Explaining Trump's Tariffs

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Welcome once again to the Conversations That Matter podcast, I'm your host John Harris. And today we have a special guest with us.

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We have Daniel McCarthy from Modern Age Journal. You can go to modernagejournal .com

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if you want to find out more. They are a conservative publication. They actually publish a lot of paleo conservative thinkers, similar to Chronicles Magazine.

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I know I had Paul Gottfried on just a few days ago, so similar kind of, I guess, outlet.

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He is the editor -in -chief of that particular journal, and we're going to talk about the Trump tariffs. I'm really looking forward to it.

00:46

So with that, welcome. Should I say doctor or Mr. McCarthy? Mr. McCarthy is fine, yes.

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Okay. Are you a doctor? No, I'm not a doctor. I'm not a doctor. I'm not on television either. Okay. That's probably good, considering in 2020 we lost faith in a lot of doctors, not just medical ones.

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Quite so. Well, I really want to delve into this topic, starting really from a personal level, and I think

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I probably represent a lot of conservatives and just your regular, ordinary, run -of -the -mill

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Christians out there. We've been steeped in Reagan, the three tiers.

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I'm trying to remember what they were, right? Reagan's like three markets, one of them, I think social conservatives, another.

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I'm trying to think what the third one was, but his - National defense. National defense. There you go. Thank you. And the free market part, that sort of libertarian part, of course,

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I have attachments to that. I still want to see the free market function.

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I don't like it when the government regulates things, right? And in 2016, when Trump was first running, he was proposing the wall and he was proposing tariffs and he wanted to get us out of NAFTA, of course, but there was a lot of talk about regulating trade.

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And of course, at that time, I was against this and I was listening to guys. I remember listening to like Ben Shapiro and guys who are more on the neoconservative side of things, perhaps, who were arguing against this, saying this wasn't conservative, this contradicted

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Reagan's tripartite there. And I've since then realized maybe that's not quite true.

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Maybe actually there's merit to this. And so I'm hoping that you can help us at the very least understand and maybe you have your own departures from Trump's plan, but maybe understand what the thinking is here and whether or not some tariffs are whether they're good for the

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United States and the economy. So I think the first thing is, what is

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Trump proposing? What kinds of things is he hoping to accomplish through these tariff proposals?

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Yeah. So Trump is proposing something really grand right now, which is basically a tariff on almost all foreign goods or all of them entirely.

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Now, Trump being Trump, this is probably an opening gambit as opposed to what he actually wants to accomplish in the end.

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He is using the threat of tariffs, the possibility of tariffs to get better deals in our trade arrangements with all sorts of other countries.

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And it may very well be the case. I mean, we'll see exactly what he does once he's in office. It may be the case that he wants to impose these tariffs and then perhaps scale them back when he has a country that he wants to cut a deal with.

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Or perhaps he doesn't even want to impose them unilaterally or universally to begin with and is just using this idea as a threat, whether or not it actually gets imposed.

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So that's one question is just how far Trump plans to go. But at least in terms of what he's talking about, it does seem like a universal tariff on pretty much everything coming in from the outside.

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Now, that would be a reversion to the kind of tax structure that America had for most of its history, that in fact, the tariff was the main source of the federal government's revenue until well into the 20th century.

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Of course, the big question there is if you bring back a universal tariff like this, are you then going to get rid of the income tax?

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You're going to get rid of all of the new forms of taxation that were created basically to supply revenue for the federal government rather than having a tariff do that.

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And historically, by the way, there is this tradeoff between income taxes and tariffs. It's the same sort of thing in Britain where the abolition of the

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Corn Laws, which is a big sticking point between the conservatives and the liberals in the early part of the 19th century, the middle of the 19th century, that actually not only led to the abolition of the

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Corn Laws, which libertarians tend to support and are very happy about and free market economists are very happy about, but it also led to the creation of the income tax.

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And so if you have a very critical view of taxes and you think taxes are evil and destructive, which most libertarians also believe, you really have to ask yourself, is this a good tradeoff?

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Is it better to have income taxes as opposed to having tariffs? Now, Trump hasn't well, he has talked to actually a little bit about abolishing the income tax, abolishing a whole slew of other taxes that are established.

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But to do a lot of that, he would really have to get these proposals to Congress, even with Republican control of both the

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House and the Senate. Being able to reform taxes on that scale would be an enormous undertaking, and it's probably more than his political cards will allow him to accomplish.

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On the other hand, funnily enough and ironically enough, Congress has ceded so much trade power to the executive branch over the past 30 years, basically from Reagan onwards, that in fact, the president can now impose tariffs pretty much unilaterally.

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And so Congress, and especially while it's a Republican Congress, they're not likely to revoke that power.

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But it does seem to be that if Trump does this and if it backfires, then you're going to get this become a massive issue in the 2026 midterms, which might very well play to the

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Democrats. And then the Democrats would use Congress to revoke the tariff power that the president has been granted.

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So that's the state of play. What Trump is trying to accomplish here, he fundamentally thinks that America has been ripped off by the rest of the world for a very long time.

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That's true in foreign policy. It's true with our so -called allies who are, in fact, clients who are dependent upon us for their national defense.

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It's also true in Trump's view where trade is concerned and that China in particular has been able to rise at the expense of America's middle class, which was heavily invested in manufacturing for most of the 20th century.

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So Trump wants to undo that. He wants to, you know, make sure that other countries all feel that they have to, in a sense, pay tribute to the

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United States and tariffs are going to be the way to do that. Meanwhile, you know, American manufacturers will be more protected by these tariff barriers and therefore will have more of an opportunity to cultivate the

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American market for themselves. One of the free market concerns here, and it's a complicated one, is well,

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I guess there's there's two ways of looking at this. One is there are free market supporters who say that unilateral free trade is great, even if other countries are actually cheating.

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So you can imagine that two companies are competing to manufacture widgets. One company is in your country.

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Another company is in the other country. And this other country might actually be subsidizing its widget production or doing other things in order to make its products more easily available in your country than your products are available in their country.

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Now, if this kind of strategy is employed, what's going to happen is that you'll probably have widget manufacturing move to the country that is subsidizing it, the country that's using unfair practices to promote it, and you're going to have your own native widget manufacturing decline and collapse.

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There is a sort of pure free market argument which says even that kind of cheating is

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OK in the long run because it will ultimately only damage the country that's responsible for that cheating, the country that's subsidizing its industries.

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That'll be dis -economical in the long run. And then that industry will eventually collapse. And then, you know, in the meantime, the country that is not subsidizing its products, but getting sort of cheap imports that are artificially subsidized by its opponent, it will be that country will be receiving cheap consumer goods, which is a nice thing.

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And meanwhile, it will have other industries it can focus on besides the one that the other country is subsidizing.

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So that's that's one argument. But, you know, I think a more realistic view says that actually having industries in your country destroyed because other countries are using unfair competition and that can be take many, many forms.

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Subsidies will be kind of the clearest example, but you can also have currency devaluation. You can also have sort of regulatory arbitrage.

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There's all kinds of things that can lead to basically government imposed differences in the costs of products, you know, in or manufacturing products in two different places or in multiple different places.

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So Trump, I think, is trying to basically say the United States is not going to be taken advantage of by anyone else's trade policy.

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Everyone who wants to do business with us is going to have to pay a tariff to bring their goods here. And then America will decide what kind of grounds upon which we want to negotiate, whether it's with China or with Mexico or with the

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European Union or anyone else. If a country is engaging in some kind of unfair tactic to lower the price of a good or service that's coming here, aren't they hurting themselves in another?

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I mean, they have to take from, in the example you gave, if they're subsidizing, they have to take from somewhere to subsidize.

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Right. So they're either taxing their people or they're I mean, they're taking it from another industry.

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So I guess the question is, aren't they already hurting themselves to accomplish this? And if that's true,

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I mean, they're hurting some of our industry, too, but they're to put a tariff on it.

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Wouldn't that make matters worse by passing on to the consumer essentially a I mean,

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I don't know if you consider tariffs taxes, but a higher price for these goods. Tariffs are definitely taxes.

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Now, you're right that a country that is subsidizing or otherwise using kind of legal power or the power of its centralized state in order to give itself a trade advantage is doing harm to some of its citizens, at least because it's certainly taxing them or otherwise expropriating those funds in order to subsidize industry or otherwise give its industries an advantage.

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The question, though, is why do countries do this? Why do the Chinese, for example, do this? Why did the Japanese do it?

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The Germans do it. Why is that? And in fact, you know, almost all countries have done this historically. And it's because they see long term value in the acquisition of industrial strength in their own country.

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So the idea is that if you subsidize manufacturing in your country, you're able to flood the market of a competitor.

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That competitor may have more advanced industry than you at first. But because, you know, these advanced but rather expensive finished goods are now competing with subsidized finished goods from the competitor country, that will tend to make consumers go to the cheaper goods that are subsidized that will tend to, you know, wipe out the market for the more expensive goods that are sort of fairly produced.

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And that will mean that you have a collapse of those industries in the country that's not subsidizing and the growth of those industries in the country that is subsidizing.

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Now, economists like to say that the governments that do this can't second guess the market and that by building up, you know, artificially building up the industry in their own countries, they're actually creating a problem for themselves in the long term, because, of course, consumer preferences might shift because, you know, the cost of manufacturing in their own countries might go up.

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All sorts of things could, you know, lead to that being a diseconomical choice to subsidize production in your own country.

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But why do so many countries do it? Well, it's because, you know, some of them do it because they want to maintain their industrial workforce, which is basically a political reason.

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They want the workers in their country to be happy. A lot of countries, however, and in fact, this is historically one of the biggest reasons a lot of countries want to get a military advantage, a strategic advantage from having certain kinds of manufacturing in their countries.

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This certainly applies to things like shipbuilding. It applies to aircraft building. It's why a company like Boeing, for example, is so heavily kind of regulated and subsidized and, you know, is something less than a fully free market entity here in America.

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That's true of, you know, sort of aircraft manufacturers all around the world, at least the larger ones. It's certainly very true of ship manufacturing.

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And then it's true, of course, of the things that go into the inputs for, you know, shipbuilding and aircraft.

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So that includes everything from steel to computer chips. So you can actually wind up with, you know, strategic and military advantages being pursued by countries, leading them into very extensive kinds of industrial policy.

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And it's interesting because a lot of libertarians and free market economists will say, at least, you know, notionally that they are willing to make exceptions for critical defense industries to be protected.

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But in practice, almost anything, you know, I shouldn't say almost anything, but many, many things can be construed and with good reason as being, in fact, critical to defense.

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So Japan, for example, has highly protected agricultural markets. They strongly protect, for example, the growing of rice in Japan.

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Now, that's not a critical military technology in the sense of, you know, they're going to throw, you know, rice patties at, you know, right balls of, you know, sort of yeah, shooting rice.

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Exactly. They're not shooting your rice cannons like potato guns or anything. But they say basically, if Japan is going to succeed in a very competitive world, we have to be able to feed ourselves.

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And so we actually do have to maintain this native agricultural production capacity. By the way, this is a very serious strategic concern right now with Taiwan, because Taiwan does not have the capacity to feed itself.

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And basically all China would have to do in order to conquer Taiwan, they wouldn't have to invade necessarily. All they would have to do is blockade it long enough and, you know, thoroughly enough that Taiwan winds up running out of food.

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So, you know, this is an element of the gameplay that these states are involved in when it comes to their tariffs.

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Now, you know, there is also an argument to be made that, you know, while it's true that states cannot consistently second guess the market.

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States are just, you know, human beings the same way that firms are. And it doesn't bother free market economists that companies also make bad investments, that companies also go bankrupt.

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Companies also adopt strategies that wind up not working. The difference is, of course, a state, because it's able to externalize its costs, it's able to tax its citizens to pay for its own mistakes.

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States can invest much more resources in very bad strategies. But at the same time, there are free market firms which make the right choices and which actually do succeed.

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Most new startup companies, most entrepreneurs don't succeed, but the few that do create an enormous amount of value.

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And the fact is, states sometimes also get lucky or are able to be strategic enough that they actually do succeed in picking the winners or losers.

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It's not a common thing, but it can happen. And when you combine that with the strategic military concerns here, you can see why states often engage in this.

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So the way this would go is, you know, China's bet is that in the long run, manufacturing is going to be more important than finance.

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And so while the United States has all these sort of finance companies, we sell insurance, we have all kinds of capital markets, which makes us very wealthy and powerful right now, the

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Chinese say, but you know what? When the dollar is obliterated, what are the Americans going to have? What's all this financial infrastructure going to be worth?

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We in China, on the other hand, if we have the manufacturing base, people are always going to need manufactured goods, whether those are televisions or tanks.

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Wow. There's a lot to go into there, depending on what direction we want to go. That's really good explanation.

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What about the economic side of this? Because I understand the military side and I'm sure there's,

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I was even thinking, I don't think you said this, but of, you know, new technologies. If you can corner the market on certain new technologies and sacrifice one area of your economy to,

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I don't know, create iPhones or something, then you're on the cutting edge and you can dominate so much.

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So, I mean, I see that strategic end, but what about the economic, like just the well -being of the

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GDP, the happiness consumer index for the country and the people who live here?

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Because Trump seems to be promoting tariffs as a way to get rich. Now, maybe

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I'm wrong on that. I was just watching him on Rogan, though, and he was saying it's the most beautiful word in the

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English language. And he just seems to think this is going to be like magic dust and Americans are going to have prosperity because of these tariffs.

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But as you said, it's a tax. So what, how does this work or does this work?

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Is he mistaken? Well, in the, you know, in the 19th century, America, as I said, used tariffs to finance the federal government.

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And this was, of course, also a golden age for American economic growth, development and industrialization.

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So when when Trump makes the argument that tariffs are going to make America rich again, he's basically looking back to a 19th century model that he thinks was very successful.

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And, you know, there are there sort of trade historians who argue about these questions. But there are a case, there is a case to be made that this is a path that other countries have followed as well, that Japan and Germany after World War II followed a similar strategy, not necessarily just employing tariffs, but certainly using an industrial policy to bring more industry to their countries and to use that to create a new middle class.

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If you look at I mean, it's really remarkable. America is, you know, a kind of, you know, it's very politically incorrect to say this, but it was a very low, low population density landmass of land that had not been developed very much.

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Right. It was not a land of factories in the early 19th century. It was not a land of cultivated fields.

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It was still largely virgin territory. The economic situation of Japan and Germany after World War II was absolute devastation.

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Their industries have been destroyed. You know, their populations, especially in Germany, were very nearly starving.

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This was, you know, as low as a country can get economically. By the way, you can also look at something like South Korea, which was also extremely poor, partly as a result of wars, partly as a result simply of having never really developed heavy, heavy industry.

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Well, all of these countries, Japan and Germany and South Korea after World War II, and of course, America in the 19th century, they all adopt this developmental mindset using industrial policy, in the case of America, using tariffs very broadly.

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And they become industrial superpowers over the course of just a few decades.

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And in fact, you know, in some cases even faster than that. So this is what Trump is pointing to when he says the tariffs are going to make

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America rich. He thinks that, you know, it's going to create a new golden age for American industry. That's going to be great for employment.

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It's actually going to be good for consumer markets as well. That's what Trump is envisioning.

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Now, yes, tariffs are a tax. And one of the arguments that has to be sort of sorted out is what they are a tax on.

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So you see, one of the anti -tariff arguments that's being made by a number of thinkers is that tariffs are a tax on American consumers.

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They're a tax on whoever buys the product. And what you said earlier is what they argue. They say that the price of the tax is passed on to the consumer.

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And if the consumer is an American, that means the Americans are the ones paying the tax. Right. The problem with that view is that prices are not simply arbitrarily set based on the input costs of a good.

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Right. So think about this. A company can make a product and it may cost, let's say, a dollar for labor, two dollars for raw materials.

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So it comes to three dollars for production costs. And then they want to give it a certain amount of profit.

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So they charge, you know, four dollars for this product on the market. But there's no guarantee that just because the company, it costs, you know, three or four dollars to make this good, that therefore consumers are willing to pay it because consumers have a, you know, in a mature economy like the

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United States, they've got an infinite number of choices of things they can buy so they can decide, hey, I don't want to buy widgets or I don't want to buy televisions.

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Those are expensive. I want to buy computers instead or I want to buy books instead. They have any number of substitute goods that they can choose instead of things that they don't like.

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So companies that produce any kind of good have to serve the consumer. They have to meet the consumer's demand rather than arbitrarily making prices based on price inputs.

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Now, obviously, if it costs, you know, three or four dollars to create a product and yet a company finds that market demand, consumer demand is only willing to pay 250 for that product, then ultimately, you know, one of two things is going to happen.

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If the company keeps making that product, you know, at a cost of four dollars and selling it for 250, they're going to go out of business.

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So that's one thing. But there's also the possibility that, you know, a company which gets started with this and then starts capturing a large enough market will find that, in fact, it can, you know, develop economies of scale, which may allow that, you know, sort of three or four dollar production costs to be brought down closer to 250.

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It also may find that in the process of, you know, creating these goods over and over again, that it becomes more adept and more skilled at creating them and is able, therefore, to lower the production costs so that, you know, it develops better technology over the course of, you know, supporting this market.

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And this is what we actually see in free market processes in America. It's often the case that new companies have products that are dis -economical.

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Think about, you know, something like a retailer like Amazon .com. Amazon .com was unprofitable for about 10 years.

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It survived on basically investment money. Now, how is it able to survive despite being unprofitable? And this is true for a retailer like Amazon, but it could be true for a manufacturer of widgets or anything else.

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It's because the investors said, wait a minute, when Amazon gets good enough that it's able to fulfill these orders, you know, with less cost, when it has developed a wide enough market, when enough consumers are accustomed to buying this product, then it's going to be in a position where it actually will start to be profitable because costs will come down and it may even, you know, consumers may be willing to buy more and more volume.

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And, you know, as the costs come down and volume goes up, you may reach a point where there's a slight profit, which then because of the very large volume

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Amazon has developed will become a very large profit. So actual market processes are a bit more complicated than just the idea that whatever it costs to manufacture something is what it actually, you know, what the price should be.

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And that's a big elementary mistake, which, you know, I think some economists who know better promote that mistake because they think it makes for an easy case against tariffs, because when you're adding a tax to something that's making it more expensive, therefore, you know, aren't, you know, manufacturers going to pass on the cost to consumers.

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If manufacturers raise the cost of a product, which is currently selling for, say, four dollars, they raise it to five dollars, they're obviously going to lose consumers because, you know, the number of people who are willing and able to pay four dollars for a television set or whatever else, obviously, that would be a really good deal.

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But whatever they're buying for four dollars that you don't have the same number of people who are willing and able and both willingness and ability are important here.

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We're both willing and able to buy the same product for five dollars. It's just not the case that consumers are, you know, have infinite piles of money and that you can just get more money from them by arbitrarily charging, charging more for the goods.

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What actually happens, who really pays the tariff here? It's not the American consumer, because the

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American consumer has, you know, first of all, a variety of substitute goods they can turn to.

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That's obviously, first of all, domestic equivalents of the foreign produced goods. And we can argue or discuss how it is that domestic producers really aren't able to raise their prices much or perhaps at all simply because you're losing foreign competition.

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That would only be true if, you know, you wound up with a monopoly kind of situation as a result of taking foreign competitors out.

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So there is that special case. But otherwise, basically, if domestic producers are able to get more market share because they no longer have to compete so much with foreign producers, what that's going to do is it will send a signal to other companies which could get into the widget manufacturing business and say, aha, there's actually space in this market for more competition.

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This was a competitive space previously occupied by the foreign firms. Now it's an opportunity for domestic companies to come in and make more money.

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I think the more accurate analysis of where tariffs have an effect which might be harmful to an economy, the more accurate analysis is not that consumers wind up paying more.

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It's rather in two different directions. Tariffs wind up ultimately being a tax on capital.

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So what, you know, and I recently kind of made an argument to an economist friend of mine saying, you know, it's well known in economics that you get less of whatever it is you tax.

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A tariff is not just a tax on goods. If it was a tax on goods overall, yes, you'd get fewer goods and that would be a big problem.

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Instead, it's a tax on foreign goods. And it's really particularly that foreign element which is getting taxed. So it's actually foreignness itself which is getting taxed by a tariff.

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And it's really foreign capital that's ultimately getting taxed because obviously if, you know, again, if it costs three or four dollars to manufacture a widget based on input costs and then, you know, another country puts a tariff on the product you're selling and that adds another dollar to the cost, you have two choices.

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You can either raise the cost to five or six dollars, in which case you're going to have fewer consumers and you may actually lose market share and you're going to be, you know, in serious trouble in terms of competitors.

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Or your other alternative is you can take that additional dollar of cost out of your profitability, out of your capital.

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And if you do that, that means you have less capital not only to reward investors, but also less capital with which to invest in new manufacturing and so forth.

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So it's very so a tariff ultimately winds up damaging foreign capital, which is actually part of what tariff supporters want to see happen.

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What what tariffs do to the domestic market is they encourage a shift in capital allocation, basically a shift from areas that do not have protection into areas that have more protection.

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So in other words, when you have foreign competitors removed from the market, if you have just one or two firms that are domestic that are making widgets, now there's an opportunity for additional firms to come in and make some profit in the space that was occupied by those foreign firms previously.

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But if that happens, what what that means is that people who could have been putting their capital to use making things other than widgets now see widgets as being a good market to get into and are more likely to invest in that.

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This, too, is something that supporters of tariffs actually see as a good thing, because it means that you're going to have more capital allocated to American manufacturing.

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And they think and I think there are good reasons for this. They believe, I believe, in fact, that right now our capital markets are distorted by the fact we have very strong intellectual property protections in this country and very strong international

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IP protections that we enforce, but we don't have similar protections for actual manufacturing and hard industry.

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And what that has done over time is to shift American capital allocation away from real world manufacturing into the realm of IP.

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And that has certain problems because IP itself is, of course, a kind of kind of property that is purely created by state fiat.

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Intellectual property is a matter of governments saying, you know, we give you an intellectual monopoly on this particular idea.

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And while there are good cases that can be made for that, it is a distortion of market processes in itself.

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So I actually see Trump's tariffs as a way of balancing one kind of thumb on the scale from government by putting another thumb on the scale.

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Now, pure free market economists would say that's bad. You should take both thumbs off the scale, get rid of the intellectual property protections and also get rid of manufacturing or tariff protections.

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But, you know, if you can't do that, if you're going to have a very unbalanced system right now that favors finance and favors

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IP, then it seems to me you've got to do something to strengthen capital allocation to manufacturing, because otherwise you'll see exactly what we've seen over the last 30 years, which is

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American manufacturing will lose capital and therefore will continue to disappear and die.

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And then America will be in big trouble when it turns out that you have something like the covid crisis or a big war where we can't get all the goods from China or from India that we're accustomed to getting.

28:38

What is the trade off as far? So let's say there's a factory in Mexico and they're producing air conditioners.

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I think there was an example of that a few years ago. Actually, I think it was Trump's first term and he had told them, don't go to Mexico before he even took office.

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He was saying, I'm going to put tariffs on imported goods. You want to stay here. And then they stayed and wherever it was,

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Chicago, I can't remember. And so there's this company that's going to do this and they can sell to the consumer at a cheaper price if they invest in a foreign market.

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But of course, now that they have to pay a penalty, if they're going to do that, they have to invest in the salaries of American workers and not just that, the infrastructure that goes along with that in the

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United States. Is that I guess the question is, is the trade off worth it?

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Like, is that going to bring so much revenue and investment back into United States manufacturing that it makes up for the fact that consumers would, if they chose to purchase the product, be paying a higher price?

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Well, like I said, I think if I could add one tag on that and maybe if you could answer the question, in addition to the math about concerning this, the social cost, is it better socially for that?

30:03

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31:08

Now, back to the show. Right. So the pro tariff case says that, in fact, consumers will not, in the long run at least, and assuming that, you know, you actually have competitive domestic markets, which is a key element.

31:20

But if you have a competitive domestic markets and you have, you know, take enough time into consideration and it's not a lot of time, but, you know,

31:27

I'll maybe talk about the time issues in a moment here. But ultimately, consumers will not be paying more in the long run because, you know, in the modern 21st century, almost anything that can be manufactured in one place can also be manufactured in another.

31:41

And, you know, the cost will not necessarily be much different. The main things that create differences in cost structures are things like regulations.

31:48

And that's, you know, an issue where Americans do have to be concerned because we do have higher regulations than other countries have.

31:55

On the other hand, Americans tend to support these regulations, whether environmental or labor or otherwise. So, you know, there is a sense in which if Americans, you know, we're being, you know, called on our own hypocrisy.

32:06

Right. Because here in America, we say, well, we have to have clean air. We have to have clean water. We have to have, you know, you know, protections for labor in terms of how many hours they're working and not having child labor and everything.

32:19

So Americans, you know, want to feel good about having these regulations. But they all but Americans also want to have cheap products that are made in other countries that don't have these regulations where, you know, factories can pollute streams and can, you know, shoot acid up into clouds and whatnot.

32:33

And you may have, you know, slave labor or child labor in parts of East Asia.

32:39

So the price of, you know, having to confront the question, do you want these regulations or do you not want them?

32:47

And if you do want them, you know, you have to pay the price for them. That's one thing that, you know, yes, Americans will have to make both an economic and a political choice.

32:55

And ultimately, those two things will combine. So I think actually what that does is, you know, it puts pressure on Washington, D .C.

33:02

and on the states themselves to get a lot smarter about regulation, because Americans will be, you know, shocked to see, you know, if regulations are now causing prices to increase, not because, you know, you don't have as much foreign competition, but rather because our regulatory structure, once you actually take into account the full cost, winds up being something that's very burdensome.

33:24

So Americans will then have to say to themselves, well, look, can we have smarter regulations that are less costly, that do less to constrain competition, that do less to, you know, manipulate our labor markets?

33:37

Or if not, if we have to have the environmental and other regulations we have right now, that's going to, you know, that's going to have a detrimental effect on economic production.

33:47

And again, you know, I'm skeptical of the ability of companies to pass on cost to the consumers. But what you wind up having is simply less goods produced.

33:54

And that will have, you know, an effect on cost structures, because, you know, if American companies simply can't produce widgets in the same kind of volumes as China because the regulatory environment doesn't permit as much mercury or whatever to be used in the creating of these widgets, that's going to be a big effect.

34:12

So there's a political choice to be made here. But I think it's, you know, a choice that Americans have to be honest about, because you can't, you know, you can't in the long run say it's bad to have child labor or slave labor or to have prisoner labor in China or to have really egregious environmental pollution.

34:31

And yet you still want to just buy goods from these places and not worry about it and, you know, sort of build up the industry and actually reward those countries for those kinds of practices.

34:39

Well, you know, you're penalizing American industry for being cleaner and, you know, having adult, you know, free wage earners as opposed to having populations that are coerced into doing this.

34:52

So those are some of the tradeoffs. There's some other parts of your question I should get to, but I've forgotten what they are. So you'll have to remind me.

34:58

The social costs, so family stability, you know, good union jobs used to be more plentiful and families could live off of one household income earner.

35:11

And now we don't really have as much of that. Wages have gone down in where I live.

35:17

I'm in New York right now. It's almost unheard of to have one single income.

35:24

You're going to have to have two to make it. So does this provide more stability, which

35:31

I know long term from my Christian understanding that would create that that would produce conditions for a better economy anyway, when you have more commitment and moral living and that kind of thing and the ability of a mom to stay home and raise the kids so they're not getting into trouble.

35:48

Right. So so that's not something maybe you can quantify, but it is, I think, something that I see is a huge part of this.

35:58

Yeah. So it's as you say, it's hard to quantify, although there are scenarios one can imagine which will lead to that kind of stability and that kind of reinforcement of marriage and of the nuclear natural family.

36:15

So obviously, the entry of women into the workforce in general, which includes the manufacturing workforce, is an element in that kind of rat race that has led to two incomes being necessary.

36:27

So there's something there which is not necessarily created by trade policy or by manufacturing that really is a bigger social change.

36:35

That said, I think it is the case that even though plenty of women work in manufacturing, manufacturing is still something of a male oriented kind of job, especially actual line work.

36:50

Sometimes there's physical strength required that tends to be obviously a masculine quality.

36:56

Just a whole variety of factors seem traditionally to have made these kinds of jobs, jobs that men tend to work in larger numbers than women.

37:06

So it can have that family stabilizing effect. What it definitely does is it contributes to the creation of a strong middle class.

37:14

And historically, that's been the secret of America's political stability and social order.

37:19

The fact that in other parts of the world, in Latin America, for example, the tendency was instead of having small towns and manufacturing, small town manufacturing, which at the time, you'd be a blacksmith and think of the

37:35

Wild West kind of thing, or a cotton mill, things like that, pretty small operations and relatively small farms.

37:43

Those farms were then sort of growing produce to be sold on the market. That kind of model, which was the

37:49

Western model and was the Northern model in America, is different from Latin America and the

37:56

South during slavery, where you tended to have very large plantations. And that creates a very different kind of political environment.

38:05

In the case of Latin America, because you have these very large estates, even when you know, even after slavery was abolished and slavery was not the kind of issue that it was in the

38:15

American South, it was still the case that because of these large sort of landmasses, you had basically a oligarchic tendency in the political system.

38:24

And that oligarchic tendency would then lead to a revolutionary tendency in reaction against it.

38:30

So this is one reason why Latin America has this very long history of kind of revolutionary movements, oftentimes

38:38

Marxist movements, but sometimes just kind of armed peasants with pitchforks or shotguns and various left -wing movements.

38:46

And then in order to protect property against these movements, you have countervailing movements in favor of military juntas and other kinds of sort of hardline policies.

38:57

So that's kind of not a model that America would ever want to adopt. In order not to have that, though, you need to have a middle class.

39:04

You need to have this wide distribution of productive property, basically. So I've just used some terms that are maybe familiar to readers of G .K.

39:13

Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. They had an economic theory called distributism, which said that, you know, people should be encouraged to have small farms and to have small shops.

39:23

But to have a middle class is, you know, it can be produced either by small ownership of those kinds of means of trade and production, or it could also be, in the case of America in the 20th century, kind of surprisingly, there was a big fear at the beginning of the 20th century that these large corporations,

39:42

IBM and others, they would basically turn their employees into serfs. But it didn't really happen for a variety of reasons, because as Henry Ford found out, if you want to get the best workers, you need to pay those workers well.

39:54

If you pay those workers well, then they have power as consumers and they're able not only to buy your

40:00

Model T cars, but they're also able to buy things from your competitors or other kinds of goods.

40:06

And it turns out that actually you wind up with a pretty strong middle class, which is able to express its strength not through ownership, not through the fact that it owns a small shop or a small farm, but rather that's able to express its strength through its consumer choices and the fact that it can actually decide which of these companies kind of rise and fall.

40:24

So the middle class is essential, I think, to American political stability. And then it also feeds into the stability of American families and American communities.

40:32

And we've certainly seen that as this middle class and its manufacturing base have been damaged or exported over the course of the last 30 years, that these social consequences have been absolutely dire in Rust Belt states all across the land.

40:51

That you've seen communities collapse, you've seen rises of deaths from despair, more suicide, more simply sort of character diseases where people are taking drugs or they're becoming lazy, they're becoming hopeless, they're succumbing to despair, even if they're not actually dying of it right away.

41:09

And this is something that is remedied when you have a strong middle class manufacturing base.

41:15

So that social element is very important, I think. I think wouldn't the combination of limiting immigration while introducing these tariffs have even a greater impact on the ability to provide higher paying jobs that could sustain families?

41:35

Yes, so certainly restricting immigration is going to have the effect of restricting the labor pool.

41:43

That, in turn, is going to lead to sort of higher wages for workers.

41:49

It also actually, I think, is going to provide an incentive for Americans to have larger families because ultimately right now companies say, hey, we don't need to encourage our employees to have family benefits.

41:59

We don't need to encourage them to have sort of large families because they're just disposable. Basically, they're expensive,

42:08

Native American citizens, they're costly. If we can bring in a new immigrant workforce, that's going to substitute for having to have expensive

42:18

American families, basically. And that's why, by the way, immigration is a kind of unending chain.

42:24

It's never a matter of simply importing one set of laborers, whether it's from Germany or whether it's from Eastern Europe or whether it's from Latin America or wherever the case may be, that it's something that always shifts to a new sort of source of cheap labor because what they're doing is they're actually subsidizing the creation of a workforce without having to have encouragement towards American family growth.

42:50

So that's going to be an interesting thing to see is whether this creates not only middle class economic foundations for a family, but also if companies start to say, wait a minute, if we need to have more laborers, we need to have more

43:04

Americans, and in which case we need to make sure that we encourage more family formation. So all those things, yes, they can combine very well.

43:12

That said, you know, there are people who are going to be very unhappy that they're no longer able to employ as many nannies to take care of their children, for example.

43:22

Now, maybe that has the effect of making a lot of sort of upper class, highly educated persons instead of hiring a new immigrant or an illegal immigrant even to take care of their children.

43:33

Maybe now one of the parents has to stay home and take care of the children. So that could be a social adjustment from a

43:39

Christian perspective would be a good thing. But I think you'll have a lot of these sort of affluent professionals complaining a lot about those kinds of changes.

43:49

The other thing I should mention in relation both to this question and the previous one is the rise of intellectual property monopolies, or at least intellectual property equivalents to the kind of great estates that existed in Latin America.

44:05

That was sort of slowly eroding, I think, Americans' sense of independence and the

44:10

American middle class, you know, as it not only lost numbers, it also lost a sense that it had bargaining power because, you know, the protections available to tech companies that are based on IP to even entertainment companies like Disney, they became so powerful and so large that Americans, you know, you wanted to have free speech on Twitter or free speech on Facebook.

44:33

And, you know, if you got lucky, if someone like Elon Musk bought Twitter, then, yes, you could have free speech again. But otherwise, you are basically at the mercy in terms of speech where these sort of large

44:44

IP based industries, you know, which were basically protected because of IP, they amassed so much commercial power that Americans started to feel as if they were losing some of their own most basic freedoms.

44:56

So there, too, I think the relative more stress, you know, more more pain put on the financial and IP sector and more support for the manufacturing sector is again going to help to rebalance things.

45:11

What if these tariffs go through without any adjustment in the tax system that we currently have?

45:19

Wouldn't that be disastrous? Like, don't the two have to or could it be disastrous because wouldn't they have to the taxes go down as the tariffs go up?

45:30

And because otherwise it is it is still a tax, even if the consumer is not the one directly paying it, it still will affect the companies in the

45:40

United States and their ability to compete. Yes. So, again,

45:45

I think in the long run, you know, and again, the long run might not be all that remote in the future.

45:51

I think it's actually quite arrived quite quickly. Those price concerns are not my my main fear.

45:57

But if you did create a universal tariff and put it in place immediately, there would definitely be an instant price shock because, again, it would it would it would have the effect of taking products off the market or making them more expensive before domestic manufacturing has been able to catch up with production.

46:16

So that would have an instant effect. It would be kind of inflationary and it would be,

46:22

I think, politically disastrous for Trump. So what you're actually going to get, even if Trump really does want to not just negotiate about trade deals and, you know, arrangements with countries, even if he really does want to create this kind of universal tariff, you know, and impose it, it's probably going to be phased in in stages and not something that's going to arrive, you know, in an instant.

46:44

That, too, is going to be there's a practical issue here because, you know, Trump is going to have one year basically in twenty twenty five when he's going to be holding all the cards in twenty twenty six, even though you may still have a

46:56

Republican House and a Republican Senate, the House and the Senate are going to be overwhelmingly concerned with their own reelection prospects in the twenty twenty six midterms.

47:04

And then after the twenty twenty six midterms, you might very well have a Democratic House or otherwise have

47:09

Democrats in a position to thwart Trump's trade policies and tariff policies. So Trump has a very narrow window to do things, you know, the way he wants them done.

47:19

And and yet, you know, if you try to impose a universal tariff, you know, in the space of two or three months, you really would have a pretty big economic shock.

47:28

So I think Trump is going to have to, you know, by, you know, just the array of realities that he's confronting, he's going to have to be a little bit more prudent and strategic about tariffs rather than saying that, you know, we can simply go back to where we were in the 19th century overnight.

47:46

Yeah, good. All right. So I have I told you before we started recording, I had some specific questions

47:51

I wanted to ask you. So the first from a Christian perspective, I just want to talk about, I guess, the morality of tariffs.

47:57

So I was reading an article by a noted theonomic thinker named Gary North, and he says that really this argument to me sounds libertarian.

48:08

I don't think there is a big difference, but he says to the extent that economics since Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations has been generally rational, it teaches us that when states use coercion to restrict voluntary private transactions, most people are made worse off.

48:23

The only winners are those whose businesses are implicitly subsidized by the state's restraint of trade. To argue any other way is to return to the state promoting economics of mercantilism.

48:33

Right. You hear this a lot. And he says this is Keynesian. And and then he says the Bible teaches that every man is to work out his

48:40

I don't understand how this applies, but he says every man is to work out his own salvation with fear and trembling,

48:46

Philippians two. And he somehow draws from this people are to be left free to do anything they choose unless what they choose to do is immoral.

48:55

Trading with each other is not immoral unless the item or service traded is immoral. So trade should be therefore completely free or completely prohibited.

49:03

And tariffs and quotas have no role to play in improving economic morality. So I could boil it down. I think he's saying there's really two things here.

49:11

One, we've already kind of talked about where he just assumes this is a tax on consumers. But the second part of that is that it's immoral to limit someone's choice if it's some.

49:23

So he would probably say on something like, I don't know, pornography, something that's illicit.

49:29

We can limit that. We should ban it. People shouldn't be allowed to trade that. But on widgets, the government shouldn't put any limitation whatsoever on the on trade concerning those things.

49:43

So I don't know if you have a thought on this. I think the verse he uses is quite the stretch there.

49:49

But, you know, from libertarians, you hear this all the time that you shouldn't inhibit someone's free choice.

49:57

Yeah, I will say so. Gary North is a very interesting thinker because he is both a theonomist and, you know, he worked for Ron Paul.

50:04

He has a lot of libertarian connections. Yeah. You know, he's very interested in Austrian economics. And he, you know, he he wrote an enormous number of books, basically a library unto himself, you know, putting together his

50:16

Austrian thoughts and his theonomist thoughts. And so, you know, I have a great deal of respect for Gary North.

50:22

But I will say that his view on this is out of the mainstream of, you know, Christian thought going back all the way to the time of Christ.

50:32

Now, I don't want to. And as you say, you know, people who read the

50:37

Bible and interpret the Bible are going to have to sort out for themselves whether the verses that Gary North cites adequately apply to the conditions that he's describing.

50:46

I share the skepticism you've just expressed about whether Gary North is making a reasonable reading of scripture based on the conclusions that he's drawing.

50:56

Even apart from that, though, generally, Christianity has seen economics as involving a very large degree of morality that, you know, things like usury, for example, have historically been frowned upon by Christians.

51:10

This, by the way, is not just something that Christianity gets from Aristotle or from Greek philosophy.

51:17

This is something also that, you know, within ancient Jewish communities, you were not supposed to take economic advantage of your fellow

51:24

Jews. It was very important, you know, and it's not that, you know, when I when I state it that way, people are going to say, oh, so is it is it

51:30

OK to take advantage of other people? That's not the way that these laws and these sort of regulations among ancient

51:37

Jews were thought of. It wasn't that, you know, yes, you can rip off other people. It was rather that, you know, a special kind of moral focus applies to your own community.

51:48

And, you know, in the case of Judaism, that meant that you really had to be, you know, quite generous to your fellows.

51:55

And of course, this is a central part of Christ's own teaching in terms of, you know, it's not just, you know, economic interactions, trade basically between peoples that creates prosperity.

52:07

There is also, you know, a genuine Christian obligation to give alms. And that's something which on, you know, if you're a pure kind of free market philosopher, an

52:16

Ayn Rand type, for example, you might say, well, almsgiving is bad because all that's doing is subsidizing poverty.

52:22

That's giving money to people who don't deserve it. And therefore it's going to have harmful effects.

52:28

And really, you know, money should only be used for purposes of trade. But that's very much contrary to what the

52:33

New Testament teaches, which is that almsgiving is good and that, in fact, money is not, you know, something that you should cling to at all costs.

52:42

Or quite the contrary, it's something that you really need to understand is much less important than, you know, religious and and moral commitments.

52:52

So, you know, Christianity has historically, you know, in fact, you know, the the tendency of Christianity from, you know, not just the sort of Catholic Middle Ages or the

53:01

Middle Ages as a whole, but also, you know, the Eastern Orthodox churches, also early

53:07

Protestants, all of them were very, very keenly interested in what the morality of, you know, economics was.

53:15

And all of them, I think, took a rather more restrictive view than Gary North takes. Now, again, the whole point of theonomy in some ways is to go back to the absolute simplest application of biblical law.

53:26

But again, you know, if that's the basis on which the argument rests, I think you have to do a better job of making scriptural arguments than perhaps

53:33

Gary North has done there. So what about the constitutional argument? And I don't know that anyone's bringing that up now.

53:41

I haven't heard it, but I know just from studying history that Article 1, Section 8 says

53:46

Congress shall have power to lay and collect duties, taxes imposed and excises to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare, says all duties imposed and excises shall be uniform throughout the

53:56

United States. And then Section 9 says that no preference shall be given by any of these regulations to the ports of one state over those of another.

54:09

And so I know leading up, well, during the federal period, there was a tug of war.

54:15

The tariff rate kept getting adjusted because of a mostly pushback from South Carolina and the nullification crisis within the southern

54:27

United States in general because they were a different kind of economy. And forty five percent of the tariff protected domestic, which would be northern manufacturers from overseas price competition.

54:42

But this wasn't a benefit that the South got. And they were mostly trying to sell their goods and tobacco and cotton mostly to Europe.

54:51

And they wanted the freedom to be able to do that. But Europe could not buy as much if there were tariffs.

54:58

So, of course, this contributed to the conflict we had in the middle part of the 19th century.

55:06

And I'm just wondering whether or not something similar, if you perceive something similar happening with this, because I know you said the regulations

55:15

Trump is proposing are across the board, but are there certain sections of the

55:21

United States that would be more they would receive more of a benefit from these tariffs than other sections?

55:29

And I know that the lay of the land is so much different now than it was in the 19th century. But could there be an imbalance?

55:36

Yes. So the Constitution says you can't have one federally created tariff rate in one set of courts in one set of states and a different rate in a different set of states and their courts.

55:49

But even if you have a uniform rate, as your example has pointed out, that can wind up having effects that are not uniform, that, you know, states that are more concerned, you know, that have more industry are maybe benefiting from tariffs, while states that have less industry that are exporters that are exporters of unfinished goods, basically agricultural or otherwise, they will be harmed by those tariffs.

56:13

And in the 19th century, especially the early part of the century, you're exactly right. That was a major stress point on the

56:20

Federal Union, and it was a major contributor to the war between the states. Now, you're right that we don't have quite the same kind of division between states that have clearly opposed interests on the tariffs in the 21st century.

56:37

So I think, you know, even states like California have seen, you know, a lot of their manufacturing base get hollowed out.

56:44

And I think they would actually, you know, benefit and be very happy to see some of these tariffs. Likewise, New York. One question might be, you know, what about states that have been doing quite well in terms of getting a lot of the manufacturing work that previously had been up north and now is down south?

57:02

So, you know, we have seen an effective international trade where much of American industry has moved to China and India and other places.

57:09

But we've also seen a north -south switch where a lot of American industry has switched from the north to the south.

57:15

So you may, you know, once again get to a position where the south doesn't see some of these tariffs as being quite as beneficial, because even though, yes, there's a lot of manufacturing in the south, which would be good for the south creating more products for the domestic market, the south also wants to have more opportunities to export those products as well, which the tariffs might complicate.

57:35

That said, the way things are right now, I think the south would actually be very happy with the tariffs, because again, it's attracted a lot of the manufacturing, you know, capacity that used to be in the north.

57:46

And most of that manufacturing capacity is selling to the American market, you know, because places like China and Japan, they've always kept

57:54

American automobiles and American manufactured goods out of their markets through one mechanism or another.

58:00

So it seems to me that even the south, which has all this manufacturing and has a lot of, you know, the south, basically

58:07

Ronald Reagan was a very smart trade negotiator. And what he said to the Japanese is, look, if you want to get, if you want to sell

58:14

Hondas and other Japanese cars in our market, you can do that. And I really want you to open your market to American cars.

58:21

But I know that, you know, no matter how much I, you know, talk to you about that, you're basically not going to do it.

58:27

What I do want to insist upon, however, Reagan would say is, you know, if you want to continue to have such a closed market yourself, you can't also take the jobs as well as keeping our cars out.

58:40

What you're going to have to do is manufacture those Honda cars in America. So you can take your capital and, you know, invest it in American manufacturing in the south.

58:49

And then the south will be producing Hondas and other Japanese cars and German cars and so forth. And that plan worked.

58:56

So even though America has never been able to sell cars in Japan in any substantial numbers,

59:02

Japanese car manufacturers, they started building their cars in America for the American market.

59:07

And that wound up at least benefiting us in terms of manufacturing capacity and in terms of middle class employment in these southern states.

59:15

It's one of the things that made the south so prosperous in the 1980s and 1990s, you know, and for, you know, quite some time.

59:21

So I don't know that the way American manufacturing is set up right now, you would see the same kind of hostilities break out over the tariff as you saw in the 19th century.

59:32

But it is a real thing to keep in mind that yes, tariffs can have different consequences, different effects for different regions.

59:39

And it's something where, you know, basically in 19th century America, you needed statesmen who were going to recognize that and would respond accordingly.

59:48

So, you know, in the case of, you know, some of the tensions with South Carolina and tariffs, there was a lot of, you know, sort of John C.

59:56

Calhoun and others, you know, talked about nullification. They talked about, you know, some pretty drastic measures that could be taken, but usually the federal government would back off or there would be some compromise reached.

01:00:07

I think in the 21st century where the tensions are less, you would still see some political pushbacks and feedback, but I think that would be politically integrated.

01:00:15

So basically, if, you know, Americans feel like they don't like the effects of tariffs, they'll start voting for politicians who are going to, you know, either lower those tariffs or who are going to be anti -tariff.

01:00:25

So I have a fair amount of confidence in the way our political parties respond right now to the possibility that you're going to have a moderating effect, basically.

01:00:34

Someone who wants to, you know, go wild with tariffs is going to be pushed back to the center by American public opinion, which can elect a lot of politicians who would go in the opposite direction.

01:00:43

We fight about social issues more. It seems like a lot of, I mean, not that I don't hear about this issue, but it, yeah, it's not the same level of concern.

01:00:54

So last question, since we are about in an hour right now, because, and I forgot to ask you this earlier, but, you know, when

01:01:02

I, my grandfather, who was 101 years old, he died this year, right? And he was a carpenter. So I go to his shop, right?

01:01:08

And he still has these incredibly well -made tools, right?

01:01:14

I don't know if you have anyone in your family like that. I mean, I'm sure, you know, old farm equipment, even like it just lasts.

01:01:21

And I feel like I buy a rake every year to rake my leaves. Like they're terrible, right? The plastic breaks.

01:01:27

So my question is, would tariffs bring back, would tariffs force consumers to make better choices in a way?

01:01:37

Because it, see, maybe my read on this is wrong, but it seems like somewhere along the line, consumers thought, and myself included in this, perhaps, it's a lot better to buy a rake for $30 than it is for $60 or $80 or whatever.

01:01:53

But we end up spending more in the long run because we keep having to buy rakes because they're terrible, but it just, we're foolish.

01:01:59

So we keep doing it instead of buying the rake that's going to last. And when things were made in America, it just seems like they were made better.

01:02:09

And so I guess my question is, could we return to that where our goods like furniture, furniture is so cheaply made now.

01:02:17

I mean, I was a furniture repairman for 10 years. It is unbelievable. Even the changes I saw in the 2010s with furniture production and regulations and stuff, like you don't want to open up your couch and see what's in there because it's not fun.

01:02:32

It's made so poorly. I won't even buy new furniture with my wife. We always go to an antique place or we try to find stuff on marketplace that's old.

01:02:42

So will this increase the quality? It's a great question because on the one hand,

01:02:49

I can't immediately see economic reasons to be confident that it will. And yet when

01:02:55

I think about all the examples, when I think about German engineering, Japanese engineering, as you said,

01:03:00

America, when we were making more products in America, all of these countries, all of these examples show very high quality.

01:03:09

Whereas when we think about more globalized, what today's production from China and India and Vietnam and other places, the quality certainly seems a lot lower.

01:03:21

So part of that may be simply that if Americans are manufacturing more at home, they are becoming more aware of the importance of good manufacturing tools in the factory.

01:03:34

And they may start to insist, well, wait a minute. If my factory can have this top notch equipment that isn't cheaply made and doesn't collapse and cause problems, then why shouldn't my washing machine or my dryer or my toaster, why shouldn't it also be made to very high standards?

01:03:48

So perhaps what that does is create a kind of sense of pride in one's tools and pride in one's both what one creates as a manufacturer and also the tools one uses to make, to bring about that creation.

01:04:04

And that certainly seems to be the case just anecdotally. If we think about people like your grandfather or other workmen that we've known, and my own grandfather was also a carpenter.

01:04:15

If we think about these workmen, you do have that sense that the workmen and his tools and the thing he creates, they all aspire to, the workman aspires to excellence on all three of those levels.

01:04:26

His own skill, what he's able to use to translate that skill into a production, and then what that production actually is.

01:04:33

All of these things tend to pull in the direction of things being created to last and having high value.

01:04:40

And when you don't have that, when everything is done anonymously, you can buy a rake from amazon .com

01:04:48

or Timu or whatever, you can get it from China. God knows what it is. This kind of stuff, it just leads to a sense of disposability.

01:04:59

You're not invested in it. You're not using it as a tool in quite the same way. You just see it as another commodity, another interchangeable piece of plastic.

01:05:08

So the social effects are very intriguing there. And while I don't have a kind of clear, concise, confident answer to give you that, yes, this will make quality a more important characteristic,

01:05:18

I still feel like it will because we have these examples. I am not an economist, but I think so too.

01:05:24

If craftsmen can now compete in a better way, more people will buy craftsmen and it's a better quality product.

01:05:31

Well, I think it is. I don't know if... I hesitate because every time I talk about a product or try to shop for a product that I think is

01:05:38

American, half the time or more than that, really, I am surprised when I go to the store and find out it's not made here anymore.

01:05:45

Yeah. I mean, Apple computers, when it was first coming up, it was one of their big things that their computers were made in America. And it's only around the late 2000s or early 2010s that suddenly everything is now made in China.

01:05:57

So even some of these tech companies, some of these titans of the new economy, in fact, were able to build their reputation for quality by the fact they had

01:06:06

American -made goods. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we've been going over an hour, so we'll land the plane, but I appreciate it,

01:06:12

Daniel. And if people want to check out your work, they can go to modernagejournal .com, modernagejournal .com.

01:06:18

I should probably also mention your Twitter handle. I'll pull it up unless you know it.

01:06:24

Tory Anarchist. Tory Anarchist. You're a Tory? It's a long story, but it's a way of criticizing liberalism.

01:06:34

Let's put it that way. I gotcha. All right. So if you go to at Tory Anarchist, you can follow