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May 17, 2023 - Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy
34:05
Revitalizing the American Economy with Oren Cass | The TRUTH Podcast #26
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One of the premises of this campaign is to rediscover our shared national identity.
What does it mean to be an American?
You ask most people my age that question, you literally get a blank stare in response.
I think that's a vacuum of identity.
I think when you have a vacuum that runs that deep, that is when poison begins to fill the void.
And I think we need to fill that vacuum with a vision of American national identity that runs so deep That it dilutes the woke agenda, the climate agenda, whatever it is that fills that void, that fills that void of purpose and meaning, dilute it to irrelevance rather than just playing a game of whack-a-mole one at a time.
That's what I'm talking about in the national campaign.
But I think at the heart of that, for the conservative movement to be the movement that leads the way on that, as I think we should in the Republican Party, more importantly in the conservative movement more broadly, There's a separate debate raging beneath the surface of what it means to be a conservative today.
Do we believe in free markets?
Do we believe that capitalism, including on a global scale, is the best-known system to mankind to lift people up from poverty?
Or do we believe that there is some role for the American government to advance the American interest, even when that conflicts with the demands of at least a 1980 vision of global capitalism?
These are deep questions.
There are questions that would be more convenient to skirt with talking points than to address head on.
I think today we're going to have what I predict is a little bit of an uncomfortable conversation about the heart of some of those tradeoffs, but which go to the heart of the future of our conservative movement itself.
And I've invited someone who I don't necessarily agree with on everything that he says or writes, but somebody who I pretty much without exception respect what he says and writes.
And I think that that's a big part of why we're having the conversation today with a friend of mine, Oren Kass, who's joining us on the podcast remotely.
Oren, you're the executive director and founder of American Compass.
I believe I got your titles right, but more importantly is the substance of what you're doing.
And, you know, look, I thought, why don't we like to just get right into it?
We only take short amounts of time.
We don't, you know, want to belabor it.
Let's get right to the heart of, what do you see as the vision of the future of the conservative movement and how it maybe departs from the Friedmanite roots, even the Reaganite roots of the last 40 years?
I think you have a vision on this, and I wanted to give you a chance to tee that up, and then we'll have a conversation about it.
Yeah, sure.
Thanks so much for having me.
It's great to see you.
I think for me, what it starts with is the idea that the future for conservatism should be conservative.
What's happened in recent decades is that we've had a very strong libertarian strain of what I would call market fundamentalism really dominate the economic policy discussion.
We basically had this very dogmatic agenda that just says, You know, tax cuts, free trade, deregulation get out of the way.
That's the formula for prosperity.
I understand ideologically why a lot of libertarians would like that to be true, but the reality is that it's not.
It's certainly not the American tradition of economic policy, which has historically been much more aggressive in terms of protecting the American market, in terms of having robust public investment.
To support domestic industry in terms of having a significant role in shaping the financial sector.
I think just basic economic theory acknowledges that you need those things.
Economics says you'll get efficient outcomes out of markets, but what conservatives need to layer on top of that is the question of what substantive goods do we want to come out of the markets?
You know, the market is not just an end unto itself.
And so I think as you've been talking about, if we start to ask, you know, what do we actually want for the nation, for the society, for our families, there are substantive things we want.
We want good jobs that allow somebody to support a family.
We want the nation to be able to produce the things it needs to not just survive, but to project power.
And there's no guarantee that markets provide those things.
And so I think conservatives need to get a lot more comfortable with what conservatism supports, which is speaking assertively about that common good that we want to advance, and then thinking about how public policy has to play a role in getting where we want to go.
I appreciate you, Arne, because you surface, I think, a lot of what's lurking beneath the surface of a lot of otherwise inexplicable rifts in the conservative movement.
My views are different than yours, but let me just ask you to maybe give some examples of a couple of policies where you would give a fair shake to the best version of the classical policy.
You call it neoliberal conservative or whatever label you want to apply, Friedmanite, post-Reagan era, Reagan era policy that you say we need to maybe think about a little bit differently and do a little bit differently just to make that a little bit more tangible and real and then we can kind of get into the debate a little bit.
Yeah, sure.
I think a great place to start where a lot of these debates are really seeing the rubber meet the road is on trade.
The free trade consensus that pushed so aggressively for globalization, for letting China into the WTO, had this view that it doesn't matter where things get made.
The important thing is they get made as cheaply and efficiently as possible because what we're trying to maximize is consumption.
We're going to measure consumer welfare, and the more stuff we can have at the lower cost, the better off we will be.
And so that theory led us to say, look, if...
Who knows what kind of cheating China is doing?
If China wants to make stuff cheaper and the production goes over there, that's actually to our benefit because we'll have more cheap stuff.
By the way, we don't have to worry too much about what's going to happen to the people here who used to make the stuff because the wonders of the market will ensure that they find different, better jobs.
The reality is that no part of that is true.
I mean, first of all, just as an economic matter, No part of it is true.
That has not worked out for American workers, American families, the American economy.
But then it's also important to step back and again, remember that markets aren't an end unto themselves.
The market is here to support American liberty and prosperity.
One thing that we see when we say we're just going to have free trade with an authoritarian communist dictatorship Is that pretty soon that starts to warp our market.
It warps the incentives here.
If you have a market where people are trying to do whatever generates the most profit and pleasing the CCP generates the most profit, then that's what people are going to do.
I think people are rightly recognizing that that was wrong, that we need to change course And where I just want to push the conversation is to say, you don't get to just treat China as an exception.
All of the lessons learned there about why the free trade dogma does not hold for China, those are general lessons about what's wrong with the dogma and we have to grapple with that.
Thank you for pushing the conversation a little forward, because I think that's where you and I, we're probably not a lot of daylight between us when it comes to China, right?
Part of my issue with China, though, is that they're using companies to advance non-economic agendas altogether, right?
So, for example, telling Airbnb that you must hand over the user data of the private messages that a guest and a host in the US send to each other on Airbnb's platform, where people are staying.
People don't know this.
They have to hand that over as a condition for doing business in China.
I mean, BlackRock had to jump through a lot of hoops doing lobbying, effectively backdoor lobbying, Larry Fink did, in order to effectively get the right to sell mutual funds in China.
I mean, you see that's how they turn companies into circus monkeys.
They say jump CEOs ask how high because they're advancing goals that are not even economic in nature, but that advance their geopolitical goals unrelated to the economics of it.
And that's unique to, I would argue at least, unique to this Chinese mercantilism, which is a subset of a tactic used by the CCP. And what I sort of see this debate sort of, you know, come into a head is that people often conflate,
even when I say we need to declare independence from China, To mean that that means we have to automatically onshore a lot of that to the United States if we decouple from China, whereas what I think is we're more likely to be able to decouple from China for our own geopolitical goals if we include Japan,
South Korea, India, Australia, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Brazil, America, go on, as part of that equation, and that making sure that we have the opportunity for those redundancies through the gains from trade, yes, through a classical Adam Smith competitive advantage view, that that actually is essential for us to be able through a classical Adam Smith competitive advantage view, that that actually is essential for us to be able to do the thing we need to do vis-a-vis China without necessarily conflating it with a protectionist, you know, and what I would go so far as to say coddling agenda that actually
And so I think you and I have deeply common ground, but for slightly different reasons that maybe come apart when I look beyond China as to whether or not we should reject free trade and throw the, you know, proverbial baby out with the bathwater where China's the bathwater and trade with our other nations and allies proverbial baby out with the bathwater where China's the bathwater and trade with our other nations and allies who do share our values economically and politically and otherwise as allies of
Well, you know, I think you're right that national security is sort of the special case and the easiest case.
And the most important perhaps right now.
Yeah.
Well, especially important with respect to China in this context.
But I think the broader economic story is the really critical one for policymakers to focus on and especially for conservatives to think about if they're going to develop an agenda that actually is Is responsive to the challenges facing the typical American family.
I mean, I think there are all sorts of problems with Airbnb's message data being disclosed or with how BlackRock behaves.
But if you're thinking about what are sort of the key challenges facing American families and communities, it comes down a lot more to the shape of domestic investment, the types of jobs that are being created, whether wages are rising.
And that's where you have to get beyond the national security context and ask, you know, how is free trade?
And I would sort of put the free in scare quotes there.
How is that working generally?
And so I think, you know, Japan is a great example to really focus on a little bit because there's a ton of history there.
You know, Japan isn't doing what China is doing maybe with respect to say civil rights.
But Japan historically had a very mercantilist agenda of its own.
If you look back to the 1980s, you had a situation where Japanese automakers were eating the American automaker's I mean, Detroit was in very dire straits.
You had Japanese imports taking share very quickly.
What Ronald Reagan did was negotiate an agreement with the Japanese that just imposed a quota on the import of Japanese cars.
Now, did that raise prices for American consumers?
Yes, it did in the short run.
It also led to the Japanese auto companies building the entire auto industry that now exists in the American South.
So at the end of the day, we got tens, hundreds of billions of dollars of investment, hundreds of thousands of good jobs, and an incredible boost to what is now the American auto industry, even if the cars sometimes have Japanese names on them.
That I take as an example as a kind of policy that is very disruptive of what some people might call free trade, but at the same time I would say is of incredible benefit to the American people.
I don't know.
What do you make of that sort of policy from Reagan?
Yeah.
So that would be a departure from what I was describing as Reaganite or Friedmanite.
So that's Reagan doing a thing that's different than what I was classifying as classically Reaganite, just so people aren't confused.
But what do I think about that type of what we can call industrial policy contrasted with an unapologetic free trade policy with respect to, you know, broadly speaking, an allied nation, certainly in comparison to China, it's not even close.
So you raise a good case.
I think the thing I struggle with is how do you quantify the impact on the country and measure the trade-off of those increased costs versus the benefit gained by seeing that investment here?
That's sort of the shallow question.
I think the deeper question is whether or not you can actually have a central actor that can predictably make those decisions in the right way, even if that happened to be the right one.
Can we rely on a model that has, you know, effectively, I'm going to use this word intentionally, a central planner that makes those decisions?
Because somebody's got to make those decisions.
I think in your worldview of it, that's part of the role for the U.S. government, including the federal government.
And I think it risks embodying, you know, Friedrich von Hayek's famous fatal conceit, the conceit that one man or one centralized body or government can know – What that right allocation is.
And so, you know, maybe you would argue we just punted and left it at the market, but history would teach us that I didn't get it right either.
That's maybe what you would say, but that's my principal source of skepticism.
And I guess a question for you in responding to that is, how would you distinguish your position from that of the classical left or the current left for that matter, which is very skeptical?
Of markets as the mechanism to allocate resources, which believes that the state ought to play a role in making sure that other affirmative goals are achieved, even when the true free market, even the unfettered version of it, not the Chinese corrupted version of it, but the harder case, the unfettered version of it is left to itself.
And I don't think that you have to not be on the left.
Maybe you are on the like, like, that's okay.
I think that that's not a bad word.
But just to understand, I don't think you identify yourself that way.
What distinction would you draw there?
I think the way that you've described central planning or framed what someone like Hayek would say really conflates two different questions.
When we think about Hayek's case for the free market and discussion of the fatal conceit and the celebration of the market, a lot of that comes down to the idea of price signals.
That in a free market, the choices that people make in response to price signals and the way that their choices in turn affect what prices are, convey information in a way that no individual planner could ever hope to sort of understand or react to.
That's exactly right.
I think central planning in the sense that we think of it negatively, like the Soviet Union trying to figure out how many screws each factory should make, that's clearly a bad idea and it empirically doesn't work.
The flip side is when you're asking broadly what areas of investment are most valuable for a country's economy, let's say.
For one thing, that is not something that price signals are going to tell you.
Oren, can I just interrupt you for a second?
Just because it's something that you said, so I apologize, but you used a great analogy.
Central planning is the number of screws that ought to be made in a particular industry.
But how is that different than saying, here's the quota and the number of Japanese cars that make it into the United States?
It seems like you're Asking a government actor to be in a position to make that call.
I'm glad for Reagan that it seems to have aged well, the decision that he made.
But reliably pinning a system on getting that consistently right, it does seem more similar than not to me.
Well, again, I think there are two things here.
One is the question of what information would you need to make that decision?
When you're thinking about the macro level of what is literally the largest category of imports into America, putting energy aside, Do we care whether, you know, one of the largest employers in this country, do we care whether or not we have a robust domestic auto industry?
The question is, who do we want to have?
Thinking about that question, you could say, well, we just want the market to figure it out.
But it's important to understand that that's not something that markets do.
Markets will tell you where a car today can most efficiently be made.
But it cannot give you the answer to the question of whether or not you want to have a robust domestic auto industry.
And conversely, I would say policymakers do not need the information at the level of How many screws should each factory make to be able to think about things in terms of do we care about a robust domestic auto industry?
I think that – but just on the question of how do you know what that quota number is, and then I'm going to go to a harder question after that.
But like how does the guy in Ronald Reagan's seat say, this is the quota on how many cars we should want from Japan?
I mean that's – you don't have no price signal, no any signal to make that answer up from.
It just seems like a form of central planning to me.
Well, what they said was that it has to stay at the current level, that we're not going to let it grow, right?
Any policy choice made anywhere has to ultimately choose a number.
And I think typically when people resort to the argument, well, how do we know what the number should be?
Frankly, I think that tends to be a pretty weak argument.
It's like, well, how do we know what the driving should be?
At the end of the day, that's a matter of making choices.
The question isn't whether you can make the perfect choice.
Nobody can.
The question is whether you can improve upon what you have if no choice is made.
That's where, again, I think this Proper understanding of Hayek is so important because in places where markets and price signals are generating good and useful information and answers, I think you're absolutely right.
We have to be very skeptical of the ability of policymakers to step in and judge, are those good or not?
Could we do something better?
That is likely not a formula for success.
In places where markets simply are not Attempting to optimize for the things we care about as a nation, where price signals do not provide relevant information, there's an awful lot better chance, certainly, that you could improve on that through policymaking.
And then I think, just to make one more point quickly, I think the other key distinction, and this is why I like the Reagan example here so much, is that if you think about what that policy is, you know, a quota on the one hand sounds kind of like very blunt and interventionist.
But the flip side is that the quota is actually kind of a very simple, straightforward choice within which you actually then empower the market to work, right?
So if you tried to say, okay, we need a domestic auto recovery plan and we have to, you know, who are we going to subsidize and how much are, you know, which states are we going to build what in, you start to get into a lot of trouble.
If you say domestic auto manufacturing is really important, we're basically going to make a rule that if you want to sell cars to Americans, you have to make them here.
That's a very straightforward rule.
That's the kind of decision policymakers do have the capacity to make.
In doing that, you essentially almost amplify the power of the market.
You leave it to the market to optimize within the constraints that you want to see it optimizing within so that you're channeling those market forces toward the outcomes you actually care about.
That, I think, is exactly the American tradition and Yeah, I mean, that's a vision of the market as a tool, as an instrument.
But that is subordinate to a broader question of national interest.
It's going to be the job of good policymakers and then the job of an electorate to put good policymakers in those seats to make those broad goals of saying that auto production is high and then use markets as a tool to efficiently allocate.
I mean that's kind of the heart of what you're describing.
That's not to say that that's what I exactly agree with.
I think that's exactly the right place to focus and where so much of this conservative versus libertarian conflict comes into play.
Is the market the means to a greater end of human flourishing and national success about which we have a perspective?
I think that's the conservative view traditionally and it should be.
Or is the market the end unto itself and our goal from a policymaking perspective should simply be to leave it unfettered and accept whatever results it produces as the correct one?
That I think is the libertarian view.
I mean, do you see the market as a tool and a means or the end unto itself?
Well, I see it as none of the above is what I would say.
So I was drawing that distinction because I wanted to lay out what I thought you were saying and glad we're, you know, on the same page and understanding where you're at.
So I call myself a conservative, but the distinction I draw from a libertarian is not the one that you draw, and I would probably be closer to libertarian than you are for this reason, is that I think there's more to life than that which can be delivered in the market.
Okay?
There are important concepts like virtue in the way we live our lives that matter, that ought not be governed or determined by the market.
And in some ways, much of what's wrong with the allocation of goods and services in a market can be explained, I believe, by the disparity between what people want and what people need.
And the delta between the two, between what you want and what you need, is a pretty good approximation, crude approximation for virtue.
And so I think that part of what capitalism does that I think can be harmful against a backdrop of a society that's not virtuous.
It's like John Adams, you know, constitution was made for immoral people.
Adam Smith would have said the same thing, I think, in not so many words.
He basically said it in Wealth of Nations and his book before it.
Read together, capitalism at its best is made for moral people too.
And so that's why I call myself a conservative, not a libertarian, because even though I don't think that has to be adjudicated and centrally determined by government, I think it's important for society to exist against backdrop conditions of virtue and morality that have nothing to do with capitalism.
And then against that backdrop, I wouldn't call capitalism a tool, but I would call it then the most just system, actually, for the meritocratic allocation of stuff, green pieces of paper, whatever.
Against the backdrop of even a deeper-seated civic equality is that even if certain people end up with more green pieces of paper than the next guy, we can all sit back and say, so what?
Big deal.
You drive one car, I drive another.
So what if we're equal in the deeper sense that matters?
Civic equality, moral equality, dare I verge into spiritual equality.
If we regard one another as, you know, we are, Reagan famously said, right?
We are equal in the eyes of God.
That's what makes us equal in the eyes of each other.
I think that's the way I view my distinction of conservatism from still my commitments to markets as the most just system and I think empirically most efficient system for allocating goods and services, which happens to be a pretty well-proven system for lifting people up from the bottom.
And then the constraining variable I would put in that is national security.
So that's why I land where I do in China, which is to say that we won't have this society to defend that free enterprise project if we like cease to exist, or we're serfs of a Chinese Communist Party.
And so that's how you and I kind of get to similar places, but from very different origin stories.
And I guess a question that I have back to you, I asked earlier is, How if at all do you distinguish your position from the conventional modern liberal skepticism of markets and a belief that there needs to be some government action to advance the interests of society as a whole that depart from that which would be delivered to us by the free market?
Well, again, I don't think a skepticism of markets as kind of delivering everything we need is liberal or conservative.
I mean, I think as you just said, you somewhat share the same view.
I think there's a sort of common universal, frankly, rational and coherent understanding of markets as a useful way to organize economic activity.
But not something that of its own accord is going to just generate the outcomes that we want for our nation, for our families.
And so I don't see that as a liberal versus conservative divide at all.
I think that's a sort of libertarians or market fundamentalists versus everybody else distinction.
Then what politics should really be about and where I think people ideologically tend to differ based on core values, how they see the world is in two respects.
One is, okay, what are those substantive ends that we are asking the market to advance?
For instance, do we want to have a nation state that is identifiable by its borders, by its commitment to a common set of values on behalf of the people who live there?
Or do we have a sort of very globalist view that takes ultimately a sort of vague generic Yeah, I think you and I reject that.
We share that.
Right, exactly.
And so that leads then to a very different point of view on what What ends we want the market to advance as compared to what you would hear someone on the left say?
That's a pretty good distinction.
That's a pretty good answer to the question, actually.
Yeah.
That's one big one.
Another big contrast, I think, is that conservatives, exactly to your point about virtue, I think have a much greater understanding of human flourishing that comes down to, in a lot of ways, a responsibility and obligation-based view that recognizes that You know, people actually need to have purpose and things that they are trying to achieve.
That, for instance, having good jobs that allow them to support their own families is a huge part of what a successful market economy should be delivering.
Whereas the progressive view tends to be much more that to the extent that we can liberate people from constraints and obligations, the better off they are.
And so progressives tend to focus on Whether it's universal basic income, what they now call the care economy where someone else is responsible for taking care of your kids, taking care of your parents, that that is what we should be trying to achieve.
I think you end up with very different visions of what the market is for and what the good society or common good looks like when you're talking about the ends.
And then when you're thinking about means, I think you also tend to have a very different view of what government can and can't do or should and shouldn't do.
And that's where I use this Reagan example again because I think you see on the left and even today quite frequently this idea that, okay, well, once we've identified something that's important, we should now develop a set of government programs that will deliver it.
And I think conservatives rightly recognize that that is not likely to work and that's not the model that you want to have for society.
And so the question that we focus on, especially at American Compass, is twofold.
One, what is that set of constraints or rules on the market that are going to channel Profit seeking activity in a productive direction.
Then two, what are the set of institutions within the market that people need to be successful, whether that is strong families, whether that is strong education systems that prepare people.
We're very interested in the idea of a labor movement that would actually provide real support to workers.
I think that When you say you're sort of talking about markets as inadequate to deliver everything we want, I would certainly plead guilty to that and would say any person who understands markets on any side of the political spectrum will be starting from that point.
What policymaking has generally been about and where ideology is very important is in what it is that we are trying to achieve and what we think are the best ways to achieve it.
It's a great discussion, Oren.
I think we're going to have to continue it.
I think that you have challenged me to want to come back to you with some examples where the story didn't work out as well as it did for Reagan with the Japanese car quota.
You've also, I think, challenged me to draw some parallels between where I share your instincts, but it shows up in different ways when I say let's ban social media for kids under the age of 16. That wouldn't be naturally the capitalistic instinct because it doesn't work towards a flourishing American society when social media algorithms build a bigger business model if they're able to exploit human frailties.
Now the way I explain that is that I draw the distinction between adults and kids.
They're fundamentally different.
I share your views with respect to decoupling from China, but the reasons I do it is due to national security concerns.
But I think I'm drawing two different exceptions there to a general rule, both of which are oriented towards American flourishing.
One is geopolitical protection against China.
The other is protecting children.
Which overlaps.
It's not exactly the same center of gravity as your broader concern, which I think is more even inextricably linked to the economics of human flourishing too.
But I think I look at the adjacent aspects of human flourishing, right?
The psychic fortitude of kids, national security of the United States, as something we deal with separately outside of the market, but without necessarily using the market or changing the way the market works to achieve those set objectives.
I think that you're really, you know, I think focused on a different aspect as your main focus, you know, empowering workers, for example, in an economy.
And I think it's interesting.
It's not that we're at odds with each other here, but I think our center of gravity of our focus is different, maybe complementary.
Makes me want to talk more, actually.
Yeah.
Just to throw out one more thought for you, I would love to do this again.
I think you're exactly right that the non-economic exceptions are the easy ones.
I think where it gets really hard is when we ask, well, what about the things that are economic and that we do want markets to do?
That's where workers and wages, for instance, is so important.
Presumably, we want people to be able to support their families.
Well, either we have to ask the market to create those kinds of jobs, or we're going to have to do that outside of the market.
I think we do want the market to do those, and that's where you then run into the unavoidable conflict of having to realize that there are substantive ends we want the market to deliver, and that leads to needing a role for policy in the market.
And that's where you and I might come apart a little bit where I would say yes, but we cultivate virtue as a precondition for the market outside of that through the family bonds that we form, not expecting the market to play a role in being commingled with that function.
Deep discussion, Oren.
I appreciated that.
And you've made me think, as you always do when we talk.
Which is why I like to make sure we have more of them.
So make more of the conversation.
So if you're open to it, let's pick this up on a future segment.
Love to do it anytime.
Yeah.
Appreciate it, my man.
Thank you.
I'm Vivek Ramaswamy, candidate for president, and I approve this message.
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