The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America and How to Restore Its Greatness by Thom Hartmann

Episode Date: September 14, 2022

The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America and How to Restore Its Greatness by Thom Hartmann America’s most popular progressive radio host and New York Times bestselling author Thom Hartmann reveals how and why neoliberalism became so prevalent in the United States and why it's time for us to turn our backs to it. With four decades of neoliberal rule coming to an end, America is at a crossroads. In this powerful and accessible book, Thom Hartmann demystifies neoliberalism and explains how we can use this pivotal point in time to create a more positive future. This book traces the history of neoliberalism—a set of capitalistic philosophies favoring free trade, low taxes on the rich, financial austerity, and deregulation of big business—up to the present day. Hartmann explains how neoliberalism was sold as a cure for wars and the Great Depression. He outlines the destructive impact that it has had on America, looking at how it has increased poverty, damaged the middle class, and corrupted our nation’s politics. America is standing on the edge of a new progressive era. We can continue down the road to a neoliberal oligarchy, as supported by many of the nation’s billionaires and giant corporations. Or we can choose to return to Keynesian economics and Alexander Hamilton’s “American Plan” by raising taxes on the rich, reversing free trade, and building a society that works for all.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, the Chris Voss Show. I hope you're ready to go on a monster roller coaster ride with your brain.

We have Tom Hartman on the show for the fourth or fifth time. I've lost track. He's been on the show so many times. Famed radio host and brilliant political mind. He's on the show once again with his latest book that's coming out tomorrow, September 13th, 2022. And you can see some of his other interviews on The Chris Voss Show and follow his amazing book series that he has that really, you know, New York bestselling, New York Times bestselling author multiple times over, I'm sure. The Hidden History of Neoliberalism, How Reaganism Gutted America,

and How to Restore Its Greatness. Tom Hart will be on the show with us today. As always, for the show, your family, friends, relatives, Remind them that the Chris Vaughn Show is the family that loves you, but doesn't judge you. I might personally do it. I wonder if I'll meet you in person, but the show won't because the show is a corporation. And according to Mitt Romney, corporations aren't people or are people. I don't know. It's in one of his binders of women. You can go look it up. Anyway, guys, thanks for tuning in. So we'll be talking to Tom today. He is the nation's number one progressive talk show host for over a decade. His program is live daily from noon to 3 p.m. Eastern time on commercial radio stations across the U.S. That's the United States for those of

you who can't spell. On non-profit stations via the Pacifica Network and on channel 127 of the SiriusXM Satellite Radio Network. The program is also simulcast as TV via the Free Speech TV Network, carried on DISH and DirecTV Satellite Networks, Hulu, Apple TV Sling, cable systems nationwide on the internet at freespeech.org and everywhere else you can find FSTV. It's also live on YouTube and Facebook as well. Welcome to the show, Tom, again. How are you? Hey, Chris, it's great to be back with you. I'm fine. There you go. There you go. And give us a.com for your main site, if you would, so people know where to find you there.

Well, the show's website is tomhartman.com, however you spell it will get you there. And my daily blog basically is HartmanReport.com. There you go. There you go. Well, it's good to have you again. We've got your new book here coming out tomorrow. Congratulations on the new book. Tell us what motivated you to want to write this one. I've been wanting to write a book about neoliberalism for a decade or more. I mean, it is a word that is poorly understood by most Americans. It is a set of political concepts that are generally misunderstood as well. Typically, we call it in our political discourse, Reaganism, trickle-down economics, supply-side economics,

Reagan Revolution, conservative economics, although none of those really captures the breadth of neoliberalism, you know, what it is, where it came from and why it's important. And so, you know, I pitched this to the publisher here of the Hidden History series, Bear Kohler, and they were all in on it. So I wrote the book. Yes. And it seems like it seems like Reagan was kind of the peak of the middle class or the middle class seemed to be doing the best. Or do I have that right? Yeah, the middle class peaked out in the four or five years before Reagan became president. And it kind of been flattening out largely as a consequence at that point in time because of the inflation that we were experiencing from the Arab oil embargo

and the collapse of the oil supplies coming out of Iran in 79 when the Shah got kicked out. But the Reagan, what Ronald Reagan did is he put, he turned America into neoliberalism. He altered the trajectory of this nation significantly. We had been operating along the lines of traditional economics, traditional economic theory stuff that goes back to Adam Smith's wealth of nations and theory of moral sentiments. David Ricardo in the early 1800s, his Iron Law of Labor and all that stuff. And Reagan threw us into neoliberalism. And the consequence of that has been in the 40 years since then, or 42 years since then, that we have lost 60,000 factories.

We've lost some 10 to 15 million good manufacturing jobs. We've seen the density of unionization in the United States go from a fully a third of Americans, which meant another third of Americans had the equivalent of union wages and benefits because the union set the local wage for us. So it was two thirds of Americans. And by coincidence, two thirds of Americans were in the middle class at that time in 1980. We've gone from that down to today where only 6% of Americans in the private sector have unions representing them. And the middle class is going from 65% of us down to 45% of us. And of the 45% of us in the, quote, middle class, the vast majority of that 45% can't do it on a single salary like you could in 1980.

And many folks in that 45% are only able to maintain that position in the middle class by going deeply into debt, whether it's credit cards or student debt or whatever it may be. You just described my whole financial situation. That of most Americans, tragically. That's true. This is what the Reagan revolution brought us. We had a strong, stable, largely debt-free middle class. In fact, basically, you know, before the Reagan revolution, it was hard to get a credit card. And if you had to go through a real serious song and dance, it took me three years to get my first American express card. And that was in the seventies, you know, and, and, you know,

Reagan deregulated the industry so that they could just rip people off. Interest rates could be as high as 30%. I mean, up until then, only the mafia charged that kind of interest. Here we are. Yeah. I used to joke when I was graduating high school, I'm like, I think in the future, you're not only going to need to have a two-income family to survive, but you may need to become a polygamist, you know, like the Morton. You just get three wives. Well, and there are, I mean, you've got Republicans like Rand Paul who come right out and say we should do away with child labor laws. Oh, that's right. Yeah. They're done with that. Can we start with

his kids first? How old are those guys? I don't know. Let's put them in. So this is really interesting. Would you say that this is maybe the number one factor to erasing the middle class? I imagine there's a lot of other ones. You know, Reagan went after unions. And since then, you know, there was Republicans were constantly trying to do everything they could to destroy unions and and labor power. All those things are our neoliberalism. Neoliberalism argues, you know, it's a it's a it's an economic and political philosophy that is number one, that the marketplace is a better, more efficient and more competent arbiter of how an economy should run than his government. And, you know, which is sort of like saying, instead of having the NFL set the rules for football, we're going to have whichever team has the most money set the rules and decide how many players they can have on the field versus how many players their opponents can have on the field and whether their players can grab face

masks and their opponents can't, because they're going to to set the, I mean, it's insane when you think about it, but no, that's, that's the first tenant is that because millions of decisions are made in the marketplace every moment, right? The second, while we're talking, Chris, someplace, somebody is deciding which brand orange shoes to buy or which kind of shoes to buy or what, you know, there's literally billions of micro decisions being made and you couldn't possibly, you know, that represents a huge amount of wisdom and data. And you couldn't possibly emulate that by policy planners or bureaucrats or politicians, completely ignoring the fact that it's a damn game. Economy is no more, it would no more or less a game than football or baseball.

The difference is instead of throwing a ball around, we're throwing money around and producing goods and services. And so anyhow, the first rule is the rules of the game or the first rule of neoliberalism is that the rule of regularity is given by the richest and most powerful players, the billionaires and big corporations. And we've seen them completely take over our economy and our political system over the last 30 years in particular. But this all started with Reagan.

The second one is that capital should be able to roam the world freely in search of labor, in search of labor, and to hell with any idea of commitment to national what's best for a nation. And we call that free trade, which we got with Bill Clinton, basically, and signing the NAFTA agreement that George Bush and Ronald Reagan had negotiated. So free trade is the second tenet. Another tenet of it is that anything that distorts the marketplace is an unnecessary and inappropriate interference to the marketplace. And the worst distortion in the marketplace is labor unions, because it gives people the ability to challenge employers.

And the employers are the big players in the economy, in the marketplace, and so they're the ones who should be setting the rules, not the workers. And you can see all of these were the core components, essentially, of the Reagan Revolution. Wow. Wow. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here with a little station break.

Hope you're enjoying the show so far. We'll resume here in a second. I'd like to invite you to come to my coaching, speaking and training courses website. You can also see our new podcast over there at chrisvossleadershipinstitute.com. Over there, you can find all the different stuff that we do for speaking engagements. If you'd like to hire me,

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chrisfossleadershipinstitute.com. Now back to the show. Now, you know, you mentioned billions of decisions being made on purchasing and stuff. That's just my girlfriend on Amazon Prime right now. I guess. Pretty sure. Pretty sure.

That explains all those boxes that keep coming into the house and why my credit card company keeps calling. You know, it's interesting to me what you mentioned before, too, about how, you know, billionaires can go to other places. You wrote some about this in your book, The Hidden History of American Oligarchy that we had you on the show with. And these guys become pan-globalists where they're not really so much concerned about capitalism and the U.S. market. They're interested in where they can get the cheapest labor. And then, of course, we saw, like you mentioned with NAFTA, the dissolving of what used to be the steel belt became the rust belt. And labor, power, and money and wealth in this country from the middle class. Yeah, it's absolutely true.

And the hollowing out of the American middle class was arguably a predictable result of neoliberalism. It was imposed on us in 1981. There were a lot of people pointing back to 1920 when Warren Harding became president. That point was 91%, which prevented, you know, this was to kind of undo the oligarchy, the Rockefellers and the Astors and whatnot, and to prevent that from happening again. We had strong enforcement of our antitrust laws. Teddy Roosevelt and William Hart Taft had just broken up Standard Oil and a bunch of other companies. Match, Copper, there was a whole bunch of different monopolies that they broke up. And when Harding came in, the Republican in 1920, he did away with all that. He dropped the top tax rate to 25%. He deregulated the financial markets. He deregulated the banks. And the result of that was the roaring 20s, but then 1929 and the great crash and what was referred to up until the 1950s as the Republican Great Depression.

Wow. And you saw some of that with the housing market, too. Yeah. But that was another neoliberal plan. I mean, Bill Clinton deregulated banking in 99. I mean, it was mostly Republicans in Congress driving that train, but Clinton signed the law that ended Glass-Steagall, which forbade banks that hold checkbook accounts and savings accounts from using your money to gamble in the stock market, or in this case, in the housing market. And so, you know, once that law was gone, they started gambling and it all blew up in our faces in 2008. And we still haven't put Glass-Steagall back. I mean, you know, we're still at risk here. And there's some serious problems. Oh, the other thing about Reagan, the second reason why Reagan was hell-bent on destroying

the American middle class, I mean, people look back and they go, OK, maybe neoliberalism that he tried was with the best of intention. Maybe it was just because, you know, Milton Friedman sold him on it. He thought that it would work out. He thought that it would help out the middle class. He didn't think it would be a disaster. But actually, in fact, what happened was in 1951, Russell Kirk wrote this book, The Conservative Mind. And you and I may not discuss this because it's in my oligarchy book. And stop me if you want, if we have. But in The Conservative

Mind, Russell Kirk said, at that point in time, we were a decade into the New Deal. And he said if the middle class continues to grow in wealth and in size as it is now, it's going to reach a point where the fear of poverty is gone. And when the fear of poverty is gone, you are going to see three predictable results. Young people are going to cease to respect their elders. Women are going to forget their place in the home and demand equal rights with men. And minorities are going to forget their place in society and start demanding equal rights with white people. And when those three things happen, you're going to see the collapse of American society. And everybody, you know, the conservative intelligentsia, when Russell Kirk

laid this out in this famous book, The Conservative Mind, you know, most people were like, ah, the conservative intelligentsia, when Russell Kirk laid this out in this famous book, The Conservative Mind, you know, most people were like, ah, the guy's a crackpot. But William F. Buckley and Barry Goldwater both completely bought and preached it, you know, from the rafters. And even in 64, when Barry Goldwater lost the election, it was still only a small portion of the Republican Party that thought that Russell Kirk was right. And then came the anti-war movement, the Fuselage movement. You know, the birth control pill was introduced in 61. By 67, we had a strong anti-war movement going. By 72, you had the Supreme Court legalizing birth control for unmarried couples. In 73, they legalized abortion, which led to a really strong

women's movement in the workplace. And, you know, so you had young people out there burning their draft cards, women burning their bras, and the civil rights movement was on a roll. And they had gotten, you know, voting rights, civil rights legislation, and they were demanding rights. And people were yelling about, you know, Rodney King kind of stuff. I mean, he came in the 90s. And so when the late 60s and early 70s happened, at that point, the fathers of the GOP who had read Russell Kirk back in the day and thought he was a crackpot, looked at him and said, holy cow, Russell Kirk was a frigging prophet. And so Reagan's job was to – the middle class was 65% of America at that point. Reagan's job was to cut the middle class down to size so that young people would shut up and go to college. In other words, throw them into debt so they're afraid of getting kicked out of school. Wow. You know, push back on the rights of minorities, push back on the rights of women. And basically, you know, using poverty is the great terrifier wow i that you know i remember watching ron reagan on and i

think this is i i can't remember if he was still in the governorship of california but he was on jenny carson and he was talking about running and how you know the federal government needs to be you know less federal government less regulations right at that size is this is this is neoliberalism neoliberalism is it also basically a way of saying unfettered capitalism? Yeah, it is. And smaller government. The government should not play a protective role. That's called deregulation.

That's another neoliberal tenet. The government should not play a protective role. The marketplace can do that just fine, thank you very much. In fact, Milton Friedman, one of the three godfathers of neoliberalism, in one of his books has a whole chapter about how we shouldn't even license doctors, that the way that the market works is so magical that if you've got some guy who is pretending to be a doctor and he's doing surgery and he's killing people, word will get around. The marketplace will inform people. And after half a dozen people are dead,

nobody will go to him anymore. We shouldn't have laws that regulate the quality and consistency of our drugs and purity of our drugs or the safety of our food supply. All of these things are the things that the magical marketplace will take care of. Now, in every case, it'll take care of them after a lot of people are dead or injured. And it'll take care of them mostly through lawsuits, which can be a long, drawn-out process. But this is what they believe. And the Republican Party is completely down with this and has been for 42 years. And about a third of the Democratic Party

is still pushing neoliberalism. Wow. Wow. Now, which part of the Democratic Party? The far left? The middle? The ones who are pushing neoliberalism are the ones essentially on the right of the Democratic Party. It's the so-called Problem Solvers Caucus, John Gottheimer and these guys, you know, who never saw a corporation's money that they

weren't willing to take. You know, the guys who are opposed to Medicare for all, the guys who are opposed to the government negotiating drug prices, you know, the guys who don't want to, who have been fighting any attempt to bring back union rights, card check legislation that's been on the table for 30 years now, blocked by Democrats who are basically shells for big corporations. any attempt to bring back union rights, card check legislation that's been on the table for 30 years now, blocked by Democrats who are basically shells for big corporations. So, you know, the Democratic Party, it's an interesting thing, Chris, in 80, or in 78, actually, when Lewis Powell authored the Supreme Court decision, First National Bank of Boston

versus Frank Bilotti, which was the decision where they said that corporations can pour money into political campaigns. And it's called free speech. Right. That happened in 78. And that greased the skids for Reagan to come into office in 1980. He came into office on a tsunami. Wow. Largely money from the fossil fuel industry, but other industries as well.

But at that point, the Democratic Party was making all its money or taking all its money out of the labor unions. I mean, you know, the court of America was unionized. There's a hell of a lot of people. There's a lot of money in those unions. And so the Democrats just kind of ignored it. Yeah, that's an in-court decision. But Reagan then took an ax to the unions. And by the end of the 12 years of the Reagan-Bush administration,

we were down to about 10 percent of America being unionized. And the unions did not pay for presidential campaigns anymore. And so at that point, Bill Clinton in 92, he's looking around going, what the hell do we do? And Al Fromm and him got together and they came up with this thing called the New Democrats. And the whole thing about the New Democrats was we're going to do the same thing the Republicans are going to do. We're going to embrace neoliberalism because that seems to be the hot new thing. And we're going to take money from corporations. We'll just only take money from clean corporations. We'll take money from banks, from insurance companies, from pharmaceutical companies and things like that. And we'll leave the dirty industries,

steel, fossil fuels, chemicals, we'll leave that to the Republicans. And so that cleavage kind of existed. Clinton bought into neoliberalism, promoted it, signed NAFTA, signed the end of Glass-Steagall, all that stuff, deregulated the telecommunications system, which led to this massive consolidation of the media, all that stuff. That was Clinton's neoliberalism. And then Obama didn't take any effort, didn't make any effort to stop neoliberalism. He didn't actively push it, although you could argue that Obamacare is a perfect example of neoliberalism because every penny runs through a for-profit health insurance company. So really the first president who has challenged neoliberalism since Reagan was Trump. He aimed against neoliberalism. And frankly,

I think that's why he won or wanted a little help help from the Russians. I'm going to raise taxes to no greed levels. My friends will hate me. It was a lie. Of course, he cut taxes. He said he was going to bring back our jobs. It was a lie. He did a few tariffs that, you know, kind of looked like lipstick on a pig, but they didn't have any effect. He said he was he was going to support unionization and labor and expand union rights. He did the exact opposite. He cut union rights. But, you know, he campaigned against neoliberalism and he won. Now we've got Joe Biden, who didn't campaign against neoliberalism, but who is openly challenging neoliberalism. So, you know, now we've got a president who's actually doing the work, although he's being hampered by these neoliberal Democrats. I mean, Joe Manchin got written into the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill and the Inflation Reduction

Act, what's called public-private partnerships, which is a neoliberal concept that says that every penny government spends must go not to workers, not to government employees. If Michigan wants to build roads, they shouldn't build out a road building crew. They should hire a for-profit corporation to do it. So every penny that gets spent out of the bipartisan infrastructure bill has to go through the hands of a for-profit corporation. So some person who donates to, you know, particular politician X can make a buck. It's just astounding how both parties are just run by money and you've written about this and we talked about it before in your books about you know stacking the scotus

court and making it so that some of the rulings what citizens unite in different things where you can buy your politician if you have enough money yeah it's the result of supreme court discussions and it's not only maybe a third of the democratic party is is doing that yeah yeah i don't know it's hard to say i tried to be in the middle of my democratic party i don't like i'm not i don't really want to have blue hair so i try and stay away from that far left side and then but i don't want to be over that far right but you know i'm an entrepreneur and and i i was regulated highly in the 90s with our career company we were company. We had to do tariffs and all that, these different regulations. And then Bill Clinton took that away, which was kind of good.

But it was actually kind of nice to have our licenses and regulation. But I can see how unfettered capitalism, because I've watched. I graduated in, what, 86. And so I was starting to see the Ivan Biosky stuff and the Milken stuff and the junk bonds and the dissolving of Main Street into Wall Street. And, of course, the siloing that we've seen of, you know, the Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and, you know, the siloing of America, especially when they can go overseas and do whatever they want. You write in your book, it was kind of interesting, Milton Friedman

parts General Pinochet, which is kind of an interesting story, I think, in your book. Yeah, these guys came up with this idea of neoliberalism in the 40s. And about the 50s and 60s, they were preaching it. And sort of like Russell Kirk, everybody thought they were crackpots. But they got some traction in the Republican Party anyway by the 70s. But they needed proof of concept. And nobody had ever tried a Sweden socialist, if you will. There was a strong social safety net. There were some government-run industries. The government controlled about a series of copper mines that were owned by three American companies. And that went back to colonial days that they had bought from like old Spanish colonizers back in the day. And these companies were basically raping Chile. They were just, you know, extracting, robbing, you know, just extracting all this copper and paying these little pittance, penny-of-the-dollar royalties to Chile.

And so Allende put together a commission. He said, we're going to take these away from these American companies. We're going to pay them a fair price for the loss of their business. And the purpose of the commission was to figure out how much they had to give to these companies. And they ultimately came up with a number. It was hundreds of billions of dollars, which would be hundreds of billions of dollars in today's money. And he made the deal

and he said, okay, we're going to do this. And he said, oh, and by the way, we're going to make public the phone systems. We're going to take those away from IT&T. So the copper companies went to Henry Kissinger, who was the advisor at the time to Richard Dickens during the Nixon administration. And the, or maybe he was even Secretary of State, I don't recall exactly what his role was at that particular moment. And IT&T went to the CIA and said, we've got to overthrow this guy. He is, you know, taking our money. And so Nixon, Kissinger, and the CIA conspire with this general in the Chilean army, Augusto Pinochet, to overthrow the government. And they did it. They did it on 9-11, 1973. And that is Chile's 9-11. It was September 11th,

1973 that they overthrew the government. And as Pinochet and his tanks rolled into the capital city, Allende went before a radio microphone. He only, about two dozen people were still with him in the presidential palace, gave his final address, and then shot himself in the head. So the next decade or so, Milton Friedman was traveling down to Chile and advising these guys. They privatized virtually everything. One of the first things they privatized was the country's social security system. The result of this was mass unemployment. It collapsed with Chilean, 20, 30 percent inflation.

The economy just absolutely went to hell. All these American companies came in because they dropped all the tariffs and all the trade restrictions. All these American companies came in and just basically started buying up, you know, ranches and farms and land and businesses and everything else and just taking all the money out of the country and leaving none of it behind.

And we're an American manager. And the people were very upset about this. And when they started protesting, Pinochet started killing them. He was literally, I mean, you know, I was at a rally here in Portland just somewhere before last and the Proud Boys were there and they were wearing T-shirts that said, Free Helicopter Rides for Liberals.

Because that's what Pinochet was doing. He was throwing – he would take people up in helicopters all over the ocean and drop them from 3,000 feet as a way of killing them. And he was quite proud of it. He publicized it in the National Stadium. He tortured over 10,000 people. There are thousands of bodies buried there. And so ultimately, they got rid of Pinochet. I mean, his neoliberal experiment was a it's all horse crap so then that you know that didn't work so then they tried it here in the united states in 1980 with reagan and you know our

economy is so large and our government was so large and there's so many different systems that they could they you know it really took a decade or two to chip away enough that that they had done the kind of damage to america that they did to chile in first three weeks. And so we didn't really realize what was going on until the late 90s, frankly. Then in 91, they, Russia, you know, Gorbachev unwound Russia or unwound the Soviet Union. And he was trying to turn Russia, the new Russia that emerged out of this, he was trying to turn it into Sweden. I mean, he came right out and said, Sweden is my role model. I want to create a democratic socialist nation with strong labor protections, a strong social safety net. It'll

make an appropriate transition out of communism where the government is aligned to all needs now, but we're going to have a completely regulated capitalist market. And he went to the IMF, him and Yeltsin, went to the IMF and to the United States. And part of this was during the Bush administration. Part of it was during the early years of the Clinton administration and said, we need, you know, we're going to need a trillion dollars to do this. I mean, we're literally taking the second largest country in the world or third and completely changing our economic and political system. It's going to take some money. And the IMF said, we will only give you that money if you engage in neoliberal shock theory,

if you do what Pinochet did in Chile. And so they did. They had no choice. They did. And the predictable result of neoliberalism is always oligarchy. We've had oligarchy in the United States for three decades. You can't pass meaningful legislation if the oligarchs oppose it, which is why we don't have a national healthcare system.

We don't have free college, you know, et cetera. And the oligarchy that emerged in Russia is now headed by the uber oligarch, probably the richest man in the world, Vladimir Putin. And oligarchy, the problem with oligarchy is it's a very unstable political system. And it typically only lasts, if you look at history, I mean, all the way back to the Roman Empire, it typically only lasts one or two generations. And then either there's a popular uprising and you have an eruption of democracy, which takes back over, or it flips into fascism.

And Russia is on the verge of a complete trap of the state, although there is a strong democratic movement. It's now starting to challenge Putin. I wrote about this today at Hartman Report. And, but, you know, this is, oh, and we tried it in Iraq too. George W. Bush wanted to try it in Iraq. And so, you know, he shut down all the government-owned businesses and privatized everything. And the result is that Iraq is now a fascist government. Nouri al-Maliki is, you know, he's not, arguably Saddam Hussein was a more benevolent dictator. And you almost saw it on January 6th. And we may see it again if we don't, elections go the wrong way.

And of course we have these election deniers. And yeah, we're kind of at that crossroads. That's really shocking what you talk about. I had you on the show, I think the day after, shortly after January 6th. And I'll never the show, I think the day after, shortly after January 6th. And I'll never forget, you threw me off my chair, literally in my head, because you're like, you remember, you said at the end of the show, you said, you know what they call January 6th, a practice or warm-up or rehearsal. And I was just like, oh man.

What does this feel like? A rehearsal. Yeah, a rehearsal. And I was just like, I remember just being floored. It's stayed with me ever since, and I've quoted you on it ever since. But every time I tell it to people, they just go, wow. But that's interesting what you say, the one to two generation about how we either go to fascism or we have, you know, we have these kids nowadays that don't, the Gen X, I think it's the Gen Zs, don't believe in capitalism anymore. And so... I think broadly the Zoomers would just, I mean, they realize that unregulated capitalism is fundamentally evil.

I mean, you know, it will always produce oligarchy and fascism. In fact, you know, the old definition of fascism, the last time I saw it this way was the 1987 American Heritage Dictionary, was that fascism is the merger of corporate and state interests combined with belligerent nationalism. Wow. And, you know, I think that's probably the best definition of fascism that's ever been written. And, yeah. Yeah. You talk about the end of your book about getting back to what, oh, here was it. I think it was Andrew Jackson, what Andrew Jackson had for a vision for America, how

we can get away from this. Yeah. Hamilton. Tell us more about that. Alexander, when George Washington was elected president in 1789, he had to go to Newark, which was then the seat of government, to be inaugurated. And he wanted to be sworn in wearing American-made clothes. It was a big deal for him because the British had outlawed the manufacture of clothing in the United States.

Everything had to be purchased from British mills via the East India Company. And by the way, that was not something the British only did in the 1700s or the 1600s and 1700s. That's why the logo for Mahatma Gandhi's movement was the spinning wheel, why he would sit at the spinning wheel whenever he did press conferences and things, because it was illegal to make cloth in India. That's right. All over the British, right up until I think 1937 was the year they got independence. Could be wrong. Maybe it was 54, but it was around there. And so Washington wanted America to compete with him. He didn't want us to be buying from England. He wanted to build an industrial economy here. Oh, you know what, for his day would have been

an industrial economy. So he turned to his treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, one of the smartest guys around and said, you know, how do we do this? And Hamilton looked at how England did it. And this goes back to the 1540s, I think it is, when Henry VII looked at how the Dutch had done this in the 1300s and the 1400s. And the Dutch had become the people who ruled the seas by the late 1400s, the Dutch and the Spanish. And the Dutch had done this system and Henry VII adopted it. It's referred to as the Tudor system. And then Alexander Hamilton cloned it here in the United States and he called it the American system. That was his 11-point plan. He submitted it to Congress in December of 1791. And by 1793, most of it was adopted as law or policy. And it was basically, the 11 points

were basically, number one, you put a tariff on the import of finished goods that compete with American-made finished goods. So you want to give American manufacturers a price edge domestically. And number two, you want to encourage the export of goods that are manufactured in the United States so the rest of the world can become our market. So you have no tariffs on those goods. And you may even subsidize them or you may at the very least provide things like the Navy to protect shipping channels so that it's easy to transport your goods to other nations. He said that there needs to be a national road system, that the federal government should get involved in building roads and infrastructure for, you know, to promote commerce, that there are industries that are critical to building other industries, you know, like having a steel industry, for example, or

having, you know, or back then it was an iron industry. I'm not sure when steel was invented, but probably by then, but whatever, you know, that there are industries that are like the foundational industries on which everything else built and that those industries, we should actually be subsidizing. We should be giving them tax breaks, or we should even give them, call them pecuniary bonuses, which is subsidies. And I'm forgetting all the points, but those were the essential important ones. And George Washington put that into place in 1793, and it built America really rapidly as the largest and most rapidly growing industrial power in the world right up until the 1980s when Reagan reversed that. When Reagan said, OK, enough, I'm going to abandon the American plan. We're going to embrace neoliberalism and start free trade.

Free trade is the exact antithesis of what Alexander Hamilton proposed. So we operated under the Hamilton system from 1793 until 1981. We've been operating under the neoliberal system from 1981 or the Reagan system until this very day. Also, an interesting anecdote of this, I lived in China in November of 1986. And during that time, the Chinese government, you know, Mao had just recently died. And the Cultural Revolution had been a disaster for the country. It had just left them in poverty and shambles. There had been this huge famine just a decade earlier.

And so they were trying to figure out, how do we reinvent China? How do we build a China that can be, you know, an industrial power like America? And there were these two sets of advisors to the Chinese government who were having this really wild debate. And basically one set of advisors was saying this new neoliberalism thing, this looks like what we really need to go with. I mean, there's a lot of promise here and it was economists who came up with it. And so let's just embrace neoliberalism. And this was around the same time, you know, in 91, that Russia was being forced to embrace it. And at the time,

much of the world thought it would be a good thing. It would be an experiment in Russia that would turn out well. And then also in China, there was another group who were looking back at the history of the United States, and they were openly saying, need to adopt alexander hamilton's american plan i mean they literally use that language and by 93 the chinese government had made the decision and they chose to go with alexander hamilton's plan rather than neoliberalism they they dodged the bullet and that's why next year china will be the largest economy in the world they will have surpassed the united states in gdp right, as we're speaking, Chris, onion's middle class is larger than the entire population of the United States.

And they get most of it with power dollars. 60,000 American factories closed. 15 million American jobs went to China. And, you know, companies like Apple are laughing all the way to the bank. Crazy, man. Wow. That explains why China has risen. I always thought it would just be the amount of people they had.

You try to sell an American manufactured product in China, it's damn hard. They freely work to keep out imports. But a lot of exports. Oh, yeah. A lot of exports. That's the thing I love about your books. And people should buy your books and listen to your radio show. You're so great at taking, you know, if you watch a TV show,

you'll see somebody, you know, they'll compartmentalize. Okay, here's what happened in 1980 or what this guy did or what that guy did. You're so great at, like, tying all the things together so you can see the history weaving of it. And that's what I love about everything you do. I mean, I your show and stuff. I mean, I lived all that stuff. I've seen it all.

You don't seem like you're around at Alexander Hamilton's time. No, I wasn't. There's still time. These guys were so amazing, Alexander Hamilton and some of these early thinkers. It was so, it was, the foresight that they had was just extraordinary. Oh, it really is.

In fact, that's the next book in the series is going to be The History of American Democracy. And I'm writing that right now. In fact, I think I, this last weekend, finished the first draft, at least my own first draft of it.

I've got a November 1st deadline to get it published. And an awful lot of it is living inside the minds of Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and Alexander Hamilton. And all the debates and all the scrum and all the back and forth. And the philosophers of the Enlightenment, you know, from David Hume to Thomas Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Diderot.

I mean, all those guys. It's just a fascinating time. And I'm really having fun writing this this next crazy stuff man so you talk about your book how is do we have a chance can we get it can we get off of neoliberalism do we have to have a revolution of some type or i think we can do it incrementally i mean it came in incrementally it came out incrementally we've got a strong resurgence resurgence of the labor movement right now. Yeah, really strong.

The main thing that has kneecapped the labor movement is the Taft-Hartley Act and a series of Supreme Court decisions, both of which would be overturned by this new bill that Elizabeth Warren is championing called the National Right to Mutinize Act. So, you know, do away with right to work for less. With regard to international trade, Biden has kept Trump's tariffs in place. That's kind of interesting he did that. Yeah, in my mind, that's incredibly symbolic. It says that he's not embracing neoliberalism. It does get that it's appropriate to protect an economy. And I think that if he can get a large enough majority in the House and Senate going forward, you know, any attempt to raise tariffs right now would be

blocked by people like Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin. But maybe he can get enough Democrats on board that he can start going back to, you know, that we can have an industrial, you know, a national industrial policy. We haven't had one since 1980. Reagan just abandoned that. That's another thing, you know, stopping the privatization of our schools. This is a very destructive trend that is another facet of neoliberalism. Needing student debt, another piece of neoliberalism, getting health care to all Americans, you know, undoing the first time in in since since 1980 we've had a president who is trashing neoliberalism and embracing in classical economics out of snow it's interesting two of those things two of those three things you've said if i understand correctly a best seat of us is an oligarch for oh yeah your father who put in the plan to stack scotus from going back to

nixon which you educated me on. Yeah, I don't know about her father, but I do know that she's a billionaire who thinks the net public schools. Yeah. Didn't her father start the Center for National Policy? It surprised me, but somebody else must have told you that story. That must be, yeah. Not a Center for National Policy expert.

Yeah. It was kind of interesting. It started from the Nixon administration and the intent. It started with the rise of abortion and they used abortion. They found abortion was the way to get voters out. It's really interesting what's happening right now. And you talked about what Biden can possibly do with legislation. And of course, everything's going to be in play in the 2022 election. When I heard the, you know, the leaking of the SCOTUS potential that they would overturn abortion, Roe versus Wade, I remember saying to people, you know, Democrats don't want to seem to vote.

They don't seem to care about 2022. And it looks like, you know, it's going to be a landslide. And I said to people, I said, maybe if they do, maybe we need them overturn roe versus wade so that we can get out the vote yeah and it's how it works looks like that's worked it's kind of it's kind of a weird way to do things but it may save us or you know if democrats can focus on abortion guns on the environment you know and climate change and and on the threat to democracy. I think those four key elements will win a lot of races. And hopefully so. I mean, we need at least get the Senate if we're going to try and influence SCOTUS.

If we don't get the Senate, I mean, they're going to go to your judges. Yeah. And of course, I really don't want to see the House turn into a romper room, you know, 15 things on Hunter Biden's laptop, you know, committees. All right. Well, Tom, it's wonderful to have you on the show. And like I said, again, I really recommend people checking your books. I've learned so much from you and just having you on the show, your books, your radio show is just immense to do. I get your mailing list every day and just the extraordinary amount of data that's on there is just...

The TomHartman.com are really from our show. Yeah, from the show. And it's got all your references and footnotes and stuff. And it's extraordinary to go through. So thank you very much for everything you do. It's wonderful to have you on the show again, my friend. It's been my pleasure, Chris. Thanks so much for having me.

Thank you very much, sir. Give us your.com one more time so people can find you. Oh, arborworkport.com and Tom. There you go. Guys, order up the book and check out everything Tom does because not only does he interweaves it and everything, he puts it in a very simple, clean language. And it's not like when you do the radio show, man, he just weaves right through and you go, this makes sense because A equals B equals C and you put it all together.

Order of the Book comes out tomorrow, September 13th, 2022. The Hidden History of Neoliberalism, How Reaganism Gutted America and How to Restore Its Greatness. It's part of the Tom Hartman Hidden History Series. Thanks for tuning in, guys. We certainly appreciate you guys. Go to YouTube.com, 4ress, Chris Voss, all our places on the internet, the big LinkedIn group, and the LinkedIn newsletter as well. Thanks for tuning in.

Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you guys next time.