Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 4/4/25 Jeff Deist on the Lessons Libertarians Need to Learn from Trump’s Success

Episode Date: April 6, 2025

Scott is joined by Jeff Deist to talk about the political situation we find ourselves in and how it should impact the strategies used to push for more liberty at home and fewer interventions abroad. They discuss Trump’s foreign policy, tariffs, the national debt and more.  Discussed on the show: Ex America by Garet Garrett The Great Deformation by David Stockman Jeff Deist is General Counsel of Monetary Metals. He previously worked as President of the Mises Institute, where he serves as a writer, public speaker, and advocate for property, markets, and civil society and as a longtime advisor and chief of staff to Congressman Ron Paul, for whom he wrote hundreds of articles and speeches. Follow him on Twitter @jeffdeist. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Robers Brokerage Incorporated; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

kind of monster. But what's so difficult, I think, for people in our circles to understand is that he's not wired for ideology. This is a, Trump is a very unique animal. He is a zero-sum guy. He views the world in terms of, I win, you lose. And this has always been consistent with his economic populism. His tariff policy, you know, he talked about this in 2015. He talked about this in 2020. He talked about in 24. He's always been a trade protectionist. And Scott, you and I are old enough to remember when Democrats used to like tariffs, when Democrats used to like union protectionism and trade protectionism so that places like Pittsburgh and Cleveland, Ohio would not just dry up and blow away in the wind in the face of international competition. So it, you know, things, it's literally

interesting to me that there's so much hue and cry now about his tariffs. When that's exactly what he talked about. And he believes in that. He believes that we need manufacturing in the United States, not just a service or financial economy. He believes that truly. And unlike, let's say, some of his neo-liberal opponents who could have become president, Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, they don't have these strong feelings. In other words, they are largely under the tentacles of the investor class, the financial class. And so we have this switch, this switcheroo, where economic populism really resides on the right and economic globalism and I guess what we call reasonably free market sentiment is now starting

to find voice on the left. And, you know, this is just something that we have to understand when it comes to Trump. And I think that a lot of us spent many, many years, many decades, in fact, in these ideological cul-de-sacs, we, we see. spent an awful lot of time, God knows, debating, writing books, you know, coming up with this whole, you know, the classical liberalism, which I really consider 19th century liberalism, not 20th century. And then out of that, a burgeoning libertarian movement, we could say that's mid-century, well, a little earlier than that, a mid-century with figures like Rand and Rothbard, and then evolving into this broader ANCAP philosophy, which a lot of us were enamored of for many, many

years. And so we spent all this time in the world of theory. And Trump just comes along and basically wipes that out. I mean, you know, what he's done in 10 years in terms of a political earthquake, I can't, it's hard to compare historically, but it's certainly in my lifetime. It's the biggest earthquake. And that's where we are. You can like it or you can not like it, but nonetheless, you know, where we are now is, let's say, drone warfare. So if you're still digging trenches in the psalm thinking it's World War I, you're just, you're not in the game, not fighting the fight because that's not where it is.

And so I say the fight is on the right, it's not on the left, and that we ought to, you know, use the history and the knowledge we've got to the old right to try to animate this new Trumpian right in steer in the right direction and that involves you know cutting out the neoconservative impulses and figures root and branch they got to go they got to be they got to become democrats that that's so important that even losing an election is okay if that if that's what it takes to get rid of them and and that's sort of job one and i basically think trump can be worked with i think there's three main planks one is a populist economic policy which i think is fine uh I don't love tariffs or whatever, but I think you can use sound money, or at least in Trumpian thinking, a strong dollar to move in the direction where things are actually better from an ideological perspective, but they're also popular.

They're also winning issues. I think number two is a piece of non-interventionism plank. I mean, look, you know, Trump absolutely ran on that. He talked about getting out of Ukraine. He talked about finding a way to deal with China and Taiwan, to deal with Israel and Gaza. I guess at the time, we didn't know he was going to suggest buying it and turning into gold and condos or something. But, you know, he talked about that. And all the energy for a less interventionist foreign policy is now on the right.

You know, the people who voted for Trump, they weren't buying this idea that Ukraine is a implicates Europe, that it's a European war. It's not. The American public's not buying what the Zillet skis and the Kier Starmers are selling. They think it's a regional conflict that doesn't involve us. And that's a very healthy impulse. And we ought to applaud that and move that forward. And then finally, the third plank, which is the toughest pill, but absolutely necessary, I think, in a new century, 21st century, is to get over this hegemony, to get over this idea that the post-war consensus of these these terrible. people like Francis Fukuyama is still in play. It isn't in play. China is not what it was. You have to deal with China as it is. Russia is what it is. All these countries are what they are, the bricks, et cetera. And in lessen and tool, we can sort of swallow hard, Scott. And this might mean having the boomers shuffle off this mortal coil. And rethink America's role as non-empirate.

the first two planks of economic populism and peace won't happen so um i think i think we have the old right to guide us and i think old right style is what's required today we don't need george will it's not nineteen eighty five we need minkin um and and that's where we are and let's embrace it rather than resist it yeah well now in your speech you also talked about our new old right heroes and, you know, people like Pat Buchanan and others of the Paleocons who really, after the end of the first Cold War, you might even throw in Jude Winniski,

he was a neocon, but then turned paleo con, right? But then there's the great Scott McConnell and Paul Gottfried and others that you mentioned, of course, the great Ron Paul, the greatest American who ever lived. And in my humble opinion, not that humble. And you might have mentioned Justin Romando in there too,

Rothbard's heir on foreign policy there and cramudgeoningly old right winger who only recently died just a few years ago and of course my old boss at anti-war.com. So we do have, you know, contemporary and very recent kind of leaders to follow on a lot of these things too. But so I guess I hear you saying, I'm not, I'm not exactly sure what you mean by like all of our great libertarian theory was obliterated by Trump. I'm sure it's definitely true he sucked up a lot of oxygen from our anti-government movement since he's actually in the position to be anti-government as the president of a government that hates him and that he at least partially hates back. So I can definitely appreciate that. I don't know. But I guess it sounds like you're saying

we can compromise on trade protectionism and and let that go as some you know as a policy worth really fighting about if we can get you know have some gains on some other issues particularly in ending the rest of the empire i mean after all and you know justin actually did a great job of explaining this too that you know our libertarian theories of free trade are one thing in practice the u.s empire's theory of free trade is you can keep your tariffs on us But we won't put tariffs on you, but you let us keep military bases in your country and dominate your foreign policy. That's the tradeoff for having troops in South Korea in Japan and in, you know, whatever, wherever.

And so, and in Europe as well. When I say Trump obliterated, I mean, he sucked all the energy out of the room. Yeah. And let's face it, the very things that the, the, the, the. Neoconservatives and globalists left, the Hillary Clintons, the Bill Crystles, the very things they accuse Trump of, you know, wanting to create an authoritarian hellscape is what they had planned for us. So let's let's start with that. Trump had to happen. I think that's the starting point. And number two is that even Libertarian Inc. had gone wildly off the rails. In other words, we had a strange liberalism. It wasn't what Mises meant at all. Mesa has talked about liberalism in the context of liberal nationalism.

That sounds like an oxymoron, right? Everyone hates nationalism. Well, what he meant by that was that you have a reasonably liberal government at home. It means you have free trade with your neighbors because he saw that was important to avoid the problems of autarchy, right? Needing to have your, you know, constantly expanding in an aggressive sense to satisfy your autarkic need for markets. And then finally, peace and non-interventionism. So this was, you know, you could argue that his two books, Nation State and Economy and Liberalism were really the blueprint for a great society.

You could also argue that they've been, they were, you know, pie in the sky in the face of what happened after them, you know, in the second half of the 20th century. But, you know, nonetheless, we have that blueprint. But that blueprint was never fully implemented anywhere. And even where it was partially implemented, it didn't last. And so we can bemoan that, but that's where we are. And so I don't believe that, you know, Brookings and Heritage and Cato and the DNC and the GOP and these people.

I don't think they have any conception of liberalism, which is worth preserving or defending or maintaining in any way. and i don't care about that yeah and we should stop caring about it and we should say that human beings are stubborn creatures and uh start to appeal to them in the way that the old right did in terms of among other things their own self-interest so you know i've often said that what we needed was ron paul and then with donald trump what we got is rudy juliani or at least you know his best friend right i mean look the world didn't listen to beases so we got to Rothbard and then Hoppa. Right. I mean, in other words, if we had some sort of reasonable government with some sort of reasonable money, some sort of reasonable foreign policy, and just let us be,

we would be so prosperous that our days, we would be reduced to bitching about like potholes not getting fixed fast enough. Right. Instead of bitching about, you know, horrific things in Yemen. So, in other words, the world didn't listen. The world rejected liberalism. And now we're in an illiberal age, and we can't fight back with kid gloves. It doesn't work. Yeah. Well, and I guess it really makes sense then, and when you say liberalism here, you're talking about, you know, core libertarian, American Declaration, Independence, Liberalism. Ron Paul was the last gasp of that, and he lost twice in a row. But remember, any, any libertarian, especially the Beltway variety, who tells you that the 20th century was a liberal century is, I think, very, very suspect.

century was a liberal century, you know, but both centuries had terrible conflicts, but, you know, the 20th century is not a triumph of liberalism. It's a triumph of central banking and income taxes and social insurance, two horrific world wars, police actions in Korea and Vietnam, unbelievable rises in the welfare state in terms of great society and New Deal programs, an unbelievable rise in militarism in the form of defense contracting unbelievable rise in the surveillance state so you know this idea that there's a happy post-war consensus represented by the 20th century just absolute nonsense that's not our model our model is that of taft and garrett garrett and albert j knock and making it and they in turn are looking at that 19th century from once they arose that's that's our model yeah and i mean that

was what Rothbard and Tom Woods and Justin Romando always talked about was like skip a generation go back to before Buckley and all of his ex-trots that founded the National Review and go back to these old right figures. Justin, of course, especially favored Garrett Garrett, who if people aren't familiar with that, if you just read the people's pottage, which has been republished under the title of the middle essay, X America, you'll get a real taste for that point of view. But so now here's the thing. Jeff, as you know, and I know you had to deal with this kind of first hand up there during the W. Bush years working for Ron Paul up there on the hill, that pieces for wimps is what right wingers think when right wingers have a chance to be the ones in charge. Will they cheer Barack Obama on into Syria? Maybe not. And we can wipe the sweat off our brow. Thank goodness they didn't go for that one, right? But when Donald Trump says, let's bomb Yemen, the assumption is he wouldn't be bombing Yemen if we didn't need to bomb. Yemen. Of course, he's our great leader and he's bombing Yemeni because those Yemenis, they were messing with us. And that's the way this goes. And what are you? Some kind of commie. And we're already right back to W. Bush type thinking on the right. As long as there's a Republican in there, you know, it says in Romans 13, you got to obey your Republican presidents, boy. And then that's it. Yeah, I don't think we're right back there with Trump. I think some of the loud as media figures around him and and Fox News and of course he still, I just found out

against all odds. Douglas Fythe was still employed by some administrative agency up until recently. I mean, you know, neo-conservatives never, ever go away. They just regrouped. And you got, you know, they require eternal vigilance. But no, I don't think reflexively, instinctively, Trump is a W or an Ashcroft. No, no, no, I'm sorry. I'm saying his supporters are when they need to be, right? When he asks of them to support violent intervention, then they adapt, right? Well, yes and no. I mean, there's still pretty good polling numbers on whether we should deepen Ukraine

and spend more money on Ukraine. So it's a mixed bag. I think Americans have enjoyed for so long this idea that we're invincible. And so when we bomb a tiny place, like a hapless place like Yemen, it almost feels unreal. Like we have no concept of what that actually means. And so, yeah, there's some harrumphing. I'll grant you that. And there's still a lot of bad impulses.

But we saw some cracks in this. We saw some cracks in this. And that's our glimmer of hope. Yeah. All right. And then the one more giant splinter in your foot is. our foot, it's Israel. And their cousin, the military industrial complex that finances all of their think tanks in the United States to keep us at war at least in the Middle East forever. And it's just

this massive incentive for this just what, I mean, they say it's the second or third or maybe first most successful lobby in Washington. They just compare it to the AARP and the NRA and they say, this is a lobby that gets things done. And so what the hell do you do with a problem like that? Last time a president tried to get him to register as a foreign agent, and he got shot in the head from the front, apparently. It's interesting because we don't get European media too well here, and we don't get Israeli media too well here.

I would really like to have a better feel. I mean, I see the polling numbers. But, I mean, Netanyahu is not that popular. and there's I think a lot of folks in Israel who are worried that all of this Belacosti is going to make them less safe and secure over the time and threatened there you know that they're just going to basically stir up another 30 years worth of animosity and so the you know the Arab world and the Muslim world is very divided very split very very full of factions but the one thing that unites them is when they feel that

that Israel's overstepped. And so I think the media we consume in the U.S. is not showing the same picture as, let's say, media in Europe. But look, I mean, does Trump have the ability to stand up to any interventionist caucus, whether it's Israel or something else? That's probably his worst kill and that could be for a variety of reasons we all know that he's that he's susceptible um and that he has big donors who were very pro israel very pro zionist so i i you know i don't know that that there's a way out of that with him yeah all right so i'm sorry back to the tariffs because we talked about the politics of it a bit and sort of a libertarian take on how to deal with it But so what about them?

How destructive do you think they'll be? And I saw a thing where they said they're not even reciprocal tariffs. They're doing some weird equation with the trade deficit. And they're coming up with these really arbitrarily extremely high tariffs. And isn't this really bad? I think Trump just fundamentally misunderstands that these will, he thinks that this is going to lower prices in America. Because it's going to do a couple of things. It's going to be more manufacturing here so that people are going to be buying imported stock.

and having better jobs and a better, you know, domestic economy and that it's especially going to force ag producers to sell more domestically and thereby lower grocery prices, which he sees as a, you know, a populist winning issue. What he doesn't see so well is that, I guess he went to Wharton Business School. What he doesn't see so well is that, look, it's too late. It's a global economy and that means lots and lots of inputs for U.S. businesses, whether that's producing a good or producing a service, lots and lots of inputs come from abroad. And so you're actually going to make U.S. domestic businesses and industries less competitive because you're going to raise the price of their input. But look, I think he believes that I think he really does think this is good

for the little guy. And so just the fact that he believes it somewhat distinguishes him from the Hillary's and the Bidens of the world who were just so absolutely morally vacant. And I think that the stock market is not America. In other words, there's still a pretty unbelievable dichotomy where something like 8% of Americans are 994% of all equities, publicly traded equities. And that's, in a sense, you know, that's grotesque. I think we have to acknowledge that. And if you've read David Stockman's book, The Great Defamation, this idea that a contagion on Wall Street will necessarily affect Main Street, just isn't true. I mean, these bailouts and propping up the stock market, it is not worked for average Joe and Jane.

And I do think that there's a huge market correction that's just needed. And Austrians understand this, right? The recessions is the cure. And we were due for one anyway. Well, I mean, let's go back to 2020, which makes 20, which makes the interventions of 2008 hail. So just on the fiscal side, just literal dollars coming out of the Treasury out of thin air, no monetary debt monetization or any, you know, any activity by the Fed whatsoever. Just on the Treasury side, our friends in Congress, first under Trump, then under Biden, put about $6 trillion of cash cash into the economy. We're not talking about bank reserves held at the Fed or anything like that.

We're talking about literal cash in bank accounts of businesses and individuals across America. So, you know, that sort of very fast and enormous infusion of cash occurs much faster than, you know, growth in goods and services. So that's obviously a dramatically inflationary event. And we're still unwinding from that. you know, Trump is is going to, I think, pay the price for this because he does understand, I think, or maybe Scott Beset does. Beset appears to be a pretty smart guy. I don't know a ton about him, but that, you know, let's say a 20% correction in U.S.

equities is really not that alarming in the scheme of things. When you look at price to earnings ratios versus historically, when you look at what I consider all the bullshit froth and financialization and the economy, me thanks again to, you know, all the stuff that the Fed has done since 2008 in hyperdrive and all the stuff also on the fiscal side. I mean, like I said, you know, a recession is the cure. It's not a thing to be fought. And yet central banks, treasuries, governments all across the Western world view it as their number one job to prevent any deflationary impulse. When deflation is just another word for the market doing what it should do to clear out bad debt

to give us a new foundation for an economy. And so is Trump willing, as a political matter, to allow that and take that pain and watch markets go down? I don't know. If he's going to do it, he ought to do it now, right? Well, I mean, he kind of just did, right? Early in his term, early in his term, because if, you know, a lot of your listeners probably aren't old enough, but Reagan had a nasty recession in 81, nasty.

My older brothers, you know, my, my, I mean, I guess my older. brothers were still in college then. But I mean, I certainly remember my father talking about the Reagan procession of 81. That's just a blip at a foot down. Now, Reagan still won handling in 84. So it's not Trump's worst impulse. And again, Wall Street isn't Main Street. It's not the same thing. And there's no direct one-to-one necessarily between some drop in equities. And let's say, you know, an outright loss of jobs on mainstream. Those two are tangentially connected. I'm not saying there's no link, but I'm saying it's not direct. And if there has to be pain, I'd rather have it now, then let's say, foisted on my kids and my grandkids.

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Okay. Well, so, I mean, the Wall Street Journal was saying that the markets are way down and all over the world, too, in response to the new tariff regime. So is he kicking off the recession with the new tariff regime right now? It probably is. I think things were wobbly already. And I think GDP is pretty juiced. and probably flat or maybe negative in actual non-bullshit GDP terms, meaning no government spending, no double counting, et cetera. So I was listening to Lawrence LaPard on a podcast recently,

and he thinks that this could be, you know, what really precipitates a pretty big equities crash along the lines of an 08, a 1987, however you want to view it. And I think that that's probably true. I mean, if there's any president who is stubborn enough to sort of fold his arms and let something happen like that, it's Trump. And especially lame duck second term Trump. I guess he's talking about a third term or something, but technically speaking, this is his last term. And so that gives him even more leeway. Well, and the Fed is just leaving rates alone, not raising him now, right? Well, yeah, you notice 10-year treasures are dropping. You notice that money market and short-term CDs are dropping a bit. So,

There's pressure there, but I think increasingly what the Fed does with interest rates is just decoupled from the real economy. In other words, the Fed can drive interest rates to zero in terms of the overnight federal funds rate. That's the only thing it can set, so to speak. But that's not going to stop consumer credit or business credit from going up. In other words, there's no – the link between Fed activity and market interest. rates and the lag between Fed activity and market interest rates, I think, has just grown tremendously. And the term for this is pushing on a string where, you know, one more little rate cut produces just a, you know, a tiny, negligible little puff of GDP. And I think that's

where we're at. We're at the end of monetary policy. It's just, it's come to an end. And at some point, markets shrug and say, you're never going to get your fiscal house in order. You're going to monetized debt till the cows come home, you were going to do whatever it takes to keep equity and other asset prices at least at nominal levels. And so we just don't believe you anymore. And then the market starts to adjust and respond. So it's a crazy time. And whether it's hyperinflationary or deflationary in some sense is two sides of the same point, I don't think anybody knows. And if I knew, if I was that smart, I'd be out there either going short or going long, you know, with with a lot of energy right now.

Okay, but what about housing? Because housing went way up from all the COVID spending and it's down a bit. That's an absolute travesty. And some of these boomers are just going to have to get over that you don't get $1.2 million for your McMansion from some hapless millennial resumer. You know, it's just the way it is. that housing as a percentage of median income has increased so much in this country, I think it's a, it's a real shame. And, and look, America's vast. Wait, but does that mean that

you think that we're facing another 08 type crash in housing prices then? No, I don't think, not nominally. I don't think they would allow that. I think we're just going to have to reimagine what a million dollar house looks like, right? I don't think there'll be a huge nominal crash. I mean, we're seeing slow crashes in places, a lot of parts of Florida, in Austin, for example. But no, I don't think we'll have the kind of foreclosures and sheer devastation we had in 08 because, first of all, the Fed's insatiable activism need to prop up prices. And number two is that lending standards were not as lax as they were this time around, versus. is let's say 01 to 06 yeah and i remember you know in 1999 um when the uh all the dot coms crashed

the federal reserve just kept pumping money into housing and i was good on this because i was reading dr paul every week and dr paul's speeches to the house were always oh see all you're doing is you're creating another bubble in another sector and this is going to end badly and of course you got finally a lot of credit for that after the fact for predicting the house bubble and crash then so I could see that something like that happening again where everything crashes but they keep funneling money into housing to make that the bubble of last resort for people to run to supposed safety in and maybe put off that crash for the next time but it really sucks because not to sound like too much of a

commie or anything Jeff but it sort of seems like the very wealthy who control the inflationary policy are put middle class people at class war against the poor and working people who might have a chance to buy a house but now they don't get to or their rents doubled so now they're living in the Walmart parking lot but it's not just the rich it's middle class people at least have a vested interest now in saying oh well the value of my house has gone up so much and all my equity is so much more now and all of this stuff and so they get theirs but they're actually like they're in on it with the ultra-rich bad guys against working people, right?

But it's also intergenerational in the sense that if you're older, you might have bought a house in the 80s or 90s and been able to refinance that at much lower interest rates since with the same purchase price. So that creates a lot of strife. And you're picking winners and losers. When we say, oh, you know, houses are going up, this is a good thing. Well, it's a good thing for people who already own. It's not a good thing for people who would like. to buy one and stop renting. So it's not the government stop, the pick winners and losers. And moreover, you've got these, you know, this very strange, very unique phenomenon of having a significant portion. For a lot of people, it's 50, 60% of their net worth, is not in their 401k from work

or whatever. It's in what they perceive to be the equity of their house. And so we have all of these millions and millions of people, especially baby boomers, you sort of look at that number and it gives them comfort and makes them think they have a certain net worth. And so if that starts going down precipitously, there's a huge political pressure to prevent that. So it's not just equities. It's not just the stock market, it's houses too. Yeah. And, you know, somebody who maybe would like to buy a house one day, I'm real concerned about the situation in Austin, of course, where I'm from, where I've already been gentrified to one county away.

and I wonder if I'll ever be able to go home again you know what I mean but then part of that is not just the bubble economy but it's the other aspect of the COVID lockdowns is people fleeing those blue states to come here and then of course you know a lot of you know more tech companies moved here and everything so there's a massive increase in actual demand of human beings to live somewhere not just cooks bidding up prices in a bubble kind of casino market you know of course you could have all kinds of political pressures that just force, you know, out migration from one state, immigration to another. And so you're apart from the Fed, apart from the federal government, apart from interest rates, apart from any of that, you know, you can simply have the population growing much faster than new housing can be built. And that's, you know, that's, that's what you've got in Austin, or had in Austin, at least until recently. Yeah. All right. So now, so let me ask you about this protectionist stuff, because on one hand, you know, this actually reminds me. I hear people talking about this. now and I'm not buying it till it's done.

But this actually used to be something that I thought, I don't know where I got this from, maybe the birchers or something, but I used to say this in the 90s that what we ought to do is have a kind of low level tariff, a uniform tariff, not a punitive or sanctions or really even protective tariff. It's sort of a low uniform tariff and no IRS and no income taxation. It's a worst kind of taxation in the first place, punishing people for earning money. And then tariffs also are bad for whatever all reasons, probably beyond the ones I understand. And I understand a few of them.

But it's the one that's least intrusive. We don't have to authorize the national government to be this Gestapo that keeps track of every dime in and out of everybody's household and everybody's bank account. It's completely East German and crazy and totalitarian the way the IRS system works in this country. as it is now so i guess i'd be for that um but then beyond that we're talking about all this reciprocal supposed tariffs and this and that i guess the way i want to frame it is i know that we used to have a lot more protectionism and then in the bill clinton newt gingrich 90s they decided no we're getting rid of all of that and they said hey the libertarians say man this is a bad deal this is the one thing they listen to us on let's get rid of all these protective

tariffs and then I guess you tell me if it's really right but it sure seems like at least in the popular imagination that Ross Perra was right there was a giant sucking sound as all these factories closed down and moved to Mexico and then from there further they moved to China and Indonesia and everywhere but here because after all everybody else in the world is broker than us which means their, the labor forces there will work much cheaper. And of course, if you own a big corporation, then wages is a huge part of your overhead. And so outsourcing to overseas is the inflation fighter, right? You don't have to keep up with rising pressure on wages here. If you can just outsource the jobs there, so obviously inflation is one part of it. But then getting rid of all

those protective tariffs sure seem to lead to the destruction of a lot of jobs. So, if that's right, was it worth it to have the protectionism in the first place? And then I guess secondarily, does that mean if we put a bunch of protective tariffs on now that all those jobs are going to come back? And this government program of reindustrializing the country is going to be successful or could be? I don't think they're going to come back as fast as one Trump term. And then the question becomes, it's the economy tank to the point where, you know, it's not J.D. Vance or whoever doesn't win in four years.

continue Trumpian program. So look, I don't think it was worth it. Ross Perrault was right about some things. And clearly what's happened since the early 90s, remember, Ross Perrault got 17% of the popular vote. He got 19 million votes or something. Yeah, without a real party. That was a real force. That's really the biggest third party success, I think, way beyond John Anderson. So that was, you know, we forget, we forget that Ross Perot was actually a serious and viable candidate. And so, I mean, all that stuff left, and it left for the reasons you suggest that it's rational to try to, you know, reduce your labor costs especially, even if you got to ship something 10,000 miles from China on a boat, is still way cheaper.

Okay. Well, we all understand why manufacturers would decide that. But over time, over those many, many decades since the 90s, and, you know, since NAFTA, WTO, Gat that era of the 80s and 90s. Since that time, you know, an awful lot of infrastructure has been built other places and a lot of not a lot of infrastructure has been built here for manufacturing. And so what infrastructure remains is kind of rotting away. And so that's a really significant change, you know, towards globalism. You can't just unwind it. I mean, Trump can try to prod it with a stick. He can try to beat it about the head and shoulders by raising tariffs. But it's not something

you can just flip a switch and all of a sudden the cheap crap you buy it you know the flip plops you buy at walmart for seven bucks yeah um you know there's not just you can't just in 60 days create the cheap flip flop factory in wichita right it's the the the stages of production which is something austrians understand that there's this temporal time element to the stages of production whereas i think mainstream economists are just sort of like well switch manufacturing to the U.S. Okay, but I think a lot of capital will just sit on the sidelines and say, we're going to wait Trump out.

We don't think this is real. We don't think this is permanent. And so, you know, I agree with you. I don't think if we had tariffs on no income tax, that would certainly be preferable on a multitude of levels. I mean, for personal privacy, for, you know, less affluent people who could, you'll go out and earn the control their spending. I mean, there'd be lots of ways that that could work.

But here's the thing is that. you know, with tariffs realistically, we can bring in maybe $2 trillion a year. 30 years ago could have funded the whole federal budget with $2 trillion. Now, you know, they're spending $5, $6 trillion a year, and then the delta is too big. I happen to agree with Peter Schiff here that there's not enough tariffs that could be imposed to raise all the money that the federal government realistically is going to spend in the coming years, but more importantly, it's just, even with tariffs, there's kind of a laugh for a current effect, right? And there's some level of tariff where people just don't buy

stuff. Yeah. You know, they're just like, well, I, look, I'm not going to pay $15,000 more for a Honda Accord. I may pay $5,000 more, but, you know, it's the same point. It's the same problem we have when people talk about, you know, proposals for a national sales tax is what you're going to get is you're going to get this new tax and we're going to still keep the old one too. So we're going to pay these new tariffs, but they're not going to abolish the IRS. You know, that's big and claim they're going to, once I see a real demand, I see Donald Trump give a speech every day demanding that all the 50 states pass legislation to pass a constitutional amendment to repeal the 16th amendment. And that is the new leading cause of the

MAGA movement to get this done within the next four years. Then I'll believe that anybody even cares or means it at all. But as long as that 16th Amendment is there, then really any new tax of any kind that's meant to supposedly replace income taxation is really just getting you in a worse trouble and worse danger. I mean, let's not forget. Social Security, Medicare, National Defense, those are the big three. Yeah. And unless and until you're cutting those in a meaningful way, you know, that this spending reductions will just be, you know, around the edges just the nibbling at the edges of the problem yeah i mean this is what i always thought

right that phrase waste fraud and abuse that's like the kind of thing that algor would say right this is just obviously slightly trimming around the edges and i guess we even see with elon musk and doge they're going as hard as you could but what are the real results how much they really saving they're like oh scandal we're saving a billion here and a billion there yeah you know yeah Yeah, absolutely. I mean, USAID, there's a lot of, a lot of good reasons to love seeing USAID shut down because it's not just the dollars, it's what they were doing with them. Right. Things I think are very harmful to American interests, but nonetheless, in terms of the budget stuff, the actuarial tables for Social Security and Medicare, you know, sadly, we've seen life expectancy in the U.S. actually begin to dip. for the first time ever in just the last few years, first time in a long time.

So maybe that's the silver lining or slight bright spot. But I mean, assume people are going to continue living longer. And then just look at the difference, the delta between projected future tax travel views and projected future outlays on Social Security Medicare. You know, the problem's not solved. And it's unsolvable. And Trump's not. going to be able to touch that as a political matter. And the little secret here, again,

I keep bringing up rumors, but there are astonishing number of people in this country, older people, who have a very quiet net worth of, let's say, $2 to $5 million. And they live very simply. They have a paid-for-house. They don't drive fancy cars. You're going to make fancy, per se, but they're getting those $2,200 a month social security checks, even though between home equity, 401k, other savings vehicles, you know, they got two to five million dollars. And, you know, and we can scream about how fair or unfair it is. I paid into the system or whatever, but I'm sorry, it's an entitlement program. It was sold to the American people by FDR as, you know, there's going to be 40 or 30 workers paying in for every one retiree.

That one retiree is literally going to be, you know, little old lady who would otherwise be thrown out on the streets. The program was never intended for people who have comfortable savings to easily last them the rest of their life. And if that's unfair because you paid into it, I don't know what's to say. I mean, the income tax that Scott Horton paid in 2000 are long gone, right? They're just gone. So Scott Horton doesn't walk around saying, well, I paid into it. So I had to get X, Y, and Z back. It's just, it's an untenable, it's an untenable system.

and the price has to be paid. And I would like to see that price paid now. Yeah. So, I mean, if you're the president and you got a Trumpian mandate and a Congress to go along and whatever, you abolish the entire world empire, you save us a trillion dollars a year, and then you go after these, you know, social welfare programs, can you even have in a Jeff Dice administration in four years, can you have at least the yearly budget balanced and start paying off the debt? or we just got to repudiate the debt and say if you invested in government debt that's your

problem suck it absolutely you anyone who lent uncle sam money in the past 30 years deserves a haircut and so i don't care if someone told you it was safe to hold treasuries i don't care foreign governments hold them i don't care if gigantic pension funds university endowments hold them by their very charter some of them are required to i don't care tough shit you you let money to a crazed, profligate spendthrift empire. And you're going to take a haircut, just like the German banks who let money to Iceland to do bubblicious real estate deals in the mid-2000s took a haircut, right? It's got to be the actual investor, the person who is all these years getting that four or five percent

coupon payment on their treasuries. You know, the investor has to bear the risk because the investor gets the upside. So, you know, I'm all for repeating the debt. I don't care about a balanced budget. I would much rather see a lower total annual spend by FedGov with deficit and debt and new debt than, you know, higher taxes but a balanced budget. Yeah. I don't care about a balanced budget at all. I just care about a lower budget, whether it's debt or taxes, you know, is less important.

Okay. And then so, I mean, the thing is, if you want to introduce. It sounds like very severe, I don't know where you draw the line exactly, means testing on Social Security and Medicare stuff. You need to be in the middle of otherwise prosperous, boom, free market time. And it seems like if Trump really wants to help regular people, the most important thing he can do is get rid of all kinds of business regulations. And not the ones that, you know, prevent them from poisoning people, at least until you come up with a better regime to prevent them from. poisoning people but still there's they make it very difficult for people to do business and especially you know starting out a small company the kind of thing that ought to be real easy and a lot of

states you need a lawyer to even open up the slightest little LLC or do anything yes yeah yeah yeah I agree and we there's a lot of things we could do you can simply because the rest of the world is so screwed up that if we're just a little better where it's just the least dirty shirt in the laundry, and we see this even today still with our U.S. dollar. But when it comes to our U.S. regulatory regime, I think we would see capital flowing in the United States. Let's not forget, part of that trade deficit, so-called, when we take dollars and we send them abroad to buy cheap stuff, and those dollars are then held wherever they're held, China, you know, the bricks, whoever happens to have sold this stuff, and they don't buy as

much stuff in terms of goods or services from us. Remember, those dollars do in the long run come back and there's only one place you can ultimately spend, save, or invest them, in a sense. And so, you know, accumulating capital would be the easiest thing in the world that Trump could do while he's going through these other painful things. And he could simply say there's a flat, a flat capital gains tax of 10%, right? With just that simple of an effort, you would see an unprecedented wave of capital investment into the U.S. And, you know, he's not, again, not an ideological guy. He sees taxes in a zero-sum manner, the same way he sees every foreign policy.

And he sees taxes as, I suppose, you know, a tool to punish his enemies, as we saw with the state, getting rid of the state tax deduction a few years ago. That was something. And, you know, he wants to, he feels like we're being cheated by the rest of the world when they sell less cheap stuff. And we don't sell them less cheap stuff back. So, you know, this is a guy, this is a guy who's got an ego and he's a zero-sum guy. You know, let's hope we can, let's hope we can not so much prevail on Trump. And that's what I talked about in Lake Jackson. It's not so much about Trump or the people around him or his policy.

It's more about the opportunity in front of us to reshape the right. That's what, that's what animates me. Yeah. Well, I mean, and that's the thing because, I mean, think of who their avatars were before. I mean, namely their presidential candidate. like Bush and McCain and Romney and these horrible people but you know I mean really even their intellectual leadership for the longest time their best guy was Rush Limbaugh who never really had anything important or interesting to say at all it was always a surface political

crap so you have you have to go back to Barry Goldwater Ike to find interesting reasonable political figures on the right the the the this 70s, 80s, 90s, even 2010s. It's basically a wasteland, and they capitulate on everything. They lost everything. They moved more and more away from their pre-Bucleite origins, and they paid a big price for it. Yeah.

And, you know, they're useless, and they have to be thrown out. You know what? You mentioned this, and I'm already keeping you over time, I know, but let me ask you one more thing again more. Could you talk about the centrality of anti-imperialism to, your right-wing message here your kind of conservative take it goes to the entire mindset you know let's forget ideology let's let's get down to more of of modesty versus grandiosity right grandiosity that is not left or right bill crystal is grandiose Hillary Clinton is grandiose

in their conception of what government could do just remake whole societies you change in other words, the individual morphs to better serve the state. I mean, just the grandiosity in thinking that we could remake Afghanistan after what we'd seen the British and the Soviets go through. You know, that sort of hubris versus humility. I think that's the framing for the new old right, is that America doesn't need to be an empire. America needs to worry about itself. America's plenty big and strong and tough. We have a great economy. We have a resilient economy. for all of our problems we still have pretty good universities for all of our problems we still have unbelievable amounts of natural resources in terms of timber natural gas coal oil just unbelievable

we still have huge amounts of arable farmland we still have two vast oceans protecting us we still have two reasonably friendly neighbors it's getting less friendly with Trump you know between Canada and Mexico and it's just there's There's no reason on paper that we couldn't just be walking away from the rest of the world if we just got over our post-war consensus mindset and started to say, you know, America first, but friendly and peaceful with everybody else. It's not rocket science. And I think, I think even with all of our economic problems, we were just 10, 20 percent better than all the alternatives, we would absolutely prosper.

right you guys that's jeff diced he's at monetary medals and of course he used to work for ron paul as chief of staff in ron's congressional office back then and dr paul's i mean to say you know um and he wrote this book a strange liberty politics drops its pretences thanks very much for your time jeff all right scott good talking to you thanks for listening to scott horton show which can be heard on a ps radio news at scott horton dot org scott horton show com and the Libertarian Institute at libertarian institute.org.