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So one of the more, let's just say, controversial areas of my new book was actually not a lot of the wisdom that I asked of the left, but actually some of the hard truths that I tried to raise within our own America First movement.
The fact that there is not one necessarily clear America First movement, but there are many strands of it.
And particularly one of the breaking points that's fascinated me is the distinction between the libertarian-leaning wing of the America First movement, what I call the National Libertarians, and the National Protectionists.
Both of us reject the historical neoliberal orthodoxies, but on slightly different grounds.
The old neoliberal orthodoxy on trade was that somehow we were going to spread democracy through capitalism and capitalism through democracy to places like China.That somehow if we traded with them, they would behave like us.
And what happened in the process is instead we increased our economic dependence on China, which has become our chief adversary, even as our own US military depends on them. The old neoliberal school of thought had nothing to say about this.
We reject that type of blithe neoliberalism.But what exactly is the response?
The national protectionist response is to say that we need to onshore everything in the United States and cease our trade relationships in general, China or otherwise, the free trade model's over.
Whereas the national libertarian view is a little bit different than that.It says that it's senseless for us to depend on China for our modern way of life.
But at the same time, if we're really serious about that, that's going to require expanding our relationships with other countries like South Korea, Japan, India, the Philippines, and so on.
But if we're serious about that, that doesn't quite have the protectionist impact on the prices that American manufacturers are able to command if they're not shielded from the effects of foreign price competition.That's a fork in the road.
Same thing with respect to the question on immigration.
The old neoliberal view was that the US is just an economic zone, and the more the better, as long as it increases the size of the so-called economic pie, without regard for the effect that has on our national identity.
So the National Libertarian, and here's the National and National Libertarian, says that, no, the United States is not just an economic zone, we're a nation bound by a shared set of values, and that we need an immigration system that selects for more than just economic contributions, but civic.
contributions and ability to assimilate and speak the language of English and pledge allegiance, exclusive allegiance, to the values of the United States of America, eliminating dual citizenship as a category.That's what that system would look like.
which is different still yet from the national protectionist view, which says that actually immigration policy is not just economic policy, it is particularly labor policy.
And the job is to protect American born workers from the effects of foreign price erosion when it comes to the labor market.
A slightly different view than if your top priority is actually focusing on civic integration and reviving our national identity. And the biggest distinction of all, of course, is in our respective attitudes towards the regulatory state.
I laid this out in a more detailed way in my book, Truths.
Again, most of these are speaking hard truths to the left, but these are some hard truths for us to confront on the right, is the question of how we wish to use the regulatory state to advance our own pro-worker, pro-American, and you could call them conservative ends.
Do we want to replace the left-wing regulatory state with one that advances affirmatively conservative goals?Or do we actually want to just get in there and dismantle that regulatory state?You could say this about the regulatory state.
You could talk about it more broadly with respect to the nanny state, which I consider to be the superset of the regulatory state.
It includes the three-letter agencies, the administrative state, but it also includes the entitlement state, the foreign policy nanny state.Are we actually serious about getting in there and dismantling it?
Or is the purpose instead a newfound purpose to redirect that nanny state or that regulatory state to advance some alternative vision for the good, not the left's vision, but a conservative or pro-American vision, one that would empower the CFPB, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, to cap credit card interest rates?
That's a kind of price control that some Republicans are okay with, even as we rail against Kamala Harris's grocery price controls.
Or is the right answer to say that we don't want the CFPB meddling in the private sector, and by the way, telling small businesses as they do, that they've got to report their race and gender data to government.
My own view on this, and I've been pretty open about this, is I think it's a little bit
not only hypocritical, it's contradictory and self-defeating for us to, on one hand, slap the CFPB on the wrist and say, we don't want you going woke and asking small businesses for their race and gender demographic data, which I think is disgusting and they shouldn't be doing, while at the same time saying we want to empower that same agency that Elizabeth Warren led, but now with a different mandate to cap credit card interest rates.
I don't think that we can have our cake and eat it too.
And in some ways, not only are we paving the way for the same shoe to fit the other foot when the left's in power, but we're also in some ways creating the very problem that supposedly we sought to solve.
And these are unresolved questions in the conservative movement, not exactly the stuff of cable news television discussions at night in the lead up to an election.
We are a couple of weeks away, and that's the most important thing for the future of the country, politically speaking right now. But on the other side of the election, I do think a lot of these questions are going to percolate to the surface.
And I think the America First movement and the Republican Party and the conservative movement and the United States of America are all going to be stronger if we're able to have those discussions in a thoughtful, nuanced and unafraid manner.
And to that end, it's why I've invited on today's podcast a guy who I've really grown intellectually respect over the years, become a kind of intellectual friend that we've actually never met in person.
It's only ever been in remote contexts like this one, though we intend to change that.A leading thinker on the new right and a leading thinker behind even some of the premises undergirding the America First movement,
my friend Saurabh Amari and Saurabh, I'm excited to have you on.And I know you've been paying attention to some of these conversations that both you and I have been having in recent years.
And I'd love to pick up where I left off and to hear your thoughts on first, how you would define the new right and what brought you to your own set of convictions.
And then we could talk about this distinction between what I think of as the national libertarian strain versus the national protectionist strain of America first. and map out what each might mean for the future of our movement.
It is very good to join you, Vivek.And like you said, we've always done these conversations remotely.So I look forward to doing them in person once and soon.Look, the term the new right
is so sort of overdetermined and laden with multiple factions interpretation of it that I really don't know.
And by the way, the new right today is the successor to other versions of the new right, other movements that called themselves the new right in decades past.So it's all a bit complicated, but I'll
lay out my own trajectory and maybe that will shed some light on it.So I began my journalistic career and my ideological sort of maturity on the Wall Street Journal editorial page.I spent five years there preaching the gospel of
lower marginal tax rates, free trade, and an assertive American foreign policy in every corner of the globe.
And around 2015-16, you know, I and my colleagues watched with horror as this guy, this former New York City, you know, real estate developer turned reality TV star.This guy.
started, you know, saying things that completely defied all of our orthodoxies.
In my case, I was based in London at the time, so I felt like I had been sent to, you know, fight this war for this set of ideas in foreign lands, and then back home the party, the Republican Party, was betraying them by embracing Donald Trump.
You know, he said, I'm not going to touch your entitlements.I'm going to protect your entitlements.And the crowds roared.The base of the Republican Party roared.He questioned the Iraq war and said it was a disaster.And the crowds roared.
He even hinted at a public option in health care in a famous exchange with Ted Cruz where he said, I'm not going to let people die on the streets. to which Senator Cruz replied, well, that means you're a socialist.Are you a socialist?
And he just said, I'm not going to let people die on the streets.And again, the crowds roared.And it was very disorienting, you know, because this was not the conservatism that I had made my own and promoted for for a few years.
But then I tried to sort of get into the mindset, like a lot of people in the mainstream media, both the center left and center right media.There were a couple of months right after the President Trump's first election.
where in 2016, where the media was like, well, what is happening with the working class?Why are these people so, why are they so, you know, why are they such malcontents?
And a lot of reporters and writers just moved on, you know, by February, March, 2017, it was full on waging kind of lawfare and backing the lawfare and attempting to undo the outcome of the 2016 election. But I didn't move on.
I tried to think about what it is that where, for me, I had come as an immigrant to this country when I was 13, 14 years old.We started out, you know, kind of very, very poor when we first moved here.
But within a decade, I was writing editorials for The Wall Street Journal and not even based in London.But for lots of like my fellow citizens, that had not been the story.It had been a story of
of dispossession of a loss of the loss of stable union, good paying union jobs, the loss of stable moral coordinates.The fact that working class has become synonymous with out of wedlock births and fentanyl addiction and opioid addiction.
And and and various other sort of dysfunctions and social pathologies, so I stayed on that Paragraph, you know sort of parentheses there.
I also became Catholic in those years and Catholicism as you know has this much more Comprehensive account of what the state is for and how to work and what was your religion?
What was your faith before that basically nothing everyone thinks because I was I was born and raised in Iran people assume I was Muslim But my I came from a very typical super secular Iranian family.
You know, even when we were living in the Islamic Republic, you know, my parents drank alcohol and, you know, watched foreign movies and read Western books and ideas.So I really wasn't like praying to Allah and then turning to Catholicism.
I came from nothing.And it was a long process of reading and thinking and going to mass and so on. But Catholicism has this account, which it draws from the classical tradition from Aristotle, of what the state is for.
Why do we form political communities?And it is not to individual, to maximize individual liberty, but rather to secure the common good of the whole.So the combination of the Trump phenomenon and then my own kind of
faith journey and intellectual journey led me to a kind of conservatism where, fast forward now what it's been seven, eight years, you know, I'm, unlike you, I'm pretty, I think that the, you know, the administrative state is, has troubling aspects.
There are things that need to be reformed, it's certainly not beyond reform, but it is necessary. given the complexity of the economy and the power disparities it generates between workers and consumers on one side and producers on the other.
I tend to be pretty, I take a favorable view of labor unions.That doesn't mean that I'm happy with the fact that the American labor movement is so beholden to the Democratic Party and so into its kind of cultural agendas.
That's something that I've sought to change.But I also understand why, given the history of the Republican Party, their labor movement finds itself the way it does.I think that's something that can be changed.And folks like, obviously, J.D.
Vance and Josh Hawley and others, Senator Marco Rubio, are trying to change that dynamic.And, you know, in some ways, you could describe me as a sort of
european-style christian democrat which is a tradition we really don't have in the united states but when it comes to the economy that's that's a good way to describe it i'm also an adherent of the wisdom of the new deal order the new deal order being that period roughly between 1945 and 1975 when the united states obviously had actually a very dynamic economy contrary to some of the
a sort of history that was told afterward, a productive economy, a manufacturing-based economy, where, in short, and I'll wrap up very quickly, that's when you had what's called the Great Compression, where you had this sort of relatively mild redistribution.
mainly through good wages and industrial jobs.A middle class was created where your grandparents were able to, for the first time, take real vacations, enjoy disposable incomes, and access health care, and so on and so forth.
So that doesn't mean we have to recreate every element of the New Deal order.The macroeconomic conditions have changed.I recognize that.But the simple premise
that an economy that works for working people should be the lodestar of a conservative movement, that this is actually a conservative goal, because just giving in to the market's wild capacities to disrupt and demolish certainties
is not necessarily a conservative view and hasn't been.Certainly in continental Europe has not been what is thought of as on the right, but lots of people in the American tradition who were on the right came to accept this.
Dwight Eisenhower, President Nixon, who I think was actually a great underrated president, but we don't need to go into that.
But the bottom line is that that journey that I described led me to this place where I often find myself at odds with the libertarian wing of the right, even as people describe me as a sort of populist intellectual.
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Let's start with the topic of tariffs, okay?So that's obviously been a big subject heading into this election.There's actually not that for all of the big subject it's been where the left is trying to hit Trump on it.
The reason they can't is Biden actually kept all of the Trump tariffs that Trump put in place anyway.So it's not a particularly distinguishing issue in this election, but I think it will be an important issue for economic policy going forward.
I view the tariff discussion as falling into three separate possibilities of what your view of the future could be, right?
One possibility is you go to the libertarian fantasy land that the United States should operate as though we live in a global free market, even under conditions where other countries are not actually playing by those same set of rules.
So I had an exchange actually just the other day on a campus I visited with a Hayek-adhering libertarian.I like Hayek, too. He claimed, self-described adherent of Hayek, who said that his word is not mine.
I said, what do you think if the other countries on the other side of these trades are engaging in state subsidies when we're not, are engaging in indirect tariffs while we're not applying the same level of tariffs to them, or even direct tariffs to us that we're not applying to them?
What do you think the right approach is to the United States?Because I don't call that free trade.And his word was, you know what?I'm going to be honest with you.I think we should still turn the other cheek, because it's still value maximizing.
So it was sort of the turn the other cheek version of approach to tariffs.That's what the classical older variety of what somebody thinks of themselves as a libertarian purist might say.I reject that.
There's a second category, which is the one that I find myself drawn to from a policy perspective, is the idea that we really weren't really ever operating in a true global free market anyway, because the other trading partners we're trading with are playing by a different set of rules than we are with respect to state subsidies, with respect to tariffs they apply to us.
And so it's a perfectly fair game for us to say that if you're going to do that and trade with us, it's not capitalism If one side is mercantilist on that trade, that's not real capitalism.We have to play by the same set of rules.
So we'll apply the same tariffs, direct or indirect, that you apply to us that we apply to you.But the best solution for all might be to get rid of them all together.But so long as you're not doing it, we're not going to turn the other cheek.
We're not going to have our heads stuck in the sand.We're going to demand that you play by the same set of rules and hold you accountable.
And that's really what I saw out of a lot of Donald Trump in that first term, which I respect and I'm on board with. That's still quite different.
And to smoke out this difference from the idea that let's suppose we did have the other countries and our trading partners playing by the same set of rules.
What you might have is a lower incremental labor costs in the trading partner country in India or China or whatever.And China's complicated because they're an adversary now. But suppose it wasn't even the CCP in charge, right?
And it was just a trading partner, but that was democratic for all intents and purposes, like an India situation, or you could take the Philippines or Vietnam or whatever else.
Even under those conditions, the true protectionist view is that even if the other side is playing by the same set of rules, we want to apply a different set of rules ourselves to advantage American workers and American manufacturers who aren't forced to compete under the economic conditions set effectively by the sum total of our trading partners, which is a coherent view, but it's different than
the Category 2, my view that I laid out.And as I understand you and many others who would classify themselves in the new right, you're probably in Category 3.I'm in Category 2.
We both reject Category 1, blithe neoliberal libertarianism, because, you know, for the reasons I just laid out, but on slightly different grounds. And yet we haven't really had that distinction between Category 2 and Category 3.
And President Trump is unique as a leader in building a coalition that includes both of those strains in the same movement that we call America First.
So I want to give you a chance to react to that and parse what you see as the distinctions between those views and maybe make the argument for your side.
Yeah, to be honest, I think that I'm somewhere between two and three, and that you'd be surprised the extent to which I'm not full three.
But here's what I'll say for starters, is that for most of its history, for most of its history, the United States has been a protectionist country, specifically concerned about import substitution, and especially concerned with import substitution in manufacturing.
So Alexander Hamilton founded something that's called the Society for Useful Manufacturers.Of course, it was about promoting domestic manufacturing.And this regime that he created, the Hamiltonian system,
You know, it wasn't just about tariffs, there were other elements to it as well, but tariffs were a very important dimension of it.
It was obviously, as you know, historically, always the agricultural South, which didn't have a manufacturing capacity, that opposed, historically opposed the tariff regime, and those are the fights between
throughout the 19th century between pro and anti-tariff Americans.But it's important to note that the immense industrial capacity that the United States had built up had been built up in the context of tariffs being the norm.
And so insofar as that's the case today, I think whether or not we like it or not, I think much of the West
is moving away from number one, not just the United States under both Presidents Biden and Trump, but even a lot of our European partners are looking at a sort of smaller globe and they're thinking they're more and more going back to thinking of the globe.
as blocks, BLOC blocks, right?Because of the experience of the pandemic, when we suddenly realized that, oh, shoot, we can't manufacture our own masks.
We still, even to this day, some of the most basic components that go into our medicines are still manufactured in China.We can't manufacture personal protective equipment.What happened to our manufacturing capacity?
So there's that kind of strategic fear that states have, all states have, and which,
led to a condition in which the Biden administration, as you noted, kept in place President Trump's tariffs, and indeed expanded them in the case of electric vehicles and electric vehicle components.
So I think that's the general trend that we're moving toward.The question is, okay, like, where do we, you know, where do we hash out the details?And the thing to remember is what are tariffs for?The tariffs are,
are aimed at promoting certain domestic industries.It's basically saying, what do we want to produce in this country?What products do we not want to give up the production of in this country?
Whether that's for strategic reasons, whether it's because, and I believe this, that manufacturing is associated with just a different kind of job, right?
gigafied, precarious service jobs don't have the same stability and dignity and actually, frankly, higher wages that are associated with manufacturing jobs.So that's part of it.There's a pro-labor component to it.
There's a national security component to it.And there's just industrial know-how, right?What we learn as we're trying to, for example, arm Israel and Ukraine is that, you know, even as Congress is
throwing more and more money, whether you agree with those policies or not, I don't want to get into the substance of it.But even as Congress is throwing money into the Pentagon to build more shells and stuff, it takes time to ramp that up.Why?
Because for two decades, we neglected our industrial base.And we have workers whose skills have atrophied, we've lost the game in terms of workforce development.So you know, these are the goals that you want to address with tariffs.
And if you have that in mind, then you can be strategic about it.You can say, OK, well, on some areas, yeah, we still want to be able to, you know, take advantage of comparative advantage, especially when there's, as you say, a real fair trade
you know, you have a fair play going on and not one side playing a mercantilist game while we're pretending like we live in, you know, Milton Friedman's utopia.
Fine, you know, we can have that as long as, for example, those third countries that we consider allies don't become platforms for Chinese investments that are aimed at doing the same thing they were doing before, which is undermining our industrial base.
Fine, we can have that discussion.So I'm not, I'm not super hard.
Can you define industrial base? Because that word gets bandied around a lot.And sometimes I think we're maybe nonspecific about what it actually means.
It's plants and the entire kind of apparatus that goes around for a plant to be able to produce whatever it is, whatever X industrial good you care about.It's got it.
It involves infrastructure, roads, supply chains, all those things that make it possible for, you know, raw materials, et cetera, et cetera, to go into the plant and for the for the product to come out. It's not just the plant itself.
It goes with a wider sort of ecosystem.Maybe think of it as an industrial ecosystem.And that's been eroded.
And its erosion is apparent in figures, like the fact that today, depending on whom you ask, manufacturing makes up 8% to 11% of American gross domestic product.For Germany, it's 24%.
The OECD average, the organization, economic, whatever, the OECD average is 18%. So the goal here is to... And what was it in the United States in 1990?I believe it was closer to the average.I'm almost certain it was closer to the 18% average.
I'm sure it was further back in time.I'm actually much more interested in the 1990s, when we came of age.
Probably the most damaging effects came with NAFTA in 1994, I believe, and then the entry of China into the World Trade Organization in 1999-2000.I mean, those when you'll see the drop off.
And by the way, if you take a map of the counties in the United States that today have are the most sort of exposed to fentanyl and the sort of various kind of opioid pathologies that we associate with the Rust Belt.
And if you overlay a map of counties that were most exposed to the China trade shock, it would be uncanny how much overlap there is between those two maps.So manufacturing, it creates a certain kind of community.
The local industrialist has a different relationship with his community frankly, than leaders in distant Wall Street or Silicon Valley.They're the ones who... I mean, that's a claim.That's an assertion.
Historically, the manufacturing bosses were the ones who would sponsor the local theater, the local library, the local arts group.It's a whole...
way of life that goes with the production of tangible goods that you just don't get in other modes of production.
I want us to lead in finance, I want us to lead in high tech, but I just don't want us to lose manufacturing either because it's just a source of national strength of good stable jobs, etc, etc.
But just to go back to your question, basically, I'm I'm kind of a 2.5.If you you know, you may be a libertarian one of the vague stat, you know, to national libertarian, yeah, and then full on hard autarky.
Of course that you know, no, that doesn't seem it sound right to me.I'm somewhere between two and three.I think the key is in the coming years to just
you know, carve out a smaller block, BLOC block, right, where that includes, we have to think about whether the allies we're dealing with are, whether they're democratic, whether they really have free market societies, as you said, because if we have a free market society, and they're, you know, pumping, you know, billions and billions in subsidies, that's a problem.
That's not a free market.And whether or not they're, we are prepared to combat it if they allow their territories to be used essentially as Chinese platforms.
Oversyndicates for some sort of narrative of like an idyllic, if I may say hand wavy account of Yeah, we had this era of some industrialist, and because he's making things there, the local theater is also better off.
I mean, those are just not the kinds of claims that are sufficiently reliable around which we can actually build a sustainable, credible economic policy. Also, the question of how much.
I mean, right now, if we open the door to say, okay, well, yes, we want to play by level playing field, I can tell what a level playing field looks like, is that the other countries play by the same set of rules that we actually do.
Climate regulations aren't disproportionately applied to the US versus another country.Tariffs aren't applied disproportionately to the US manufacturers versus other countries' manufacturers.
They don't get to subsidize an industry when we don't level that playing field.I can tell you what that looks like.
But this idea that but then we need to go further and have some type of more muscular state sponsorship and or regulatory and or New Deal vestige apparatus.
I think demands an answer of at least how much and how do you know which is the right amount of that and how do you know whether you're going to get the result of the local libraries and theaters being sponsored just because some guy happens to make something in a particular location.
Like what if that doesn't follow and you're left with a guy who's coming out of Silicon Valley or a financial industry that's actually sponsoring the theater in Cincinnati, Ohio instead.I just want to understand
with greater specificity, how you translate your desired end with the policies that you would propose to actually get there.I'm not contesting the end.
I'm contesting whether or not we have the specificity of actually having policies that restore that more idealized vision you've laid out.
First of all, on the point about manufacturing employers being anchors historically of their community, that's not the primary benefit.I mentioned that as a side thing.It's not like I'm standing out saying, now there's going to be a good,
well-funded public theater group in every town.However, it is true, we can go to towns where historically there were manufacturing employers and they were associated with a kind of philanthropy and a kind of culture.
It wasn't just that it was the factory, it was the associated union hall, which was a place not just of, well, that's where we go to lay out collective bargaining, but also it was
a place of community and solidarity, et cetera, et cetera, that's all been decimated.And there are towns I can tell you to go to, like Steubenville, Ohio, where you see what it looks like when it's been, that's been lost.
And we agree that that's not an end state that we want.Of course.Maybe we're talking about competing visions of how do we actually... The local libraries thing was not my main contention at this point.Fair enough.Fair enough.Illustrative though.
And then, you know, on the other point, I mean, look, I think
For starters, the tariffs that we've put in place under the Trump administration and maintained under the Biden administration, because we're talking about protection here, I would maintain those.
And I'm worried about the fact that Kamala Harris, I think, comes closer from the neoliberal wing of the Democrats than the kind of wing of the party that Biden
whether it's Biden himself or whoever was around him calling the shots, prioritize, right?And I always joke, I would have an easier time, I would do a better job laying out what Bidenism got right than Kamala herself.
Because she can't, you know, she's saying tariffs are a tax on consumers.It's terrible.
It's like, well, she doesn't know what she's saying.
Do you know your own administration imposes tariffs?
The existence of Kamala Harris, I think, is a great risk for us, not because I think we're going to lose electorally.We'll find out if I'm wrong about that, but I don't think so.
But because it actually, like the level of intellectual clarity about her own party or supposed movements goals,
is so obfuscated that it actually sets such a low standard of what we can expect for ourselves and stops us from having intelligent debates on the right because we just end up falling into the trap of dunking on Kamala Harris, which is just too easy to do.
But let's just take this question on what accounted for that loss of the industrial base.Because part of it, I would put at the feet of the idea that the US was held to different regulatory standards than other countries.
And the US was overregulated in the first place that caused many of those manufacturers to go to conditions where they could either be in less regulated or more
you know, more business friendly environments, not just as it related to labor costs, but even as it relates to things like emission standards, if you're tracking that in the United States, but not in another country, that's actually part of the reason, among other regulatory factors to that account for the, the industrialization as they move to countries that were closer to the Wild West of what the United States used to be, during the time that we had the first time we had a frontier.
And the first time we had an industrial revolution, when those were not constraints on us businesses.
And so I guess part of my objection then to the vision of believing in muscular state intervention, and even in part backstopped by some level of a regulatory state to create that optimistic vision of reindustrializing America, is that that was the very source for the deindustrialization in the first place.
And we can't possibly trust that bureaucracy to somehow magically will into existence an alternative vision when, in fact, that was at least among the causes for deindustrialization in the first place.
So what would be your response to that national libertarian claim from your vision for what you think is the right kind of industrial policy we need in this country?
Well, I mean, we've Tariffs aren't necessarily industrial policy.They can go hand in hand.So we've seeped into industrial policy and maybe the existence of the regulatory state as such.I welcome that.But let's just be clear about that.
It's an adjacent topic to the tariff topic.There's a guy, and his book is off the frame here, but his name is David Harvey. And he also agrees that there was too much regulatory sclerosis.
And even he would say that American unions were too inflexible during that key period of the 1970s when the real transformations began to happen.David Harvey happens to be a Marxist, but I think he's like an eminent Marxist.
But just to your point that if you take my view, you don't have to say I'm going to defend every element of the regulatory state.So here's what I would say. complex economies always go hand in hand with complex administration.
This is unavoidable, right, because complex entities like nation and in fact indeed globe-spanning corporations have such complex operations and their interests
and the interests of the wider national community are so intertwined that you cannot but have an administrative state.The question is, what we do with that administrative state, and is it sufficiently responsive to the political demands.
So here's my general stance on the administrative state.
On the one hand, when people say, I want to collapse the administrative state, I want to destroy the administration state, the first thing I'll say is like, okay, well, you take the first flight after the FAA has been abolished, because I would be hesitant to do that.
or you eat the first can of sausages after we've been liberated from under the tyrannical yoke of the Food and Drug Administration, I'm not going to do that because it's going to be scary.
And there was like a reason why all this sort of apparatus was built up in the late 90s.But what about the 50th?
What about the 50th can or the 50th flight?That might be, that's a different story.
No, what you're saying is basically some people will crash and die and then we will make different choices about which
But people are crashing and dying already anyway, is part of my point.Is there a transition cost to a new equilibrium?They'd be dishonest to say that there couldn't be.
But the question is, are we going to be in a better place where that's actually governed through other forces? competitive forces than by a partially captured regulatory apparatus.That's the question.
If you believe it's better, then the question of what transition cost are we willing to bear?
We went through this in the 19th century, in the late 19th century, in 20th century, and the nation decided in a pretty decisive way, beginning under the
in some cases under Republican administrations, for example, Hoover had elements of the New Deal, certainly Wilson, and then, of course, the New Deal.
That became so embedded as a necessity for dealing with modern capitalism that it's never going to happen.To me, debating the administrative state is like debating the weather.
I don't like that it's rainy today, but the fact that I gripe about it doesn't mean it's going to go away.However, there are things we can do.Just to build agreement rather than sharpened disagreements.
I do agree and I think you would agree that one initial step that everyone on the right and even maybe some people on the left agree with is that we want greater political control over the administrative state.So I'll give you a funny example.
I was on a an interview with PBS about J.D.Vance, and like my segment didn't air, but they asked me like, uh, we've heard J.D.Vance... You're too smart.It was too intelligent.We've heard J.D.
Vance say that he wants the president to have control and sort of like, over the administrative side.I'm like, well, you understand the administrator is an extension of the executive branch.Of course, we want that.
And it's- And you and I agree on this.It's a bad thing that the chief executive cannot exert his will over the bureaucrats.And I think we should change that.If he wants to be able to fire them, I'm all for that.
Now, I think like talk of mass firing of bureaucrats or like de-biotification is crazy and it's not going to happen and it would result in a lot of bad things.
But the point is, like, I'm willing to say, let's adjust the administrative state if we're going.You're right.If we want to have industrial policy, some of the environmentalism has to give.I'm I'm open to that because I'm not a green alarmist.
So and that's one of the shortcomings of the Inflation Reduction Act is so much of the investment.This is the Biden industrial policy in a way.So much of the investment is going toward green kind of investments rather than other things.
So anyway, I think that's the bottom line.And here, your listeners should know that I'm sort of definitely the outlier here, because even the most
sort of more of a protectionist America first, or as you mentioned, are fairly hostile to the administrative state.I'm because my job, I'm not a, I'm not a politician, I'm not an office seeker.I'm just a writer, you know, whatever.
I could just say like, I just don't think dismantling the administrative state is ever going to happen.
So like, yeah, so I think the question of I hear this argument a lot about what is it going to happen and the American people decided they decided in like 19 1920 and 1930.
I mean, starting with Woodrow Wilson and Kaltman, further extending through FDR, and then further even through LBJ, in some ways through Richard Nixon.That doesn't mean that those decisions of the past were the right decisions then.
That doesn't mean that even if they were partially the right decisions then, that they're necessarily the right decisions now.
And just because those decisions have been made in the past, we've radically reordered a lot of things in this country that were unimaginable back then. or what they did back then was unimaginable 100 years before.
So this idea of that it is or isn't going to happen, I think, is, for me, less interesting than whether it should happen.
The fundamental reason this came about is because modern capitalism is not the kind of agrarian Arcadia that is described in most econ 101 textbooks that econ 101 students read in college.
I don't know if they read textbooks in college anymore, but there used to be kids something called textbooks that you read and got information from.
And in Econ 101, the picture that is painted, it's a kind of neoclassical tradition, whatever you want to call it, it has different names, libertarian, et cetera, is basically that every market is intensely competitive.
There are numerous sellers and buyers on every side.And the fact that there is this much competition means that you can always find a better deal elsewhere.Therefore, markets, all else being equal, markets are generally non-coercive.
Now, there was a period in the development of capitalism when this was true.
Like I said, in the late 18th century, there was this period of called the masterless men, artisans, yeoman farmers, et cetera, who would deal with each other at arm's length.
And really, that picture that I just described really described the reality.But ever since the Industrial Revolution, most sectors are dominated by a handful of large players. The name that the economist Joan Robinson coined for this is oligopoly.
It's not monopoly.Even free marketeers agree that monopoly should be curbed.It's oligopoly.It's just two or three players so that like by the late 19th century Otis Elevator controlled 90% of its market.
British American tobacco controlled 70% of its market, et cetera, et cetera.
When you're dealing in a situation like that, the economy is coercive because the price is no longer this pristine index of supply and demand, but rather an index of relative bargaining power between consumers and sellers, between employers and employees, and so on.
And can I can I can I pause you there because I think you and I are tracking each other well now.
Isn't your claim of this vision a little bit in tension with your view of inhibiting competition in the form of international sellers in those same markets into the United States of America?
So on one hand, if our concern is the concentration of market power, and yet on the other hand, our concern is not enough American manufacturers are doing it, therefore we need to protect from the effects of that competition.
Isn't there a bit of talking out of both sides of the mouth?
I don't aim for going back to it.I don't think it's possible to go back to that Arcadia of many, many sellers, many, many buyers in every market.It's just not possible.It is not rational to have a many sectors organized that way anymore.
That's why, you know, in the late 19th century, you had this sort of bloodbath of railroads, and as few railroads emerged out of that.Why?Because you either have factory effects or network effects, and in both cases, they actually promote bigness.
So what is that?In factory effects, that just has to do with increasing returns to scale. It's why you don't really have tire manufacturers that are mom and pop shops.Tire manufacturing has to be on an enormous scale.
Or the network effects are industries that connect people and goods in different ways.So for example, a railroad, it doesn't make sense for 100 railroads to connect 200 different towns.It's much more rational for two or three lines
connecting each about 70 of those towns in some regional formation.So that's the reality of modern capitalism.And that's fine.Like I said, it's rational in many ways.
We don't want intense price competition, all that kind of 19th century capitalism, because it's destabilizing and, you know, there's all this sort of wild cycles and so on that we live through in the 19th century.
So we realize we're going to have these kind of consolidated, enormous concentrations of power.However, if we're going to have them, then we should countervail their power by other forces in society.
Labor unions, one, and of course, government administrators and so on, regional wage boards, civil society, non-profit.This is the model of the early, of mid-century America, which
coincided with this period of great, like I said, productivity and dynamism and mass prosperity.Now, like, I don't see how in 2024 conditions have changed.
Capitalism in an industrial age will just involve large concentrations and we need socially to be able to sort of exert our will over these entities, even as they benefit us.And I realize that they benefit us.So that's the theory.
And I just don't think you say, well, just because it was enacted in 34 doesn't mean that it's, well, the basic kind of conditions of industrial capitalism haven't changed.
Look, I think that where we find a lot of common ground in the framing of the discussion is a menu of options of imperfect systems or imperfect alternatives.I would say that even this gets into sort of a deeper vision of
philosophy of virtue, but if our own needs matched our wants, if we wanted what we needed and really there was not a gap between the two, capitalism would be the perfect system, right?
But the gap between what we need and what we want accounts for that delta is this thing we might call an approximation of virtue.
I think that a lot that goes wrong with capitalism in part is explained by the way in which our own innate human wants don't always match our needs.
What we actually manifest or revealed preferences in the market don't always actually represent what we ultimately need for a fuller realization of ourselves.
So I think that we agree that as a matter of policy, we're choosing between less imperfect options.But I do think that the case has at least been more rigorously made over the body of work of the last 100 years of libertarian economic scholarship.
fantasy land, though some of that may be, in a way that is missing for what the exact quotient would be of exactly how much of a regulatory apparatus without being too much, exactly how much competition we want while also restricting the international dimension of it.
And I think that perhaps that puts the new in the new right, right?And so perhaps this is being developed, you know, and intellectualized as we as we speak.And there's, you know,
On my side, you have to turn to because the right has, you know, there were conservative or Republican figures who made their peace with the vision I described, most notably, I would say, Eisenhower and Nixon.
And I'd kind of placed Trump as an inheritor of, he skips over in a way the Goldwater-Reagan, you know, George W. Bush tradition.
Donald Trump is a sort of inheritor of the, is more of a Dwight Eisenhower, a Nixonian president, but they didn't theorize what they were doing.
They didn't write down like kind of a book of like, here's why we're doing this kind of strange making of the peace with the New Deal order.
I think, well, partly it was political necessity and partly, you know, a lot of these people had lived through the Great Depression and come to realize why, you know, markets need restraints and so on.
But so therefore, who are the people who have theorized the vision that I'm putting forward?It's actually kind of New Deal economists like John Kenneth Galbraith or historians like Arthur Schlesinger and Richard Hofstadter.
So it's odd because those are often my touchstones in public writing about these issues.
you know, some people will be like, well, that's, you're, you're basically citing a liberal historian or you're on the left, you know, that's not that to me, that to me is not a, but just to say that there is a body of work that's, that's very rigorous and very has a place of eminence on the, on the mainstream or the center left.
But that, you know, within the conservative tradition, what I'm trying to carve out is sort of under theorized.So I agree with you there.
Yeah, it's under-theorized as to how that would otherwise inevitably, a conservative might say, that framework inevitably leads to the advancement of liberal substantive goals.
And is there a possibility of advancing a conservative alternative vision using the same instruments, I think, is maybe under-theorized.
To me, like, to me, union workers having you know, stable jobs, being able to support a family on on one or one and a half income, being able to have the peace of mind to go to church, to retire in safety.That's a conservative outcome.
Yeah, I agree with you on that.I fully agree with you on that.
I think I think I think the question is, you have those in the sort of the national libertarian strain who might believe that the reason we want to advance these policies is because it's consistent with an ideology.I reject that.
I don't value these principles because they're more important than looking after the American worker manufacturer. I care about actually, in part, reviving a vision of true free trade of a kind we don't have.
That's category two that Hala hit at the very start, because I think that's the best way to advance the interests of American workers and manufacturers rather than over-expanding the regulatory state.
So, you know, with that being said, we didn't even get to touch on immigration, which was the topic I was looking forward to getting into.We're out of time today.
Well, I'll just say very quickly, I appreciate it, Saurabh, and if you're up for it in the next couple of weeks, let's pick this up where we left off, and same principle discussion an exchange as applied to the question of immigration.Let's do it.
Thank you, Vivek.Take care, my man.Cheers.
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