and and and followed his material, you you can assume for our purposes here that he and I are pretty aligned on most of this. So, so now I want to ask you um not theoretically or hypothetically or for the purpose of getting to where we already know we agree, but really out of my own curiosity, um I am not sure that there is a uh significant movement that is with the administration on the Intel deal. Um, now I would have maybe guessed that 10 years ago there wasn't a significant movement on the tariff side and then I would have been proven wrong and and I believe that maybe Trump more than Trumpism did significantly move the right >> on free trade. But I would point out that to do it, they had to facilitate a total intellectual schizophrenia in the right to allow it to happen. Because even if 80% of people on the right now talk negatively about free trade, 20% of them are doing it for one reason, 20 for another, 20 for another. But to your point of either using a national security canard or protectionism or um intellectual property rights or or various other things that flip around, they did it incoherently. But I would grant that they did it successfully that they really have moved the right on trade. But I do wonder because I look at a lot of the other issues that guys like you and I have pushed back on Josh Holly on credit card fee limits. um you know JD Vans saying he wanted a higher federal minimum wage. I don't think there's any ground swell of support um even if a couple people on stage at Natcon say so for those issues. So I guess what I'm wondering is is this equity stake thing in Intel and sovereign wealth fund and we want to do it in other sectors and uh Howard Lutnik saying that there's companies that we're a huge customer for, we should own a piece of them. is this may be a moment that could be a blessing in disguise for guys like you and me because it will be a enough is enough moment for many on the right who we haven't yet found an enough is enough moment. >> Well, I mean I I I I could see it I could see it both ways. I mean I'll just go back to kind of where we started in this conversation which is how rapidly things have progressed in the last five years um uh 10 years to five to 10 years. The more you lay the groundwork for the government ordering relationships in the private commercial sector, the more those players in the private commercial sector start to make decisions to please people in the government, to please bureaucrats, to meet requirements, to get capital, to get purchases, to get contracts, etc., etc. You start to get us more and more comfortable with the idea that there is no public private distinction. And once you start to play that game, then you're in the realm, I don't think I'm exaggerating, you're in like Japanese 1970s, 1980s industrial policy realm where um, you know, essentially your national champions are effectively tools of the government and they are going abroad to spread, you know, Japanese commerce and it and and and remember the verdict at the end of all of that, the Japanese government said, "We thought our industrial policy was the source of our success. uess we came to find it was the source of our ruin. Could that now could that could those principles and that logic and that habit that behavior of thinking spread to other sectors? I mean the newly elected senator I live in Ohio um Bernie Moreno is now advocating to put workers on uh company boards, publicly traded company boards. He I think he has legislation to that effect he sponsored with the Democrat. Um, >> that that's an old that's an old Orin Cass idea as well. I think >> that's an or Cass idea. It's also a Josh Holly idea. Now, do those sorts of things start to spread? Now, I'm also from the South and Southern Republicans are very different on all of these questions. And for the most part, I think are are uh dis pre, you know, predisposed to to challenge this stuff. But it all becomes kind of a conversation and it, you know, the the the window can start to shift and move again on even those questions. I mean, remember JD Vance comes into the Senate and wants to um and basically favors labor union legislation on railways and and found a lot of Republican co-sponsors. Now, it ultimately died, but those sorts of things start to happen because again, it's it's sort of like the one big beautiful bill. I don't think there was any Republican senator who even had the language, the ideas, and the terms to talk about why work mattered. And we wanted to move people off of Medicaid and move able-bodied adults off of Obamacare uh and and resist the notion that they were being vilified for having this legislation that kind of did that with the requirements that it uh you know, it stiffened the requirements for those welfare entitlements. And I think that's already you see a Republican party that can't talk about the benefits of work over welfare anymore because they've lost those habits. They've lost that way of thinking as we've moved into government and government and the social and the business are kind of aligned together. And you know it's and again it's this if the fundamental problem of our age uh is we've got to rebuild community and there's something definitely wrong there. We've got to rebuild family. we we need to we've got to rebuild our country. All this sort of stuff and you don't make the clear articulations for the ways in which government can and cannot aid in that process. And you assume it's all the same like we have to have transfer payments to families in order to rebuild the family. This is in Or Cass's book, but it's also in Kevin Roberts book, the president of the Heritage Foundation. All this sort of stuff gets muddled along the way. So, so you're you you see it in some of the legislation from guys like Holly. To my knowledge, nothing Holl's ever proposed has uh become a bill that became a law. >> No. >> Um that that you know on a real sincere legislative standpoint, even tariffs, they couldn't and certainly didn't pass them through Congress. Um, I'm not trying to play glasses half full, but I just am more wondering out loud. >> Yeah. if where they've had successes have been behind the cult of personality of Trump the highly successful magnetic charismatic figure uh celebrity and that there is although you've seen movement in some of these think tanks and organizations and yes you have explicitly seen certain things proposed from the vances and holl of the world that would have been just completely unfathomable some period of time ago. I still have this hope that the general ground swell of something more resembling Reaganite conservatism is still the majority view on the right and that what they the quote unquote new right and this book the new conservatives refers to what they've been able to do is more of a marketing feat than an ideological one is that is is come off with the impression that they represent a new majority that has been highly distorted by the the phenomena that is Donald Trump versus a genuine change of opinion in in the right and its psyche. Now, I say that as uh hopefully recognizing that an issue like trade and tariffs is one is a tough bogey to overcome. that there was and is a a a pretty significant uh acceptance of protectionist rhetoric that pits consumers against workers and adopts marxian argumentation to get there. And that isn't something I ever thought I'd see. And I think that's been pretty well embedded. >> Yeah. >> The deeper you go into industrial policy though, the more opponents we pick up along the way. But you brought up antitrust earlier and there was a sense in which a lot of the pro-antit folks uh gave up as you said they there was not a standard uh as to what it necessarily meant. They had to jettison it. But there was a time that we at least knew what a necessary standard was if not sufficient of harm to consumers. Mhm. >> And it strikes me that even on the antitrust side now there is a significant amount in this so-called new right that have adopted a textbook answer for this subject from the far far left >> which is that anything big has become monopolistic. >> Yeah. >> Do you see antitrust issues as another uh battlefield here? >> Yeah. I mean it's been interesting inside the Trump administration. uh Trump's head appointed head of the of the FTC kept at the beginning of of the administration Lena Khan's sort of merger guidelines and and that raised a lot of eyebrows and yet it it seems not to have mattered nearly as as much things a lot of mergers a lot of acquisitions seems to be seem to be going through the pipeline although they seem to be going through in a very Trumpian way. They seem to be going through with a lot of meetings, with a lot of gives, a lot of negotiations, not just a clear, you know, rational test based on consumer welfare being sort of the pre-clarance model that uh, you know, lawyers would would use. So, that's that's of note, but more seem to be going through. There's also seems to be some, you know, more than anecdotal evidence that lawyers who went in with this sort of pro- antitrust model seem to be frustrated right now. That's all that's all good. I I think you know the the question then comes back to whose principles are going to will out and not not just in this moment but in time to come and who's sort of capturing people's imaginations. We know where the left is and and we know where you know even I think moderate Democrats are going. Look at you know the Biden administration's policies with Lena Khan. JD Vance said that Lena Khan was the best um official in the in the Biden administration. So you think about who's going to be setting the principles uh of the debate and there I I think that really comes down to those of us continuing to keep them alive in public argument. Um in addition to you know hopefully finding the right people, right lawyers, right right uh administrators to to carry those forward in the Trump administration. So that that process, you know, goes on. But certainly the the Silicon Valley problem, the ways in which the Silicon Valley aligned with the left, I think really opened up the imagination for a pro- antitrust policy and sort of cultivated this this sort of belief in the small and the decentralized has sort of being the ideal of the economy and anything big we needed to knock down. That of course also goes to the banks. I think the way large financial houses were perceived as being a part of and and were in some cases ESG and and also persecuting conservatives and debanking and things like that. So we also need to see corporations play things a lot smarter as well. Um, you know, I we Sam Greg and I wrote a piece recently in national affairs thinking about, you know, the CEO of Kroger's came to Washington lobbying to push through an acquisition that Kroger wanted to make or a merger I think with maybe Albertson's and, you know, Senator Tom Cotton uh, in a hearing basically mocked it and and said, you know, where were you when you know, you're you were firing your Christian employees in Arkansas who didn't want to wear the LGBTQ flare while they were on the clock. They were fired. Uh, and now you come here. It's kind of like the godfather. Now you come here wanting my protection and I'm not going to give it to you is basically what he said. He said, I'm I'm sorry uh that this is happening to you. Good luck. I mean, in effect, that's what he said to him. So that's I think that's also all working in this antitrust spear of reasons and motivations. But I think what we have to do is find ways to rearticulate what the consumer welfare standard was about and why that actually leads to a more dynamic economy and one where more people can participate in it. So that's that that sort of involves argumentation uh that that that people aren't even aware of really. I I think in that uh incident with Kroger and and Senator Cotton, it was this opportunity where guys like you and I could have felt very comfortable saying all at once, yes, why were you blocking your employees rights and religious liberties and also yes, Kroger should be allowed to merge with Albertson's. >> Yeah. you know that that we but but to your point these guys are their own worst enemy sometimes when when they behave badly they're they're not winning friends and influencing people. I think I think that uh there's a constant need as you pointed out a moment ago to to be persuasive to to to win the arguments. And it is one of the areas with this general protectionist strand that um I'm tempted to not pick on our side that much that oh we didn't win the argument and then they they ran away with the tariff side because we really were victims of an incredible whack-a-ole. Um you know I could never win an argument on protectionism when the argument didn't stay on protectionism for 30 seconds. >> Yeah. before it then moved to national security or human rights abuses or other things. And this is where I think there's an opportunity for many of us and you mentioned Sam Greg and whatnot to point out that in the end it is very clear at this point that those who advocated you mentioned Kevin Roberts he had tweeted early on that what we were after was a full unambiguous decoupling from China. >> Yeah. The results of this now here appear headed to more trade with China than ever before, including selling them more semiconductors than ever before and buying more rare earth minerals than ever before with the only difference being better terms of trade. That's the opposite of decoupling. That's re-uping your coupling. And >> and so >> no, I was I was just going to say also, you know, if you if you go back 10 years, I think we had the right policy in place with China, the the Trans-Pacific Partnership Act and China because we were going to form >> uh economic deeper economic relationships uh and other kinds of relationships with countries in that Asian sphere as a way to pull them away from China to give them a reason to come into our sphere. and both parties turned against that policy. Uh and and and and that would have been the way you slowly decouple in a national security sense because there was a recognition that assumptions made 20 years ago weren't coming true with China. And now what are you going to do about it? And and you can't just decouple overnight, but you can create conditions by which important realms of commerce can leave China and can do so on profitable terms. But that's gone. And so what you know you look at the these >> well and by the way Richard with that to your point on TPP so that people can at least have a non-revisionist remembrance of this all the talk about reciprocity >> and how it was un we were getting ripped off by Vietnam and South Korea and other countries all of that was addressed in TPP as well. We would have now gone for 10 years with significantly lower barriers of entry to trade reciprocally had we pursued TPB. >> And now we're punishing these nations. >> Yeah. >> With with with the new tariffs. So none of we're punishing Japan. Um you know none of this makes any sense. Countries like Indonesia that we need to help bring. So I I fail to understand the rationale in any of this. What I noticed is it started with national security and then it goes to like small towns in western Pennsylvania. We need to recultivate um and then it goes to, you know, the family and we need to get our young men employed again and if they're employed, they'll be marriageable and we'll have more children and Toqueville and all this stuff. Yeah. >> And it it never sticks. At the end of the day, it does seem to me it's about we have to have the government engaged in creating conditions of of of economic abundance again. And then what what really you know what what makes you just sort of scratch your head is just sort of basic evidence you know that I that I present that many others present when you look at the growth of incomes over the last 30 years or 40 years the growth of the manufacturing productivity total factor productivity all of these sorts of things you can quibble with it but they fly in the face of this narrative of uh you know China shock of we emptied out the middle class emptied out jobs for men. None of this is true. And it starts you start to see it's like I'm not I'm not saying that they're lying when they're making these arguments, but they they aren't remotely true. And it does sort of make you think there is some sort of intoxication with a narrative, its connection to power, and what it's going to do for you and for your political cohort once you gain power and and help you attain power. as opposed to thinking through the broader picture of our American economy and the type of manufacturing sector we need and the parts of our economy like the service sector that are incredibly product um competitive internationally where we have quote a surplus but you don't want to even talk about that for a second none of this makes any sense to me >> well I I actually would my own observation would be that they started with protectionism and small town type arguments and national security came second. It sounds like you your observation would have flip-flopped the the sequence that they went through in their kind of rationale movement. But I agree that they have then ended with attempting to make this sort of moral argument about about the dignity of the worker. And I my frustration is not just the whack-a-ole of it and disingenuity and and and the um either fabricated or just massively mis construed uh statistical argument. My my concern would be that they end up proposing things that I think do the exact opposite of what they're suggesting. And it was one of the things intriguing to me to come full circle as we get ready to close to your article that um you're not making a consumer versus worker argument that says they believe in the uh uh superiority of the worker to the consumer in decision-m and I make the argument for the superiority of the consumer versus the worker. You're making the argument that in order to properly serve and consider the worker, >> yeah, >> one has to serve and consider the consumer. In other words, yours is not an eitheror, >> right? >> That yours is a both and. And here's the way the economic reaction function works. price discovery from failure reallocate to new resources. Adjust to the subjective preferences of consumers to drive productive activity that employs more people, creates wage growth, creates economic prosperity. It's a very classical economic argument that is just absolutely inarguable uh in the testimony of history. But I believe they're making an argument that is Marxian in the sense that it is replacing the pro the the entrepreneur uh the capitalist with the consumer but still holding on to that proletariat class envy argument that we are pitted against each other. that what is best for the um consumer is damaging to the worker and that it is time for the government to uh pick the worker over the consumer. Not only would I suggest, Richard, that your point is the superior one in terms of the validity of how to serve the worker, but I would point out that their construct is not about worker versus consumer. It's about some workers over other workers. >> Exactly. that that the workers in the service sector are also family people are also seeking marriage, seeking home ownership, seeking community tovillian experience, seeking dignity and human flourishing. And yet what they have said is essentially sometimes explicitly but much more often implicitly that we are to ignore the needs of the many in the services sector for the sake of fewer in in uh uh let's say goods manufacturing and even then very specific goods manufacturing because of the fact that they're willing to punish 40% of American domestic manufacturers who import unfinished goods in their manufacturing processes. Yeah. >> I I I wonder if we are sometimes only talking about an intellectual confusion and in fact talking about something far bigger because it strikes me as entirely irreconcilable with truth. >> I I think there's also a point here. They are the the the Marxist point is well taken. I think there is also an instrumentalization of people and of the economy that you're only thinking about the economy in terms of what it does what it produces in relationship to the power of the government and you know what it means for the nation overall but the the you know the subjectivity which of the economy it's it's the ways in which the economy allows us through our actions with one another whether that's as fellow workers manage Management and workers, consumers, investors, all the ways in which we interact with one another are ways in which freely on freely volunteer terms are ways in which we develop ourselves, that we find a path to flourish, that we act with freedom and virtue and freedom and responsibility. And there's something in this in this new right argument about economics where you're actually turning that inside out and saying the government is going to intervene direct order for the sake of uh an exterior or an ulterior end motive and that's the thing that matters. It's not all the stuff that happens in the voluntary peaceful commercial realm. uh that strikes me as something that flies in the face of I think the best encyclicals of the Catholic Church in the 20th century in particular centesses and also where I think the best of Protestant thought on commerce and its relationship to society and the government ended up as well and uh that point needs to be made I think more regularly that you're actually damaging relationships between individuals when you intervene in the in the manner in which they propose and conceive of the economy in the way that they do. >> Well, a amen. I I I couldn't agree more. Um the the piece you've written, Law Liberty, is is just fantastic. We we have the link in the show notes. So, reading the New Conservatives by Richard, uh please do read the article and and Richard, I I hope you'll be able to come back again. Appreciate the good work you're doing. I think you said it earlier. Um I don't know exactly where the political tea leaves are now. There's a lot of things out there that we're going to have to see where things go in the remainder of the administration and and what life looks like post Trump. But what we have to be doing is making the right arguments and and and winning those arguments and and I think you're doing a lot to drive that cause. So thank you. >> Thank you. You as well, David. >> Well, thanks so much for joining us in David Bonson's Capital Record. I hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did. I promise there will be other special guests in the future to give you that much needed break from my own monologue and voice. Uh in the meantime, we'll be back with you next week as always for a couple more editions of Capitol Record. We will continue doing our best to advocate, fight, defend the free and virtuous society.