The Tucker Carlson Show - Oren Cass: How Trump’s Tariffs Are Reversing the Foreign Policy That Doomed America’s Economy

Episode Date: May 16, 2025

The point of the postwar global economic order was never to help the United States, says economist Oren Cass, and in the end it didn’t. Thankfully Trump just blew it up. (00:00) Introduction (01:20) What Really Is Conservatism? (05:16) How Did America Lose Focus on Family Values? (11:45) The Societal Problems Dividing Generations (30:09) Are Trump’s Tariffs Working? (46:12) Why Did They Try to Destroy Pat Buchanan? (51:07) The Deep State’s Economic Model Was Really About Foreign Policy Paid partnerships with: ExpressVPN: Go to https://ExpressVPN.com/Tucker and find out how you can get 4 months of ExpressVPN free! Masa Chips: Get 25% off with code TUCKER at https://masachips.com/tucker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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People will get poorer. What's your position on Trump's tariffs? Are they working? We should have them, but you should phase them in. There are going to be obstructions. If you are somebody who wants to do business in America, you need to start planning for that. If we want our economy to work well, the way to make a lot of money in America is by making things in America. It's like the most interesting thing I've heard in a long time. So you're saying that our economic model was not primarily an economic model, was an instrument of foreign policy.

It was like the centerpiece of the global order, post-war global order. It wasn't like designed to help the United States as much as it was to preserve stability around the world. If there's any group to whom we should be focusing resources on, it is families raising kids who are the ones who have been, I think, most squeezed by these economic changes. We will have to pay for that. And the people who will pay for it are the people who are earning a lot of money and don't have kids. I love that you said that out loud. Thank you. what is conservatism? What is the Trump movement? Who's on what side? And probably not a better, it's not really an abstract debate anymore. It's like all of a sudden you find yourself, I find myself like on the same side as people with whom I don't think I have anything in common. So what's your definition of conservative? That's the hardest question in conservatism, I think.

And, you know, for me, it comes down to a focus on what actually matters and sort of, you know, all of our policy debates are about the means. What should we do? I think at the end of the day, what defines conservatism and what separates it from progressivism is the definition of the ends. What do we actually think is the good life? What are we trying to achieve? And I think for conservatives, there's a very deep recognition and belief that the good life is about more than just the individual liberty and autonomy and consumption of stuff. Obviously, we care about those things too, but that it is much more balanced against a recognition that, you know, the well-being of families and the conditions in which

we're raising the next generation and the strength of our communities, ultimately the strength of our nation, the ability to carry forward traditions, that all of those things are equally probably more important to people's actual well-being. And that as we think about what government is for, what public policy is for,

those are the things we actually have to have in focus. So paint the picture of what the end result of a well-organized society is. Well, I think first and foremost, it is the family. That at the end of the day, everything is oriented toward this question of how do we raise a next generation that is able to do what we have done, hopefully more than we have done, to enjoy what we have enjoyed, hopefully more than we have enjoyed. And that that is a sort of fundamental obligation that we all have. It's not a choice, a consumption choice, right?

Some people go to Greece, some people raise the next generation. I mean, as a descriptive matter, it is true. But as a normative matter, as a question of should, that is what should happen and that is what needs to happen. And so the question is, well, okay, what are the conditions in which that can and will happen? We need to have the conditions where young people can see a future for themselves, forming families, going to be a healthy one for kids to grow up. We obviously, therefore, need an economy that provides those kinds of jobs. anybody who wants to work and is willing to work hard, regardless of what their particular aptitudes

and interests are, regardless of where they live, right? The idea that, well, we'll get more growth if everybody moves to a big city is highly corrosive to the idea that we will actually have a world of people raising strong families. And then as you sort of keep zooming out, ultimately you get out to the level of the nation and you recognize that, you know, at the end of the day, you do have to have a country. A country is not just a market or, you know, an Olympics team. It is actually something with an identity within which people owe obligations to each other. And not everybody is raising kids, but if you're not, you have some obligation to the folks who are. You have some obligation to those kids. And as those kids grow up, they will in turn

have obligations back to you. And if you can't maintain that structure, and I think a lot of what you see in the modern West is struggles to maintain that structure, things start to fall apart. It sounds like socialism, Warren. No, I'm just kidding. It sounds beautiful, actually. And I should say for people who don't know, I'm not going to give your home address or anything, but you kind of live that personally. You live in a smallish town, far from, very far from a city. You have a family, you're involved in the town on like an official level. You are living the life that you describe. I try to, I think it's, and I think it's important at that level because I think that, you know, what I'm describing isn't sort of the ideal that I hope

somebody goes and does. I think it is, as I said, sort of that obligation that everybody should feel that they have. And also that I would underscore that people can fulfill in lots of ways. You don't have to live in the middle of nowhere. You can do these things in a city too. You can do these things with all sorts of jobs. You can do these things in a family where both parents are working, in a family where only one parent is working. But I think a lot of what we need to aspire to, and the fancy term for it is pluralism, is the idea that having all of those different options is a good unto itself. The fact that people can see that option set and find one that works for them

is part of what leads to human flourishing, part of what makes it all work. And one of the things that our markets have pushed against, the market just looks for the most efficient solution. And that might be fine if you're just trying to sort of maximize your GDP growth. But if the most efficient solution is to push everybody into any particular lane, especially the kinds of lanes we've been pushing people into, you don't actually get the outcomes you care others, to our children, to our neighbors, really sort of old-fashioned Protestant talk that I haven't heard in a long time from Protestants or anyone else. It's not a worldview that like Ken Griffin, you know, talks about or probably believes in.

Where does that, well, why don't we talk about that anymore? Where does that obligation come from and how do you restore people's sense of it is it is especially oriented around raising that next generation. And so, you know, not by coincidence do the world's great moral traditions have this embedded. Well, that kind of is the moral tradition, right? Well, yes, that's right. There's a common thread there. You know, I think you don't see it as much today for two reasons. One is that it is constraining, right? The entire premise of obligations and duties, as opposed to merely rights and privileges,

is that there are things that you should be doing, even if they are not the thing that is the most fun at that moment in time, even if they are not the thing that you personally want to be doing at that moment in time. Sometimes just because it is the right thing to do and it is, you know, something that is important to that humans are frail, flawed people, and simply pursuing what the economist would say is optimizing your well-being at every moment in time leads people to choose all sorts of things that are not actually good for them at all. And that's what I find fascinating about speaking about these kinds of concepts of obligation and duty in the good life is some people get very skeptical of this. They're like, oh, yeah, but, you know, no one's going to choose that when they could just have all this other stuff instead. But you step back and you look at all of the available data and you say, no, no, they will actually be happier if they choose all this stuff. People who are married are happier. People who have kids are happier. People later in life who have done these things live fuller lives overall. They also tend

to earn more money. Whatever it is you actually want to achieve in your life, it is almost certainly the case that making these kinds of decisions will be good for you too. The problem is just that in the moment when you're 23, it's not necessarily a thing that you're going to choose. That's right. And in a sense, and this goes back to where you started with, you know, what is conservatism? It's a recognition that for people to lead good lives and make good decisions, they need to be operating within this structure. They rely on institutions, their own families, ideally an education system, ideally the broader

culture to shape and form them and help them make these kinds of decisions that will benefit them, they themselves in the long run. We're not just asking for fixed bayonet charges into machine guns. We're talking about things that will be good for them, will be good for those around them, will be good for their own kids, but that we know are not things that they're just automatically going to choose by themselves. And so just, you know, this is the other thing that you would just like, just like, well, why aren't we doing this? Part of it is people just don't like being constrained. Part of it is we have adopted this sort of what I call market fundamentalism, where economists and their way of thinking have somehow persuaded a lot of people that,

no, no, no, just everybody choosing what they think is is good for them at every moment with with no constraints is actually the way to optimize welfare for themselves for the nation for the economy and and that's just not true everything you said well you've described the basis of any civilization you know no civilization can continue ignoring what you said um so it's obvious i mean nothing's radical that you described it's like fundamental but it does feel like the generation that began in 1946 kind of like didn't know that or something spent the country into bankruptcy sort of dying in their condos in South Carolina, leaving nothing to their children or grandchildren.

It does seem like those assumptions changed with the baby boom. I think that's right. And I think part of the answer is the sort of more skeptical or cynical one that, you know, this generation has not been especially thoughtful and obligation-oriented. Man, you ought to join the State Department. That level of diplomacy is awe-inspiring. Many of my friends are boomers, let me say. But I also think part of what we saw happen is that we went through, the boomers lived a life where everything did just seem to work. Yes. That, you know, if you look, and sorry, I always come back to the economic side of these example of someone who was sort of making this very public case that literally his best work is called free to choose we had built up in the American culture, because we were taking for granted that we were the dominant industrial power, you know, far and away ahead of anybody else, it felt like,

oh, you don't have to worry about these things. You can just leave people free to choose. They will just make these kinds of decisions. You know, investors will just invest in the paragraph where he writes about the invisible hand, he has all these requirements. Like if people prefer investing domestically to investing in foreign countries, if people focus on doing the things that will lead to the greatest outcome, the greatest output and most jobs, then the economy will work. And in this generation, just all that got erased. It's actually interesting, in the leading economics textbook, it literally got erased. They just ellipsed it out and just left with the part that the invisible hand leads to this stuff. And so, it sounds like

a magical force. Well, yeah, I call it magical. It's like the Holy Spirit. Exactly. And this is why I call it market fundamentalism, because it sounds like a derogatory term. Obviously, I'm using it somewhat derisively, but it's a descriptive term. misinterprets the original texts and ideas to create this very absolutist, easy-to-live-by framework, even though it's probably not actually true and probably isn't actually very good for people. And that is the course that the U.S. set itself on and American culture set itself on in a period where things were working well, right? You can get away with it for a while. And then, especially as the Cold War ended, as we sort of moved into this new world, I would say just it went off the rails and we started making choices in our foreign policy and our economic policy that assumed a whole bunch of

things that certainly weren't true anymore, even if they ever had been true. And I think in both our culture and our economy, we're now sort of grappling with the consequences of it. People are watching you without your knowledge every time you go online. Sorry to be creepy about it, but it's absolutely true. Data brokers record all of your activity, everything you do when you turn on your phone, your computer, absolutely true. Data brokers record all of your activity, everything you do when you turn on your phone, your computer, your laptop. That includes your search logs, everything. And they sell that information to advertisers, scammers, even government agencies. It's not good at all. There's no law against it. They're making a lot of money. So they don't think of you as a customer, really a human being. You're a product.

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Yes. Among those for whom this has all worked, right? Because there is still a class of people, certainly in the United States, if you are highly educated, living in certain regions. Older. um you know living in certain regions older older if um you know certainly if you are the beneficiary and have all the savings from the golden era um but you know there's there are plenty of people in their 20s and 30s if they got you know we're in the right place have the right education get the right kind of job um they're doing very well. And they have immersed themselves in a culture that says, well, we are here because we deserve to be here, right? In our wonderful

meritocracy, it is we who are supposed to be the winners and the ones who sort of make the decisions for everybody else. And let's look at just some economic statistics, like our TVs are bigger than ever. We have more stuff than ever. And so let's keep the good times rolling. That's, you know, I think there's a lot of people. It's such a small percentage of the country, though. Yes.

It's in that position. So that's what I find baffling. It's like, I mean, of course, famously, life is unfair. It's not exactly clear how real free will is. I mean, there are lots of deep questions that arise when you think about how wealth is allocated. Luck plays a role or providence or whatever. But it's still hard if you're in that percentage that's been benefiting and continues to benefit from the current arrangement. It's hard to understand how you don't look around and think to yourself, this isn't working for like

the overwhelming majority of people and that's bad. Like if that doesn't occur to you, what does it say about you? It's a fair question. I guess, you know, one reason I have maybe sympathy is strong, but a sense of it is I even look at, you know, my own trajectory going through a lot of these same institutions and kinds of jobs. You know, I ended up working for Mitt Romney's presidential campaign. After graduating Harvard. Yes. Well, actually, I was still in law school at Harvard. Was in charge of domestic policy for the Romney campaign.

And we started, questions would come in, what are we going to do about the opioid epidemic? And I'm embarrassed to say this. I'm hopping on Google, like is an opioid like like opium I mean I literally had no idea and at that point it had already been the deadliest drug epidemic in American you know probably for going on a decade at that point and it was extremely easy to not even know it existed, to have absolutely no contact with or familiarity with those kinds of challenges happening in other parts of the country. benefits everybody. And, you know, maybe you lose a job, but it's okay, you get a better job. To then be working in a big city, surrounded by other people have good jobs, and just kind of assume that that happened. And I think, you know, one of the really important things about Donald Trump's success is that I do think that represents a point at which you can no longer say,

well, you could reasonably be sitting around, just not understanding. At that point, is that I do think that represents a point at which you can no longer say, well, you could reasonably be sitting around just not understanding. At that point, I think you face a choice. You either have to recognize, wow, there are some things I did not understand that are serious problems that we need to focus more on, or, and plain people did this, you conclude, wow, I just don't like my country. The people must be too racist or xenophobic or just not understand how good they have it and good riddance. And let's be honest, again, you're right, it's a small share of the population that even with Donald Trump's success, even now, went in that direction. And they call it, you know, a term, they call it grievancenomics. If you think there are problems out there, that things are not going well,

you're just feeding the grievances of those who should take opportunities. I think that's a moral crime, that attitude, and I hope the people who have it are held responsible at some point. Sorry, I can't. I have to. I've asked this before. You've never given me a real answer, so I'm just going to ask you one last time. Given your profile, your life history, the merit badges you collected, the fact you went to Harvard Law School and worked for Mitt Romney, how did you wind up with these views?

You're like the only person who did. J.D. Vance, okay, but he had a childhood that was different from yours. You, more than anybody I've ever met, took a path that was not obvious at all. Why did you do that? It's a good question. I don't try to avoid answering. I don't necessarily have a great answer. I think if I were to pick two things, one is I ended up sort of hitting all those important checkpoints, but they grew up overseas, met overseas in Israel. And so, met at the American school. My dad lived on a kibbutz. They got married there.

And so, they moved back to the US. I was raised in the US, but with a just sort of different outlook. They hadn't come through that model that we were just talking about in the 60s and 70s. They weren't here. They were growing things? Literally, that's right. My dad was head of irrigation on a desert kibbutz. And so like, pipe, you know, like literally nozzles on pipes. And so, you know, I look back and I realize that I've been incredibly fortunate to have been given at once both a lot of the sort of superficial accompaniments of the standard meritocracy, but also an outlook and set of values that from them really did focus much more on,

you know, question one is family and what you're doing there and how you structure a job and a career comes around that and so on and so forth. Were they religious? No, not especially. You know, I think the, this is something you see a lot Were they religious? there. And so I had that. And then the other thing I had, and my grandfather was an extraordinary trial lawyer. And from the age of about four, my age of four, he just, whatever I wanted to say,

he would just immediately take the other side of it and start arguing with me about it. My first book is- He was willing to argue with a four-year-old? Yes. If that was who was available to argue with, that was who he was going to argue with. My first book is in memory of Irv, who always liked a good argument. That was... And I just grew up loving that.

And the idea that everything was always up for argument and testing both sides of, I think, just left me at every stage reflexively unwilling to accept the, you know, sometimes in a very unhealthy contrarian way, but also in a healthy contrarian way, insisting on arguing about it and pushing on it from all directions. And so, you know, I think those two things then left me kind of moving up through standard Republican conservative politics, but a little bit as an outsider and looking at it and saying, like,

well, like, why is that? I'm not sure that makes sense. That's not what I thought we were here to do. I thought conservatism meant the things we've been talking about here, not tax cuts. And that led me down a lot of interesting paths. Well, it led you away from like everybody in your world. Because, I mean, I've lived here the whole

time. The path for conservatives at Harvard Law School is well trod, not a huge number, but there have been a lot over the years. And they're all, you know, I'm a socially liberal but economically conservative, and you literally took the inverse position. I mean, it's like the single most unpopular combination that you could have. Yeah, I don't, I guess that's true. You guess that's true? That's definitely true. Now that you mention it, I do think, though, and this has been my experience with all the work You guess that's true? That's definitely true. forward, I find that as long as you're willing to sort of engage people in good faith and try to understand what they think and tell them what you think and argue about it.

Again, this is back to our mantra is intellectual combat with personal civility. Yeah, there are the people who'll be like, oh, well, I don't like that. Like, I don't like that person anymore. The vast majority of people are actually really interested in it. And so, you know, I guess it would be interesting to be sitting here, like, telling you about the huge personal cost I've paid for doing these things. Frankly, there hasn't been the personal cost at all. It's been very- You did give up a lot of money, just in point of fact, but whatever.

Oh, well, certainly to do public policy instead of going and being business, whatever. But that's always been, ever since I was a high school debate nerd, I always wanted, like I said, always wanted to be arguing about stuff. So, okay, you managed, I think, to, in the four years, four years that you've... Five years. Five years you've been running it. Okay. To remain pretty civil and people are civil back and like it's all interesting until the tariffs happen, at which point it becomes pretty emotionally charged, I would say. So, what's your position on Trump's tariffs? Are they working? And what kind of response have you received as one of the best-known tariff proponents? you know my view is that the the direction that that trump and the administration are going is exactly the right one that that the the willingness to focus on how globalization failed that free

trade isn't real it has not worked out the way it was promised we need to move on to something else is exactly right the fact that they're willing to acknowledge it has costs and that we should bear those costs is extraordinary. I mean, how long has it been since we had politicians who were actually willing to stand up and say, yes, this isn't just a free lunch. There are actual costs here and we think they're worth it. And I think that's right too. It's such a good point. And the irony, of course, is it's exactly the, you know, the very important people, very serious people in the newspaper columns, so forth, who've been complaining like,

oh, we politicians won't do this. They won't be serious. You finally get, you know, President Trump and Secretary Besant, people who are willing to say these things. And immediately everybody attacks. How dare you suggest we should accept any costs? You know, like, look at these fools saying, you know. And it's like, no, this is exactly what actual leadership looks like. This is what we need if we are going to get back out of the hole that we've dug. I think that being said, you know, especially when you are doing this kind of thing that does have upfront costs, you're kind of making an investment for a payout down the road, you have to be really careful to keep those costs as low as you

can and make sure you're setting yourself for as much of the return as you can. And I think in some of the sort of, frankly, chaos that we've seen in changes in the policy, in a lot of people not necessarily being clear on, okay, where are we going and why? I think in some cases, the costs have been higher than they have to be. And I think it's been really encouraging to see, really after Liberation Day, a bunch of shifts that have improved things. So I'm somebody who thinks tariffs are good. We should have them, but you should phase them in. You should give people time to adjust. And so now we've started doing that, right? Tariffs were paused, so we have negotiations. With China, they've now come back down a bunch,

so we can have negotiations. I think what we should have is a very clear commitment that down the road, two or three years out, for the long run, countries that are not playing by the rules, obviously China, countries that are not willing to take a balanced approach to trade, yes, there are going to be tariffs. There are going to be obstructions. And if you are somebody who wants to do business in America, you need to start planning for that. And you need to invest more in America. And going back to Adam Smith and what the paragraph about the invisible hand actually says, if we want our economy to work well, it has to be one where the way to make a lot of money in

America is by making things in America. Can we? Oh, yeah. It's one of the saddest things about this country the country's getting sicker despite all of our wealth and technology americans aren't doing well overall obesity heart disease autoimmune conditions all kinds of horrible chronic illnesses weird cancers are all on the rise probably a lot of reasons for this but one of them definitely is americans don't eat very well anymore they don't eat real food instead they eat they eat industrial substitutes, and it's not good. It's time for something new, and that's where masa chips come in. Masas decide to revive real food by creating snacks how they used to be made, how they're supposed to be made.

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Crime is not going away. Supply chains remain fragile. It does feel like some kind of global conflict could break out at any time. So the question is, if things went south tomorrow, would you be ready? Well, if you're not certain that you'd be ready, you need Ammo Squared. Ammo Squared is the only service that lets you build an ammunition stockpile automatically. You literally set it on autopilot. You pick the calibers you want, how much you want to save every month, then they'll ship it to you or they'll store it for you and ship it when you say so. You get 24

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How is that resolved? Yeah. These things take time. I think it's funny. You said earlier, well, the good news is people are starting to realize how big a mess we've made. The other thing I always say is the good news is that we've done it to ourselves, which is, I guess, mixed news. But it's good news in that it is policy

choices that we made that have led to this situation, which means we can make other policy choices. There are some things, if you think back in the 1970s with the oil crisis, oil embargo, and so forth, there was a situation where in the foreseeable period, we just didn't have oil. Now, it turns out we actually did have massive reserves of oil. It took technological innovation to access it. But at least in the short to medium term, you could say like, look, we just don't have the oil and our economy runs on oil. That's just a sort of geographic reality. The problems that we have created with trade are not about actual geography, right? It's not like, oh, shoot, we can't grow avocados. Where will we get the avocados from? The problems are

all a result of our country's decision that we didn't care what we made or whether we made anything at all. And other countries, China being obvious, but it's also Korea and Japan and Taiwan and Germany saying, no, it's actually really important to what we make. And so we are going to be the ones that invest in making it. And as a result, all of that investment, all of that technology went to those places. But if we make the other decision, if we say, no, actually, we care at least as much as those places, we are going to make things here too. We certainly, we have the natural resources, we have the innate skill in the workforce, we have the of two really good examples of this.

One is Reagan actually did this, right? People are like, oh, Ronald Reagan, free trader. Like, not true. The Libertarian Cato Institute, when Reagan left office, Cato called him the worst protectionist since Herbert Hoover. You know, especially vis-a-vis Japan, Reagan had no patience for the trading relationship as it was working. And under threat of tariffs, just as Trump is doing now, Reagan went to the Japanese and said, the way that you are cap how much we import into the United States, and we will instead send Honda and Toyota to go invest in the United States. And the entire American auto industry in the American South is a function of that, of Reagan saying, free trade does not work here, you need to come invest here. And lo and behold, American workers can build great cars, including Hondas and Toyotas.

Toyota actually has, the Toyota Camry has more American-made content in it than anything coming out of Detroit. And that was an extraordinary success. Really? Yes. Because it wasn't just, so the first thing that happens is the assembly plant comes over. Once this is a place where you're assembling, well, now it makes sense to move the supply chains over. Now it makes sense,

even now they have research and development facilities here. If this is how these countries got everything from us, they took the American manufacturers and said, come over here instead. And it all moved. In a case where we've actually said, no, you have to bring it here,

that works too. And the other great example we're seeing now is with semiconductors, right? We have what's called the CHIPS Act, where we basically said, wow, it's a huge mistake that America, inventor of the semiconductor, pioneer of pretty much everything CHIPS-related, we just said we didn't care. We let all go overseas, right? The reason Taiwan, it's not because Taiwan's beaches are made out of silicon. There's nothing special about Taiwan. The Taiwanese government said, we're going to lead in chips. And now that the US has said, no, we're going to lead in chips and Taiwan Semiconductor is making 60 billion, now another 100 billion of investment in Arizona,

their first plant is coming online. And they actually said the yield's coming out of it. So basically the quality of the chip manufacturing in Arizona is already better than in Taiwan. So we can do it, but it's a policy choice of whether we care and whether we're going to do it. So, you know, we can't make everything. What should we make? So if you were in charge of reshoring manufacturing to the United States, what would be the industries that would get priority? So I think there are a few that you really give priority to because they have some kind of unique strategic value, either for defense purposes or because of the way supply chains grow up around them. And so chips is a great example of this. Critical minerals, you mentioned the magnet, is a great example of this.

I think batteries, whether it's for electric vehicles, for electric grid generally, for all sorts of uses, is probably one of these things. And so there are a few particular things you want to identify and say, we have to have this. And that's where I would use what's called industrial policy, right? You just literally say, we've decided this industry is important and government, people call this picking winners and losers. It's not picking this company wins, this company loses, but it's picking, we actually have a point of view as a country that we want this thing. Beyond that, one of the things that's so great about tariffs, it's funny, I'm having a lot of fights about people with this right now, because in my view, tariffs are actually the free market

approach. A tariff, it can be a very broad-based policy. You're not picking a particular industry. You're just saying, look, we are going to give an advantage to things made domestically. So whichever things make, relatively speaking, the most sense to make domestically will come back. The things that, relatively speaking, make the least sense to make domestically will stay elsewhere. We don't have to tell people what to invest in. We can just tell people, all things equal, we're giving a 10% advantage to making things here. Now go. And I think that creates a much healthier economic system. It's much closer to Adam Smith's invisible hand and means we have to have less regulation, right? We don't have to go around figuring out,

oh, what's every other country doing? What do we have to correct this way or that way? We don't then have to say, oh, and let's not forget all the losers. We have to now have a whole other set of programs to help everybody who isn't succeeding because we don't have this stuff. We just say, we actually want to have a free market in the United States, but it has to be one that makes things. And so we hereby give an advantage to whoever wants to make something here. And then as the Chinese would say, let the flowers bloom. Why is that so hard to do? That seems pretty straightforward.

I would imagine it would have overwhelming popular support. What's the process by which that gets done and why hasn't it been? Well, the reason it hasn't been is because our point of view was that nothing that I just said was true. Right? Our point of view, in terms of the underlying assumptions, our point of view is that making things doesn't matter. There's a very famous quote attributed to Michael Boskin, who was George H. W. Bush's chief economic advisor. He literally said, potato chips, computer chips, what's the difference? If that is your economic theory, then yeah, who cares? If the idea is, well, anything that China can make more cheaply, we want China to make it, then why on earth would you put a thumb on the scale to make something here? And so that model persisted for a very long time, and it persisted partly on the very foolish assumption that we just don't care if we can make anything.

It also persisted on the foolish assumption that, don't worry, these things will sort of self-correct and work themselves out. So the best way I think to see how badly things have gone is our trade imbalance, right? We bring in more than a trillion dollars more stuff from overseas every year than we sell to the rest of the world. That suggests that trade isn't working very well. Paul Krugman famously said, trade deficits are self-correcting. There was an economic theory that said such imbalances won't persist. They will take care of themselves. You know, Krugman, I was actually, this was a discussion I was part of with him. And I said, like, why do you say that? And he said, like, yeah, that was naive. Like, just, sorry, we built an awful lot on that idea, and that was just wrong. You see the same thing, you know, Janet Yellen, who was Biden's Treasury Secretary, has recently said, look, the standard economic model was if someone will send you something for cheaper, you just send a thank you note. And she said, I would never say that again.

That just wasn't true. And so, one reason we have not done it is because we actively believe things that were wrong, and we are fortunately now starting to realize that and try to fix it. I would argue that's all clearly true. Slightly more complicated, though, because it wasn't just that people believed something that was wrong, demonstrably it was that the people who argued it was wrong weren't just like debated in good faith they were destroyed as people so the two biggest advocates of the position you're describing now were ross pro and pat buchanan and both of them were kind of driven from public life on the basis of claims that they were like not just just wrong on economics, but like dangerous bad people.

What was that? It's a great point. And I'm using Krugman again as an example. He actually has a fascinating essay where he says, look, some people won't understand this stuff that we now know is not true. And you're not going to convince them. So the best tool you have is ridicule. That if you wrote that? Yeah, yeah.

That's right. Right. Still up there on the web. That it's not going to work to persuade them. But with sufficient ridicule, you can either essentially force them to stop saying it or make sure that nobody else listens to them. And it worked in both cases. There's another, I guess this is Krugman.

This is the Krugman segment of the show. There's a very famous anecdote. Danny Roderick, who's an economist at Harvard and one of the very few people who has always been skeptical of globalization, tells the story of sending out his manuscript for a book about this to Krugman to ask his feedback. And Krugman writes back, you know, the substance of this is all fine, but you shouldn't do it. You will give ammunition to the barbarians. Hey, it's Tucker Carlson. You may have noticed that the companies whose products you buy tend to kind of hate you. They're controlled by massive multinational corporations, and they have all kinds of weird agendas that you're supporting when you buy their products.

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Terms and conditions apply. Visit bmo.com slash VI Porter to learn more. So that's what I don't understand. So why, I mean, typically even was a debate between you know the Keynesians and the Milton Friedman people it didn't get to that level of like let's just wreck the person

let's make you know let's make his wife divorce him but it did no but it did on you know I mean it it kind of wrecked Ross Perot's life wrecked Pappy Cannon's life like whyed Pat Buchanan's life. Like, why were the stakes so high on this one question? Yeah, well, I'll give you my theory for it, because I've tried to go back and was in this era where people kind of were rightfully saying, you know, never again.

Obviously, about the Holocaust, more broadly about World War II, we can never go back to that kind of conflict. You have the United Nations, you have all of these sorts of, right, like that is everybody's focus. And that is when the arguments about free trade actually start to emerge. And they emerge not actually primarily as economic arguments. They emerge as a sort of new model of a global world order. And, you know, one thing people looked at— Now you're getting to the heart of it. Well, you know, one thing people look at, you know, what happened after World War I, the way Germany had been treated, the idea that, you know, sort of holding them down rather than supporting them helps lead to World War II. So how are we going to rebuild the world after World War II? How are we going to build a sort of inclusive market that builds these companies up? How are we going to rebuild Japan as a democracy? How are we going to rebuild Germany as a democracy? How are we going to rebuild Germany as a democracy? How are we going to combat the Soviet Union, which, remember, is out there now putting out this ideology that says

markets just can't work at all? We are going to put forward this vision. And the best illustration of this is guy Paul Samuelson, Nobel Prize winner, sort of writes the The Standard Economics textbook that comes out in 1948, right after World War II. Remember I mentioned The Invisible Hand Gets Ellipsed. That's in this textbook. Which was the textbook for generations. It was the textbook, exactly. And

you know, I have a copy now. I went and got like, you go through it and you say, okay, well, how does he make the argument about free trade? And what you find is that he really doesn't. He actually acknowledges all the ways that free trade might not work, that it might be bad for the United

States, especially if other countries behave a certain way. And he says, quite bluntly, basically, so what? That if we actually want to build this kind of global economy that we all agree we need, the United States basically just needs to take the lead and push this forward.

Wow. And look, again, and maybe I'm being too charitable again, but like, I can see why someone would say that in 1940. I totally agree. And I got to college 40 years after that book was written, and it was assigned – it was the first book you read in economics class. Yeah. And by the way, you could even say it was right in 1948. And this goes to the point about the boomers, that the policy as we pursued it into the 50s and 60s did accomplish a lot of what we wanted it to. There's a very famous article in Foreign Affairs in 1971, where one of the kind of leaders of international economic thinking

says quite explicitly, he says, you know, the case for free trade has always been primarily a foreign policy case, not an economic policy case. And then, of course, you get to that when we get to China, right? The entire argument for welcoming China into the WTO, I mean, economists said like, oh, this will create good jobs for Americans and whatever. But the actual argument was, this is going to fix China. This is the way we democratize China, we liberalize China. And if that happens, if China does become a liberal democracy, and we do bring them forward

in this way, then won't it be wonderful that we have trade with them? And won't it be great that everybody prospers? And again, that wasn't like, if that had happened, that might have been a good idea too. The problem is that in the post-Cold War era, this model fell apart very quickly. Can I say, why have I never heard this before? I mean, it's like the most interesting thing I've heard in a long time. So you're saying that our economic model was not primarily an economic model, it was an instrument of foreign policy. It was part, it was like the centerpiece of the global order, post-war global order.

And it wasn't like designed, really, to help the United States as much as it was to preserve stability around the world. Is that what you're saying? I don't,

there are other people who say that. I've written an essay about it. It's called The Free Trade Origin Myth that kind of goes through the chapter and verse on all these various things.

The way it was presented to me as someone who was always conservative and for markets and repeated all the slogans and all that and was living in the world where, like, I didn't know a single person who disagreed, talk about a bubble, was that free market economics in the way that the United States was doing it was not really an instrument, wasn't even a theory it was like a physics principle right it's just it's just true okay so and to the extent that you deviate from it you get punished to the extent that you hew to it you're rewarded because like gravity it's just real right and this is this is the fundamentalism but I just I I had no idea that this was like

like the UN something that people who are understandably like horrified by what they've just gone through, the world war. Yeah. It was part of their reaction to that. And they're like, this will prevent that from happening again. Yeah. And another good example is, so if you go back, so Samuelson is the key post-World War textbook. There's a prior textbook by a guy named Alfred Marshall, who's kind of seen as the father of like modern economics, right? Like Adam Smith is like the original guy.

Alfred Marshall is a British economist, probably the first one to actually be called an economist. No one would have called Adam Smith an economist back in the day. So Marshall writes probably the first economics textbook, comes out in like 1890. And he says essentially nothing positive about free trade. He actually has a whole section. The comparative advantage is this idea that, oh, free trade works out great for both sides. And it's attributed to a guy named David Ricardo, who was a great early 1800s economist. Marshall has a whole section called The Narrowness of the Ricardians, where he specifically says, look, like, Ricardo has this nice theory, has some good math associated with it, but it only works in very limited circumstances.

It makes a lot of sense that Britain as a global empire is promoting it, but there are lots of people it doesn't work for. The Americans don't believe it. The Germans don't believe it. And he even has this hilarious footnote where he says a lot of these ideas basically seem to be used as a way for, like, people to put one over on the working class. And so, like, again, all of this. And then if you even go back to Ricardo, like, and Adam Smith, these guys, as I was saying, Adam Smith knew the invisible hand didn't work automatically. Ricardo, when he's talking about free trade, he gives the example of how it could work. The famous example is England specializes in cloth, Portugal specializes in wine, and here's all the great ways it works them to trade. Right there on the same page, he says, by the way, this only works if capital is immobile.

Meaning if the British cloth makers can't pick up and go make the cloth in Portugal. It's right there. And then even more, he notes, and he hopes that never changes. That the idea that basically people were going to be stuck investing and doing business in their own countries was one of the core premises of any of this working. So it's all there and it's only post-World War II that you get partly for the foreign policy reason and then building on that people looking around like Milton Friedman and like Friedrich Hayek and just saying like, wow, like this is all just working, right? Friedrich Hayek used this term, the self-regulating market. And he actually, it's funny that Hayek is one of these libertarians who I Am Not a Conservative, in which he specifically mocks conservatives for not being comfortable enough with the idea that markets are just self-regulating and will automatically deliver good answers. Well, it must work automatically all the way to this fundamentalism where, like you said, it's just like a law of physics. And if you don't understand that, you must be an idiot. And more importantly, you must be a heretic. And heretics are the one thing we cannot have. Boy, I mean, well, that's just we watch that happen.

We watch that happen. And I participated in the slander, by the way. I did. I have my, you know, my original college economics paper. I've got like, here's my two pages on why free trade is good. And I have this great sentence that's like, while some workers will lose their jobs, they will find better ones. Like, A, correct answer. That's what you were supposed to say. So what's the reaction to the administration's tariffs in Washington? My sense is not positive, but you're closer to this. Well, it's interesting. Washington is changing.

I mean, you about the second Trump administration compared to the first one is that there is now an entire team of people who understand this stuff, are aligned on it, are carrying it out, right? In Trump's first term, Bob Lighthizer, who was, I think you had him on recently. Oh, yeah. He was a wonderful guy. He's been an incredible mentor to me. He wrote a wonderful book called No Trade is Free that talks about his whole history working on this, but especially then in the Trump administration, how even just within the senior Trump team, these ideas that we're talking about were incredibly controversial. There were a lot of people who were still like, nope, free trade. Let's just make sure Trump doesn't disrupt things too much. And now you have a team from Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, Stephen Mirren, the head of the Council of Economic Advisors, Jameson Greer, the U.S. trade representative, page, that this needs to change and they're going to push forward this new approach. And so, you know, and they have teams that understand that and are working on that. And so, you actually have a whole administration and then an ecosystem of

organizations around them working on this stuff that are're supportive in Congress. Now, you know, they've been trying to bring these resolutions of disapproval and Democrats vote to disapprove just because they disapprove of Trump, even though, like, isn't that funny that all of a sudden Democrats are now the, you know, free traders, like literally Democrats are now fighting with labor unions over this because the labor unions to appear like, oh, yeah, like, hey, this is actually the kind of stuff that we wanted, that we were talking about back in the 90s when we were shamed for it. And now the Democrats are shaming them for it. But the Republican Party, generally speaking, is quite supportive of it. Some are mostly supportive because it's the party line, but you have a really great set of, especially younger Republican leaders, folks like Josh Hawley, like Bernie Moreno, like Jim Banks, who are being very outspoken and effective advocates for it. And so, unlike in the past, there is a Washington that is actually supportive of it. And then there's what you would call the blob. Yes.

Right? And the blob obviously hates all of it. Is the blob, is it your sense, is the blob getting less powerful or more effective and organized? Oh, I think the blob is getting much less powerful. Good. That's my sense too. Yeah, I think it's partly there is more division within it. I was describing some of the things that someone like a Janet Yellen or a Paul Krugman has said recently. It is starting to

dawn on folks that the status quo just is not defensible. And it's funny to see the kind of ridicule argument flipped the other way. At some point, standing up and just being like, free trade with China is great, is now the position that's subject to ridicule. And if there's anyone who cares about ridicule, it's the blob. It's the blob. And so that's actually very powerful. And then I also think there's just a way in which, you know, one thing that Trump is demonstrating, that folks like Vance and Rubio have demonstrated, is that the blob just to apply its ridicule to a JD Vance, right? Forget about them talking to each other to the extent that it's just performative for the rest of America. America's not going like, oh, well, this former State Department official says JD Vance is wrong. I guess JD Vance is wrong. They're going like, is this the former State Department official who got

us into Iraq? Yeah, why are you in jail? The one who screwed up the Afghanistan withdrawal or the one that embraced China, right? And so, look, there are some ways in which it's a huge problem for the country that our experts have been so discredited. It would be nice to have credible experts. But to the extent that it's happened, I think it just does not have the same political power that it used to. So, just to go back to your amazing point. Sorry, you've got a dog there. Oh, welcome. Hey, Al. A tariff supporter, I think. A tariff supporter. Sorry, you were nice to the dog on the way in and you're marked for life. Your amazing point that these were post-war institutions

self-consciously designed to keep order, how has that worked? Like leaving us, and there's really no debate in this room anyway about the effects on the United States. Look at it. It didn't work for us. Did it work for the world?

And do we risk conflict by abandoning it? It's a really good question. I mean, there's one way, so one way in which it obviously did work for the world is that it obviously worked for hundreds of millions of Chinese subsistence farmers who have now benefited from China's growth. And China is the top example, but Yes. from getting to consume a lot of stuff too. So I think it's important certainly to acknowledge that. And I think it's even important to say, you know, good US policy, right? America first policy isn't America only policy.

I think we should want a policy that lifts other people up when we can. But I think it's important to be honest about the trade-offs and say, you know, look, if we do X, this could have this great effect. It's also going to have this cost and who's bearing the cost. So there have been those benefits. I think during the Cold War era, there was obviously enormous benefit in defeating the Soviet Union. I mean, in that sort of an existential conflict, holding together the American alliance, making sure that it was seeing broadly shared prosperity within it, proving that markets could work better than communism, those were all extremely important

things. And by the way, it did work. We did win the Cold War. I mean, that's always the one piece of, you know, free market economic thinking, even as he himself was not a fundamentalist on it, the more traditional social conservatism and the Cold War hawks. And what actually did all those folks have in common? They hated communism. And gosh darn it, they succeeded. And so, like, it's very important to give that its due. I think where things go off the rails is once you don't have that existential threat anymore. And you see it in the foreign policy context too, right? Where all those hawks are now like, well, let's go find other wars to start in ways that are neither conservative nor good for the nation. No. And the economic folks say like, well, like, great. How can we like continue

to carry this further? Well, like now we need the WTO. Now we need free trade with China and on and on. And so I think it's sort of, it's the classic pendulum swing from something that, you know, a world of no trade

isn't a good world either. Some good ideas were introduced. They did accomplish some things, and then it just sort of kept on swinging all the way to the other side. And, you know, that's where I think we got stuck and where it's now very helpful to see we've kind of dislodged it and we're swinging it back. Specifically on China, and they were open about it in the early 70s when Nixon famously went to China, that this will be good for the world because it will de-radicalize China, which is the height of the Cultural Revolution when he said that. So pulling back from that and starting a trade war with China, does that increase the chances of a conflict, a military conflict with China? I don't think so.

I think other things have increased the chances of conflict, right? The fact that since the year 2000, China, rather than liberalizing, has become more authoritarian with more expansionist, with a massive military buildup, that makes it more likely that we're going to have a conflict. But I think one of the key failures of the blob is that it always tends to live in the world as they wish it were, rather than the world as it is. Like, I wish we were in a world where China had liberalized. That sounds great. But we don't. I wish we lived in a world where, you know, the U.S. was still the superpower that could essentially dictate terms.

I mean, when we did a bad job, that was bad. But all things considered, it would be great for the United States to be— You want your country to be on top, sure. Absolutely. But that's just not the world anymore. It's not a question of should. It's a question of is. And so in the world

that we have, the idea that like, well, higher levels of trade with China is what's going to diffuse conflict, that's just like a cliche that people say. Like, you know who had like really close relationships in trade? France and Germany and the UK before World War I and World War II.

Like, this idea that countries that trade don't go to war with each other isn't actually a thing. And so, you know, conversely, when we entirely decoupled from the Soviet Union, we had a war that stayed cold. And so, you know, I think the United States needs to make its decisions about the economic relationship with China pretty much independently, not believe that one choice versus the other is the way that we're going to manage the foreign relations. All things considered, I think our best chance of maintaining stable, peaceful foreign relations is to make clear that we are, first of all, is to re-industrialize and make sure that we are capable of deterring China. But then also to make very clear that we are not going to buy into this gobbledygook,

that we are going to be realists and we are going to look at the world as it is. And one element of that is not to pretend that you can have free trade with an authoritarian communist regime. So how does the tariff story end? Or I don't know, end, but like in the next five years, we're clearly going to have some kind of economic reset. People will get poorer. That's kind of guaranteed, I think. I expect it anyway. Do then we evolve past that and become more prosperous and more cohesive?

Like, how does the story end? I think we do. I think the best way to understand what's going on is to think about this kind of world order that we've been talking about a bunch and recognize that what we are going through is a transition out of U.S. as sole superpower to, I guess you would call it a multipolar world where China is a kind of peer competitor and adversary. Secretary of State Rubio has actually been talking about this a lot. And all of the assumptions we made, we've been talking about the foreign policy case for free trade. In a world where the U.S. was the power, you could make a case that it was worth accepting these various costs for

sort of maintaining that status. In the world where it is no longer, we're seeing in real time how it breaks down, how you can't just be the benevolent open market when China is now bigger than you and more technologically advanced in some ways, and it can't go on that way. And so, you know, I think the tariffs are the sort of tip of the spear of saying that system is over, what do we want to have replace it? And I think what the United States should want, and what I see the administration pointing toward and pushing toward, is basically, look, we still want to have strong allies. We still want to have free trade among our allies, right? When I was talking about that idea, if you have a tariff on the outside, you can have a freer market on the inside. Ideally, that's not just the U.S. alone.

Ideally, that goes for a set of countries that actually are market democracies and do want to play by the rules. And so what the U.S. is doing with the tariffs is saying, look, the open season, everyone does whatever they want and unconditionally gets benefits of American defense, American market, that's over. New system, we would like to have strong alliances and relationships and low tariffs, but there are now conditions. Condition one is balanced trade. And again, that's this idea that free trade is great if you're actually trading stuff for stuff and you're doing it in a way that fits with the economic model where it's supposed to work. And so, you know, countries that have been basically taking the most valuable industries for themselves and just selling to us, that's over. Piece number two, on the defense side, everybody needs to pull their own weight and actually lead in their own areas. You want to deter Russia, Germany, go figure out what you need to do to deter Russia.

You want to deter China, Japan, go figure out what you need to do. Don't be looking over your shoulder, sort of, have I done enough homework to go outside and play? Like, actually get it done. And it's actually interesting, you see the Trump administration, Stephen Mirren, who's the chair of the Council on Economic Advisors, gave a very good speech talking about what are we actually looking for in these negotiations. And he said, this is economic and security. These are not separate conversations. This is a question of whether you are in for both. And by the way, system, you can't have these sort of entangled

systems where, okay, the US doesn't want Chinese supply chains, so they just go set up in Mexico and it comes in through Mexico. Exactly. Mexico, and this is actually, I think, why Trump started the way he did with Mexico and Canada. Mexico and Canada with the US, you should be the core of this alliance we're talking about, but you need to understand that it can't work the way it's been working. It's going to have to work on these terms. And so you see someone like Treasury Secretary Scott Besset specifically saying, Mexico, we need to see the same tariffs toward China that we're putting toward China. Canada, we need to see that same policy because it can't be a sort of screen door. I mean, I think it's dawning on a lot of people

that China has enormous influence over the political structures of Canada and China, particularly Canada, in some real way kind of controls Canada. So is it too late to bring those two countries into? I don't think it's too late. And, you know, the funny thing about this sort of set of demands, right, is that like the blob gets very uncomfortable with this.

Like, oh, like you can't, you know, you'll drive these people into China's arms. And you actually step back and you look at it objectively and you say, this isn't some exploitative client tribute regime. This is a set of demands, which by the way, we hold ourselves to. We are not asking them to switch to a trade relationship where we get all the advantages. We're just asking for a balanced one. We're not asking them to pay for our defense. We're just asking them to do their fair share. We're not asking them to keep China out so we get all the fun with China. We're saying we all need to keep China out. And while there are obviously a lot of people who are very sore at the moment with how they're being treated by the Trump administration, anybody who actually steps back and looks at this, if you are a market democracy

that wants to remain a market democracy, this is your chance, right? By the way, not only are these not unreasonable demands, these things are good for you. You should want to be moving to balanced trade. You should want to have the will to get China out. And the U.S. is, frankly, helping you by giving you a way to go in your own domestic politics to say, look, we can't keep pursuing this compromised relationship, partly with China. If we don't get real about this, we are going to end up outside of the U.S. perimeter and then stuck with China. And I think whether it's Canada and Mexico, you know, Japan, India, Australia, Korea, we've already seen with the U.K. now the start of a

deal. I think that's sort of a no-brainer. I think the one where it's hard is Europe. I think Europe is probably more compromised. They've shown more willingness already to just take the short-term gain. You see, the crazy thing is the group most opposed to keeping cheap Chinese cars out is the German automakers. Oh, I know. Because they want to make five more years of money in China before they get thrown out of there. And so I don't know if Europe has the civilizational will. I don't know if they have the understanding of their interests. And because of the way the EU is structured, I don't even know if they have the, you know, this is something that could also pretty much

break apart the EU. You could have some countries that say, well, wait a minute, we do want that deal with the US. And if we can't get that through the EU, then the EU doesn't work anymore. That's where I think you're going to see the most tension. And then you'll see countries that are going to be in China's sphere, right? Pakistan. I think a country like Vietnam is a very interesting question, which direction they might go. At the end of the day, the idea isn't that we sort of are going to be able to get the whole world to gang up on and oppress China. The idea is that we're going to be in a world with two powers that have two very different economic and political systems and different spheres of influence. Boy, that is best case if we wind up there.

And that goes back to the question about like, well, but isn't this going to start a war or whatever? It's like, no, this is the best case. This is the formula for actually having, I think, a much more sustainable equilibrium. Yeah, like a peaceful multipolar world. Yes. Which, by the way, we've had for all of history, you know, up until it ended in 1991.

Well, and that's such an important point that people keep raising this as like, what is this strange, unprecedented thing that the crazy Donald Trump is doing? It's like, no, no, no. First of all, this literally was U.S. policy for the Cold War, right? And not to mention,

this was the way foreign affairs always worked for however many hundred years before the Cold War. It is only people who think the world started in 1991 that don't understand what is happening. The problem, though, is like a deeper problem, and I hope it's resolved, and I pray it's resolvable, but it's like, how do you pull back from hegemony? How do you scale back an empire without becoming Great Britain?

Yes. Well, and that goes to your question about sort of the costs, because there obviously are costs here. You know, some of them are the sort of direct just consumer costs. If you were relying on cheap stuff from China, you don't want to do that anymore. At least in the short run, there is going to be higher cost. I think in the medium, not even just like the wealth someday, but within the five to 10 ten year window, you actually see the benefits overwhelm that. You see that if you actually return to an economic model that does encourage domestic investment, that does focus on, you know, prosperity in places that aren't just a few big cities, that is oriented toward creating good jobs for everybody, you actually get more growth that way. I mean, the dirty secret of this post-Cold War period is we're supposed to do globalization

and efficiency and growth. Growth just keeps getting slower. No, I know. Investment keeps going down. In manufacturing, productivity has actually turned negative, which should not be possible in a capitalist economy. We are literally getting worse at making things. You need more labor in an American factory today

than a decade ago for the same amount of output. And so this just isn't working. And going back to the kind of economic model that did drive our prosperity for so long, I think will be much better. The point about what happens after empire, that's bigger than the economic question. If this were just about the numbers and the production, I think you can see a very clear way out. it returned to the idea of a republic as, in fact, far superior to and more desirable than an empire. On paper, that sounds great. It shouldn't be a problem at all. In practice, for anyone who studied history knows, no one has ever really stuck that landing.

And that is the challenge we have. Why do you think? I think probably for a lot of the reasons we're seeing now in our politics, Why do you think? toward sort of globalism is a better end state if you are the emperor, right? If you are that set of people. And, you know, for me, ultimately, this is kind of the best way of understanding populism because I think everyone agrees something like populism is happening, right? And it is used often in a very sort of derogatory way. Like, oh, populism means, you know, just telling where the elected representatives and the other elites, people with power in the society, rule not just in their own interest, but in the interest of the entire nation. And when they lose sight of that, when they think, well, now that we have attained these positions, it is for us to do what is best for us, the response to that is a populism that's entirely healthy. It's to say, well, if the people who are in charge are not going to act on behalf of everybody, we are no longer interested in having those people in charge. And frankly, we will take anybody at all if they at least will start with that commitment that we are here to act on behalf of the broader interest. And so I think what's so encouraging about the U.S. situation-

That is the, what you just said is like, that's the heart of it right there. I think it is. And it really dawned on me speaking to the faculty of a university recently who were like extremely, like they don't understand what's going on at all. And not talking about elective,

just talking about the university as a university saying, look, like you guys are a sort of quasi-public institution. You sort of havepublic institution. You operate in the public trust. And at some point in the last 20 years, you just decided you don't actually have to run this place in the interest of the nation anymore. You're going to run it in the interest of yourself and your friends. And your policies are going to be the ones that you like best, not the ones that are best for everybody. And so, like, yeah, like, either you self-correct somehow, and I don't see that happening, or this gets done to you. And that is a natural and necessary step. And if there's a reason to be optimistic for the U.S., I think it's to contrast what is going on in the U.S. with what is going new leaders with different ideas.

And it has been painful and messy, but the ship is in fact turning. You contrast that to what's going on in Europe, where you have, frankly, among the population, a very similar set of frustrations and desires. And you have that political class at the top banning political parties. And this is why I think J.D. Vance's speech at the Munich Security Conference was so important and gets exactly to the heart of what is going on, of what the Trump administration represents in this respect, where he was saying, look, the biggest problem that we all have here isn't some external adversary. It is our own capacity to actually navigate these challenges.

And probably better than any country in history, for reasons that is driving the blob, the elite, absolutely nuts, the U.S. is actually showing some ability to respond. And if we can pull that off, that would be pretty exciting. It would be amazing. And I agree with every word you've said and said so well.

My last question refers back to what you first said, which is about the point of the system, which is to encourage and support and sustain healthy families and bright-eyed, impressive children who continue on the civilization. I don't think any person could disagree with that, and thank you for reminding us of it. What are specific policy changes in the next five years that could help that? It's a great question, and I think it's important to think about it expansively, because it's great that we now have a, quote, family policy discussion in the U.S., but a lot of the times it is basically a, well, how big should the child tax credit be discussion. And to be clear, that is an important piece of it. And this goes back to the boomer

discussion as well. We have a system of taxation and distribution in this country that overwhelmingly brings resources to retired people. I've noticed. And I don't think we should stop giving resources to retired people. I think the fact that we have Medicare, that we have Social Security are great things. But if there's any group to whom we should be focusing resources on, it is families raising kids who are the ones who have been, I think, most squeezed by these economic changes. And I don't think we should believe, you know, oh, well, if we manage to get them more resources through some sort of child benefit or child tax credit, like, that's going to, like to make people have more kids in the short run, right? I don't think that works very well.

I don't think we want to be in the business of saying, well, if we pay you a little more, will you have another kid? But what it will do is make the experience of being a family raising kids better. And in the culture, it will begin to shift what it feels like to be doing that and what people see about people who are doing that, not this constant struggle and getting squeezed, but a little more something that is actually viable and desirable and that we all have committed to supporting. And so both for the sake of the families and for the sake of the culture, I think that does make a big difference.

I also think it's important to note that we will have to pay for that. And the people who will pay for it are the people who are earning a lot of money and don't have kids, which is the direction of distribution we should be leaning toward. More broadly, I think then, and this is great that we're sort of landing back here i love that you said that out loud what well i mean the people who will pay for that are the people who are earning a lot and don't have kids but they're the ones who are constantly saying well i i don't have kids so like why should i have to pay for other people's kids. Right. To which you'd say what? Because that is your obligation as a citizen of the nation. And it is all our obligation to raise the next generation of kids. And whether someone is not called to do that, whether someone is not able to do that, not

everybody is going to be doing that. But the idea that you can disavow it and say, not my problem, is just not true. I mean, there are very specific like math and demographic related reasons it is your problem, but- But you're making a moral case. You're making a case about the obligations of citizenship. Yes. And I would say, you know, it's very interesting whenever you talk about an obligation, the question is like, well, where does that come from? Like, well, just because like somebody said it. And so I do think you have to attach it to something. And I think it attaches to two things.

One is this obligation of citizenship and the idea that if, you know, insofar as you think you are better off living in America than like having been dropped naked in a jungle somewhere, like you didn't, you know, you didn't cause America to come into being yourself. You are part of this larger system that if you want to benefit from, you probably need to contribute to. people actually chose to take the time and dedicate their life to having and raising you. And so, you know, either you could say like, well, I'm just going to like stick that in my pocket and go on vacation to Greece, or you can't pay it back. You can never repay your parents for what they gave you. The only thing you can do is pay it forward and do the same thing for the next generation. Whether they're yours or not. Whether they're yours, that's absolutely right. And if they can be yours, ideally they will be. And if everybody says, well, I'll just support somebody else's, obviously it doesn't work. But I think that's the sort of dual individual and communal commitment that supports all of this. And so that just, you know, we talked about the kind of narrow family policy of tax policy. I can see why you're successful because you say these radically countercultural things with a kind of like, of course, you know,

just putting ideas out there for whoever wants to pick them up. So when you go back to Harvard and you say stuff like that, how do people respond? It's an interesting question. I actually just did a talk at Yale Law School about this. And one of the really things

that's interesting that's going on with younger conservatives is that they are very attuned to this. Yes, that is true. There's an extraordinary divide, sort of, really, once you're under 40, certainly once you're under 30, you've just grown up in such a different context that the Cold War Reagan-style conservatism makes no sense. And the things we've been talking about here are just much more responsive to the

problems you see out in the world. The funny flip side of it, then, is that you always get the few progressives who want to sort of come show up. And to your point about, like, well, like, nobody could disagree with this, in fact, you will have the few progressives

who either somehow, like, think this must be a conversation about gay marriage somehow even if like they can't they're not sure how but they would like they would like it to be um or they will just more broadly sort of try to in interpret to interpret the principles as by implication oppressing some out group. Which is right. I mean, look, that's sort of the core

of progressivism. But there's only one template. I mean, there's other things going on that don't affect the trans community. Come on, stop. Well, even just, you know, this goes to the question

of rights and privileges versus duties and obligations. Like part of the reason progressives get very uncomfortable with that side of the discussion is because, well, like, wait a minute, that you just, there's a lot of sensitivity to like, well, who are you infringer on all liberty to the extent that it is being claimed to the exclusion of all of these other things that matter too if we are going to have a society and a civilization at all. And that is, in my mind, what conservatism meant for most of modern Western history. And it's very exciting that a lot of people are now focused on it again. I can't improve on that.

Oren Kass, thank you. This was so much fun. Amazing. It's great to see you. We want to thank you for watching us on Spotify, a company that we use every day. We know the people who run it, good people. While you're here, do us a favor.

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