Voices of Freedom - Interview with Dominic Pino

Episode Date: July 27, 2023

The latest tool to turn the tide against corporations that are active in the culture wars is the power of consumers who are willing to vote with their pocketbooks. Acting on their frustration with companies that “go woke” by boycotting their products, they are damaging some of America’s most iconic brands. While the pushback has caused some executives to think twice about adopting marketing campaigns that reflect the priorities of progressive identity politics, others continue to forge ahead. National Review writer Dominic Pino is our guest on this episode of Voices of Freedom. As a frequent contributor to NR’s Capital Matters, Dominic has his finger on the pulse of current economic issues and the state of free enterprise, including corporate boycotts, ESG, and labor unions.  Topics discussed on this episode include: How to improve reporting on economic matters Why industrial policy has become attractive among the younger generation How to advance the case for economic freedom The fight against Big Labor – how it has evolved and where it stands today Corporate boycotts and the pushback against ESG Rediscovering Edmund Burke as a guiding figure for conservatives Pino is the Thomas L. Rhodes Journalism Fellow at National Review Institute. Previously, he was the William F. Buckley, Jr. Fellow in Political Journalism at National Review. He recently co-authored Edmund Burke and the Perennial Battle, 1789-1797, a compilation of Burke’s best, most accessible writings from 1789 until his death.  

Hello and welcome to Voices of Freedom, a Bradley Foundation podcast. I'm Rick Graber, President and CEO of the Bradley Foundation. On the podcast, we'll explore issues that affect our freedoms with a focus on free enterprise, free speech, and educational freedom. So let's get started. Our guest today is Dominic Pino. Dominic is the Thomas L. Rhodes Journalism Fellow at the National Review Institute. The fellowship is awarded to a recent college graduate who has demonstrated excellence in writing on current affairs with a particular focus on fiscal policy, economics, free enterprise. And I should note that there's a Bradley Foundation connection to this. Thomas L. Rhodes, better known as Dusty Rhodes, served as both president of National Review and also as a member of the Bradley Foundation Board of Directors and for a time was chairman of our Bradley Board. Dominic, in his role as a fellow, has quickly lived up to expectations through his

analysis, through his commentary. Dominic, thanks so much for joining Voices of Freedom. Were you aware of the Bradley connection? Yes, yes. Very grateful to the legacy of Dusty Rhodes. Dominic, let's just jump right in a very obvious first question you received your bachelor's and master's degrees in economics from george mason but then you end up in journalism how on earth did that happen we thought you'd be an economist yeah the uh you know the education i received at mason was was terrific on economics and I don't think there's hardly a better place in the world to study economics than at George Mason. But while I was there, I also was the opinion editor for our student newspaper. And so it was there that I kind of developed the desire to work more in opinion journalism and had always been reading National Review since high

school. And so, you know, applied for their internship there three different years. On the third year, I finally got in and was able to. Is that right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I was able to stick around there and I've been there since graduating. You're doing a great job. I mean, Dominic, there seems to be a real lack in journalism these days in terms of solid reporting on economics. The general public is just not hearing about the merits of free enterprise or tax policy or budgets or debt to deficits. There just isn't much there. You're trying and you're making some wonderful contributions there, but there's a knowledge gap, it seems to me. And what do you think we can do about that? How do we plug that

gap beyond just you? National Review, we take it seriously. Our Capital Matters section, which is run by Andrew Stutterford here, and he's the editor of that, and so he provides a lot of different commentary as well, especially on issues relating to finance and regulation and those kind of things. And so we've made a big issue out of electric vehicles, for example, which has been a really a major effort on the part of a lot of progressives to kind of centrally plan their way to a future where we have where everyone drives electric vehicles and the technology is not quite there yet. And, you know, it's running into a lot of the same problems that we see in central planning from any number of different examples historically. And so we've been trying to draw the parallels between that, try to illustrate that to people. But yeah, I definitely think you're right that there's been a problem of understanding about how markets work and why they work and why they're much more successful at providing a good standard of living, at providing the choice and the quality of different goods and services that people want in a modern society.

And so I think we have we've always had an uphill battle, though, in terms of explaining this, because, you know, as Hayek said, it's it's about systems that human beings did not design. And so since human beings did not design them, it's more difficult for humans to understand them. And so we always have a sort of uphill battle, but it's it's always worth, you know, when you see the actual outcomes that markets produce, it's always worth going out there and defending them. Let's stay on that theme for a minute. We just had our Bradley Prizes program in Washington, D.C., and one of our winners was John Cochran from the Hoover Institution. Wonderful man, wonderful economist. And he did say that, in his view, there's been a failure of free market advocates to really make the case for economic freedom and markets. Are we just not pulling our weight on the free market side?

And maybe you were touching on it. It's hard, but that can't be an excuse, can it? No, I don't think it can. One of the problems that market defenders do have that's just kind of built in and it's a disadvantage is that a lot of times we're arguing for things that are not immediately apparent, right? So if you have an example of, say, you know, a government creating industrial policy and the government says we're going to spend a bunch of money, spend a bunch of taxpayer money to support a factory to make a specific good that we have decided is important. Everyone can see if that works or not. Right. Like we can all kind of look at that and we can say, oh, they wrote a check for this amount of money. The money went here.

There's a building there that wasn't there before. Look, they created something. But what that misses is, of course, the opportunity cost of that money, which is that all that taxpayer money could have been used for any number of existing obligations that the federal government already has, which it's already overburdened with those. But then also any number of other alternative uses that could have been out there for that if the government didn't take that money in the first place. Because all the money that government takes from taxation, it's taking away from people

and from businesses that would have used it productively on their own. So a lot of times we're arguing for things that are unseen. And, you know, this is something that Frederick Baustiat talked about with the difference between the seen and the unseen. And it takes, you know, it takes training in economics to understand how that works and then to try to explain it in a way that will make sense to people who don't have that training. So that's always an uphill climb. But that being said, I do think it's right that free market defenders can sometimes get stuck in certain arguments that aren't always very useful. One of the ones that I've been thinking about more recently is the focus that a lot of market defenders have on the tech industry. Now, I'm not against the tech industry. These are our largest corporations by market cap. They are world-leading

companies, and they're all in the United States of America, right? None of our competitive peer countries are producing these kind of giant innovative tech companies. That's a wonderful story for the free market. It totally is. But I think there's been maybe too much focus on that and not enough focus on other parts of the economy, which also are doing well. And I think we have, by focusing too much on one sector like tech, we create this impression among a lot of people listening that maybe aren't as well informed that, you know, oh, we made this trade off and we said, well, instead of having, you know, a bunch of factory jobs, we now have big tech companies. And that's not true. We have lots of manufacturing in the United States still.

It's extremely productive. Our manufacturing productivity leads the world. And we also have somewhere around, I think, 800,000 to a million vacant manufacturing jobs right now. These companies can't find people to work for them. And so the idea that we've gotten rid of all of our manufacturing is not accurate. So I think there can be, you know, the ways that we emphasize certain parts of the free market argument, I think can be done better. And one of the areas that I've tried to focus on is transportation and supply chains. And you'll see, you know, in a lot of these, you know, take the trucking industry, for example, extremely competitive industry, lots of churn, lots of turnover.

And that was all as a result of deregulation that the government did in the 1980s. And, you know, we have, you know, independent contractor truck drivers who are their own bosses. They own their trucks. They're small business owners. And they go out and make deliveries. And many of them make very good livings. And we have efforts in Congress right now to restrict the ability of people to be independent contractors, which puts all those jobs at risk. And I think that's a story that free market people need to be telling as well, alongside the wonderful successes of Amazon. Great points. You mentioned in your response industrial policy, and there really is

a debate, not only between left and right, but within those on the right about the appropriate role of government. And when we talk about industrial policy, we're talking about more statism, about using government as a means to accomplish certain ends. You wrote an article not too long ago called Central Planning with Conservative Characteristics, and in it, you basically say that some on the right are arguing for the same thing that folks on the left argue about in this respect, and that is, again, relying on government instead of markets to solve problems. And actually, it seems to be a particularly attractive argument to people in your own generation. What's going on there? Talk a little bit more about that debate on the right. Certainly, it is a debate on the right. You know, it was never a debate on the left. They've always agreed that the government is great at doing all this stuff. They don't have any issue with it. the United States compared to other countries is that free market support is kind of a left-right

issue. And a lot of countries, it's not like that. A lot of countries have, you know, they have some right-wing statists and some right-wing free marketers. They have some left-wing free marketers and some left-wing statists. In general, on average, you know, the support for free markets is higher on the right than on the left. But in the U.S., it's especially it's especially pronounced. And that's that was somewhat that's somewhat unusual. And so we're we're in a way it's it's we're kind of not an issue that divides the left and the right and is a much more um uh contested thing within each each camp which i think is unfortunate because i think it's good to actually have you know one side because you know you need 50 to win elections right so uh and and that's how that's how this stuff gets gets put in place. So I think it's a much better thing to have a unified, a unified, you know, one side of the debate be unified on that issue.

But regardless of any of that, I do think there's some discontent among a lot of among some conservatives in the D.C. area anyway, for a lot of these things. But if you look out at the rest of the country, if you look at the states, I am having a hard time finding any Republicans at the state level unified Republican government has cut its income tax, if it has one. and school choice, where all of these states all around the country are doing school choice, which is something that was like a crazy Milton Friedman idea, you know, 30 years ago, and is now becoming, you know, a very mainstream policy that lots of people support. Started right here in Milwaukee. That's right. That's right. That's right. And so I'm you know, there's I see in in the actual actions of a lot of conservatives.

I don't see this skepticism of markets and of choice as much as some people in Washington, D.C. might might talk about it. I hope you're right. Sort of a similar theme. I think we've seen a friendlier approach to unions by some on the right in recent times. And you had a cover story in National Review magazine that gives a historical account of why and how the right has traditionally taken on unions. And I think you think that it's important that the right continue to do so. Elaborate on that. That's absolutely correct. You know, I'm from Wisconsin. I grew up in Wisconsin. And kind of my first political issue that was really interesting to me growing up was Scott Walker taking on the public sector unions in Wisconsin.

And the protests at the Capitol building, all of this stuff over incredibly common sense policy goals. I mean, he was talking about making contributions. You'd have to contribute like 10% to your pension instead of 0%. You'd have to contribute like 10% to your pension instead of 0%. You'd have to contribute 10% to your healthcare instead of 0%, you know, um, you don't get to, uh, you don't get to, um, uh, bargain over all of these ridiculous rules that make, uh, that make running the government impossible. You can bargain over your wages, but, but but but not not over, you know, all these work rules. And so I just thought that that was such a common sense thing. And to see the reaction from the unions on that, which, again, was totally divorced from the actual popular opinion, because, of course,er won in 2010 he won his recall election first uh you know first

time that's that that that's happened and then won uh at one reelection to his second term in in 2014 and so uh i think um it's a it's a you know that's just kind of my personal uh background in being interested in politics and and and becoming aware of that issue. But, you know, conservatives have opposed organized labor since the New Deal. As part of the New Deal, Franklin Roosevelt passed the national or signed into law the National Labor Relations Act, which still is kind of the baseline for labor relations in the United States today. And that law is explicitly pro-union. It favors unions

over employers. It does not seek to create an equal playing field. That's not the point of it. The point of it is to favor unions. And so if you have a set of special, if you have special treatment by the government towards one uh one side of the issue uh there needs to be a lot of accountability there because and this is an argument that conservatives have making forever uh another wisconsin example of course is the uh the uh kohler united auto workers strike uh back in the 1950s, which National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr. talked about a lot in the early days of National Review. And there's this great line from an editorial where he says, you know, there were progressives

threatening to boycott Kohler. And he said, we're not going to boycott Kohler. We're going to buy Kohler products. And if Kohler starts making peanut butter, we will eat Kohler peanut butter until it comes out of our ears. And so it was just, it was a huge issue that conservatives cared about. And conservatives have been very successful in restricting the power of organized labor, which, you know, in the 1940s, there was a huge strike wave where two to four million people went on strike, caused huge economic problems. Right after that, it swept

Republicans into power in Congress, and they passed the Taft-Hartley Act to, you know, roll back some of these powers that unions had, created the ability for states to pass right-to-work laws. The right-to-work movement has been extremely successful. We have 26 states now are right-to-work. And with the exception of Michigan recently, basically every state that passes right-to-work keeps it because it works for them. And so this has just been a very successful part of the conservative movement over the last 75 years. It's something we should continue to build on. And we need to understand that labor unions are not created under our labor relations law.

They are not created to represent the interests of workers. They're created to be interest groups that represent political causes. And they do so with money that they take from workers' paychecks. And so that's the reality of it, and that's what conservatives need to focus on. It's not like there hasn't been progress. The Janus v. AFSCME decision by the United States Supreme Court a few years ago is a really, really important decision. And in it, the court said that public sector employees do not, cannot be forced to pay dues to a union that does not reflect their views. And great decision in my view, but really only the beginning. And as you know, the unions have made it very difficult for employees

to leave their unions, restricting it to two weeks a year, depending on the employee and other such tactics. I mean, we've seen some reversals. Michigan, for instance, became the first state in a long, long time, decades, to repeal its right to work statute. At the same time, private sector union numbers continue to go down. So what do you think the state of affairs is at this point in time in our country? Are we fighting back sufficiently? Is progress being made to allow people to be able to voice their own opinions without having to pay money through, as you point out, a purely political arm? I think so. You know, Michigan was certainly a step back,

but it's possible that that can be, you know, re-reversed when Republicans eventually retake power there. And so, but I mean, the Janus decision was a long time coming. This is something that conservatives argued about for decades. And again, it's one of these just common sense things. It says, look, unions in the public sector, first of all, Janice is only for public sector unions. It says unions in the public sector are, everything they do is political because when you are negotiating, and I put that in scare quotes because you're not really negotiating with the government that's not how that works it's not like it's totally different from private sector negotiations but regardless when you're

negotiating with the government what you're doing is you're arguing about about government policy and if you're arguing about government policy you are engaging in political speech and if you're gauging in political speech your speech cannot be coerced. That's a violation of the First Amendment. It's very straightforward. And and this is something that was that should have been should have been the law of the land the entire time. But it had to come as a result of, you know, decades of activism within the conservative legal movement in order to, you know, restore an originalist understanding of the First Amendment and understanding of what the Constitution's protections for for free speech. And so that finally culminated in the Janus decision, which was very good.

But as you said, that was only a starting point, because now you actually have to change a lot of the state laws that were creating all these situations in the first place. And so we've seen Florida was one of the leaders on this recently. They passed a bill that said that that prohibited the automatic deduction of union dues for public sector employees. This is one of those things that a lot of people don't know about, but in many cases, in many states, public sector workers automatically have their union dues taken out of their paycheck, and if they want them to not be taken out, they have to request that, especially, as opposed to actually being a voluntary organization that you join by choice which is what unions should be and so uh so florida you know repealed that they made sure that nobody has their dues automatically taken out they uh passed just common sense transparency things saying that unions actually have to disclose their their financial information to

the public and to their members uh so that they that they can see how the money is being spent. This is something that corporations have to do all the time. I don't understand why unions should not be required to do that, especially given the fact that unions have all these special privileges from the government, and in many cases that the corporations don't have. And so, you know, that was a that was a really promising thing that just passed in Florida. Other states are looking to do similar things to Florida. And so, you know, every state should. I mean, there is no reason that a private organization like a like a union should be

allowed to automatically take money out of government workers' paychecks. That should be common sense. I think most people do think that's common sense. I think that's an 80-20 issue. I think basically everybody agrees on that. I see those kind of reforms as really promising areas for conservatives to continue to advance. Agreed. Now, one thing that the right does seem to agree on is the threat that ESG, environmental social governance, poses to wealth creation, to returns on your pension plan money and so forth. Yet, time and time again, we see businesses from Disney to Nike to, more recently, Bud Light and Target, tackling these social issues in a way that, frankly, is destroying their brand, almost beyond belief.

Why are businesses doing this? Has it become more important to get a good ESG score than deliver on behalf of your shareholders? That's definitely part of it. I mean, there is, you know, all of these rating agencies that give points based on ESG categories and all that sort of thing. Part of it's a media problem, too, where, you know, most of the mainstream media is far to the left of where the average American is. And so companies that want to get good press push further to the left than their customers are, not realizing that you're actually alienating part of your customer base by doing that. So that's part of it as well. Or in the case of Bud Light, almost all your customer base. Yeah, certainly, certainly.

So, you know, there are many reasons for this. You know, I'd prefer to just see companies just focus on making their products. I don't really want them to be, you know, conservative either, right? I mean, I want them to just make what they're supposed to make and do it well. A lot of companies do that. Exactly. A lot of companies do that. Especially

any number of companies out there that have 100 employees. These aren't family businesses, but a little bit bigger than that. These kind of companies are all over the country. They don't care about politics at all. They just want to make whatever they make and sell it to their customers. And so I think there's

a huge part of our economy that is still focused on the right things. But yeah, no, it's certainly an issue and it's certainly something that I think market signals are starting to tell them to knock it off.

With these stock prices, share sales and revenue and all that kind of stuff is sending signals to these guys like, hey,

tone it down, focus on what you're good at, and stop lecturing other people on politics because we don't really care. We don't want to hear it from you. You just want to buy beer, you just want to buy clothes, whatever it is.

We don't need the lessons. I mean, the market is speaking loud and clear. It will be interesting to see if the senior executives at these companies pay attention. I have a hunch they may not have any choice. But pretty astounding to see what's happened over the last month, say, in that space. One last topic. You recently co-authored a book called Edmund Burke and the Perennial Battle, 1789 to 1797, and it's a compilation of Burke's best, most accessible quotes from the period in which his written work was intensely focused on radicalism, which he argued was a threat to liberty. And one of his quotes was,

rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years. Seems like a lot of people on the right have rediscovered Burke as a guiding figure. Why Burke and why now? Yeah, I'm glad you picked that quote. That's one of my favorite quotes from the book. Yeah, I co-edited that with one of my college professors, Dan Klein at George Mason, and we wanted to pull together a bunch of quotes from the last part of Burke's life. So, you know, you said 1789 to 1787, which is the sort of last part of his career when he was really focused on the French Revolution, but more broadly on radicalism, because he saw the French Revolution as as a threat, not just to France, but to to Europe as a threat not just to France but to Europe as a whole. And he saw the ideas that were coming out of France as being something that was exportable around the world. So he wanted to make sure to argue against that at the time.

And so we wanted to pull together quotes from that period because there's a fair number of conservatives that have heard of edmund burke that might know about uh you know might have even read some parts of the reflections on the revolution in france which is his most famous book but uh but really haven't engaged very much with what he actually said and he was a very engaging writer uh He was a very, you know, even though some of the language can be, you know, a little bit outdated sometimes, it still comes across with the same energy and the same passion that he had when he first delivered it in the 1700s. And so we wanted to make an accessible version of that for people who might be, you know, casually interested in the, in conservative thought and in what Burke specifically had to say, but, you know, don't have time to read his, you know, complete works.

And so that was our goal, our goal in doing that. And, you know, we see a lot of parallels today because one of the mistakes I think that some, some conservatives make, and it's not necessarily a – it's not a huge mistake, but it is something that's worth thinking about more, which is that we try to blame things on specific people from the past so we try to say you know oh there was this there was this movement or there is this this leader or you know a lot of things you try to trace them back to Karl Marx and we try to place connect the dots and you know Marx Marxism is terrible it's a terrible ideology it had horrible uh effects on on on you know lots of countries around the world that's all that's all correct but uh Burke was writing before Marx was even born. Burke is writing, you know, before that, he's writing before any, you know, a critical race theorist was coming up with things

in law schools. He was writing before all of this, right? And if you read a lot of the things that he's saying, they sound like he's talking to us today. And so that should really wake us up, I think, as conservatives to say, oh, you know, first of all, the conservative principle that, you know, human nature is not something that changes. It's something that stays consistent over time. And as a result of that, people who wrote, you know, hundreds of years ago can still be really, really insightful to us, because if they were really good and thinking really deeply about the human condition, they're still going to have a lot to teach us today. I think Burke is one of those people for whom that is certainly true. And so, you know, making sure that we are addressing kind of the

root causes of a lot of this stuff, which is not some bad thinker that we don't like. But a lot of it is about just how humans interact with each other and in understanding the blessings of liberty and the blessings of kind of the western civilization that has been created around these notions of individual rights and all these things which are very unusual in human history right for for thousands of years we lived in poverty and we lived in communities where people did not have very much freedom and so know, we've advanced beyond that, but in order to preserve it, we need to understand how we got here and why it's important to stay focused on the human condition and human nature. And I think Burke is one of the best

people to do that. Well said. Last question, Dominic. What are you, 25, 26 years old? I'm 24. 24? Yep. You have two prestigious National Review Journalism fellowships. You've got a magazine cover story. You've written a book, and you're 24 years old. What's next for you? I'm very grateful for all of the opportunities that I've had so far between being at George Mason, put me in a good position for a lot of these things, and then also everyone at National Review. It's been a lot of fun and I definitely want to keep at it. You know, it's always a problem of trying to explain in a way that people who aren't trained in economics can understand what the advantage of markets is. And I think that that is something that there's, you know, I don't think I'll have any problem finding a shortage of opportunities to do that going forward. I suspect that's right. Dominic Pino, thanks so much for your contributions already. I know you've got an extremely bright

future. We really do appreciate you joining us on this episode of Voices of Freedom. Thanks so much. Thank you, Rick. Thanks for listening to this episode of Voices of Freedom. Join us next month on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts for our next conversation on issues impacting our freedom and America's foundational principles. And make sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. I'm Rick Graber, and this is a Bradley Foundation podcast. Thank you.