Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy - Do Conservatives Want a Right-Wing Nanny State or Should We Shut It Down?

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Nov. 13, 2024 - Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy

47:27

Do Conservatives Want a Right-Wing Nanny State or Should We Shut It Down?

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	Thank you for the warm welcome.
	It's going to be a different kind of speech tonight.
	I've been giving mostly campaign trail style speeches, but this is a different type of conversation we're going to have tonight about what I see as an interesting, friendly intellectual rift within our own America First world.
	National conservative movement.
	But before I get into that rift, I want to say a word about the man who I hope we are going to be successful in putting back in the White House.
	Donald Trump is not only the 45th but the 47th president of the United States.
	And accomplishing that goal this year is certainly more important than anything we're going to accomplish in this room today, but we all agree on that already.
	I talked to the man twice today, and every time the sense of energy and revival that he brings to our party is something that's not lost on me, and that's where I actually want to begin.
	It's going to be a tour of a short history.
	Since 2016 and what Donald Trump did in the eight years since he first ran for U.S. President.
	The thing that made him so compelling as a candidate in that 2016 primary was that unlike the other candidates, he didn't just blindly parrot the party's historical orthodoxy with fancy verbiage wrapped around it.
	He offered an entirely new worldview, actually, one that shattered the historical neoliberal consensus to its core, but one that had by that point become pervasive in the Republican Party.
	He offered a nationalist vision for America's future.
	On foreign policy, he reimagined our relationships with other countries.
	He rejected the idea that it was America's job to be the arbiter between the good guys and the bad guys.
	There's no such thing in our view of international relations, but that it was our job to look at international relations through the prism of what does or does not advance American interests.
	He was alone in the GOP primary in that cycle in 2016 in opposing forever wars, including the Iraq war, something that bucked the Republican consensus.
	And so much so that it's easy to forget today how contrarian that was.
	It's now become the consensus in the Republican Party and probably for most of us in this room.
	And I think that's a testament to the seismic imprint that he had in the conservative movement, but not just on foreign policy.
	The same was true for immigration policy, actually.
	Republicans have long opposed illegal immigration.
	That's true.
	But if we're being honest, we have sloppily used the vehemence of our opposition to illegal immigration to actually obfuscate a deeper divide on our views on the quantity and quality of illegal or legal immigration.
	So pre-Trump, the consensus among Republican elites...
	I have to confess, I usually hate using the term elites.
	I think we're too sloppy about it at times.
	But here, narrowly, I use Republican elites to refer to the subset of people who are most influential in setting Republican policy.
	The consensus among those Republican elites was that immigration policy was an extension of economic policy.
	Do whatever maximizes the size of the economic pie, period.
	If companies could reduce their marginal costs with high-quality, skilled labor, then bring that into the maximum, and we should design an immigration system that maximizes the ability of companies to do that.
	That was the old worldview.
	But by contrast, the nationalist view at the time was different.
	It said that immigration policy is tantamount to labor policy.
	And so unlike the neoliberal economic policies, the most important question was no longer what maximized the size of the economic pie, but what maximized the well-being of American workers.
	That was the new post-Trump view.
	The same went for international trade.
	The historical Republican elite view was that more trade is inherently good, period.
	And by contrast, the post-Trump new Republican view was that the top objective of trade policy shouldn't just be to blindly increase the size of the economic pie, but instead to advantage American manufacturers.
	Again, this bucked the consensus in both major parties.
	So just as Trump reframed foreign policy through the lens of what advanced American interests— Just as he reframed immigration policy through the lens of what advanced American workers' interests, just as he reframed trade policy through the lens of what advanced our manufacturers' interests, that's what actually made him a true leader in 2016, is that he challenged an existing status quo, an entire existing system.
	He offered a new vision.
	And I think it's a testament to his success that what began as a challenge to the system became the new system.
	I think where we are today, nearly a decade later, we're seeing a version of that same old problem present itself in a new way.
	They say if you care about somebody, you tell them the truth.
	If you care about yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.
	I prefer to challenge audiences rather than to show up with audiences and tell them what they want to hear.
	And I spoke at the Libertarian Party's convention and I challenged the Libertarians with views that I think buck the Libertarian Party's view.
	But I'm going to do the same thing in this room today.
	Today I think we're seeing a lot of Republicans step up and utter phrases.
	I travel the country on the campaign trail for down-ballot candidates trying to help them.
	And I'm seeing a pattern that concerns me, actually.
	We see candidates utter phrases like, America first.
	We're the party of the working class.
	That we need to make more things here.
	Without actually stopping to answer the question of why we're uttering these things.
	Without stopping to ask what these phrases actually mean.
	I don't think that's a good development.
	Uttering phrases out of habit, out of muscle memory, rather than remembering why we utter them, I don't think is a good development for any movement.
	And I think an important part of the reason why the historical neoliberal consensus failed our country was not just that it failed to predict certain adverse consequences of its policy prescriptions.
	After all, no economic or political theory is ever perfect.
	I think the thing that was the deeper problem with the old neoliberal consensus was the intellectual laziness and capture through which it earned its staying power.
	Even after the 08 financial crisis, you'll remember the neoliberal consensus on immigration, on trade, on foreign policy became so codified as dogma in the Republican Party that our own Republican presidential candidates from George Bush to John McCain to Mitt Romney didn't know exactly why they were saying the things they were saying.
	All they knew is that they were supposed to say them.
	And I'm keen to make sure that we don't make that same mistake in our own America First movement today.
	So this evening I'm going to, as I said, give not quite a campaign-style speech, but to focus on different questions.
	Not the urgent question of who wins the election this year.
	The less urgent but no less important question of where the America First movement is actually going to go or ought to go after what I hope is a successful second Trump term.
	It's not a rah-rah speech.
	My goal is to actually tonight just illuminate what I view as this growing, healthy, but existent rift between what I call the national protectionist direction of the future and a national libertarian direction for the future.
	Both of them reject the historical neoliberal consensus on foreign policy, on trade, and on immigration.
	But for different reasons, And with very different implications for the future direction of America First policy.
	And these are two different worldviews which I believe do have or at least should have a home within national conservatism.
	And I believe that the national conservative movement will be most successful if we actually understand these rifts rather than to pretend that they don't actually exist and to surface the common ground between them as well, which I think is greater than their differences in their rejection of the historical 20th century neoliberal consensus.
	So with that, let's start with the issue of international trade to understand the different views and get them on the table.
	The historical neoliberal consensus on trade is that more trade is good for at least two independent reasons.
	The first is that international trade maximizes the size of the global economic pie.
	And the second is that we could use international trade as a vehicle to spread democracy to places like China.
	The theory was called democratic capitalism.
	It effectively said that we would somehow export Big Macs and Happy Meals and somehow that would spread democracy to places like China.
	The basic idea is that we could use our money and access to our market to get them to be more like us.
	Well, it turns out the idea turned out to be wrong on at least three levels.
	Give a round of applause to the woman in the back, because I've been in that position many times.
	And you're a real hero in this room for being brave enough to bring your young daughter.
	My older one just turned two, and believe me, go on a presidential campaign with a near two-year-old in many moments like that one.
	But it's for their generation that we ask these questions.
	The neoliberal consensus, I think, has failed on at least those three levels that we ought to at least understand and see clearly.
	The first one is the most concerning.
	It increased U.S. economic dependence on China on sectors critical for our national security.
	So the little-known fact is today, over 95% of the ibuprofen in our medicine cabinets come from none other than China.
	And as a reminder, that is the same country that concocted a man-made virus in a lab and by one means or another released it to wreak havoc on the rest of the world, including our own country.
	The same country that is knowingly exporting precursors to synthetic fentanyl to Mexican drug cartels, whose entry into the United States is killing upwards of 70,000 to 80,000 Americans on our own homeland and our own soil as we speak.
	That's the same country that we're relying on for 95% of the ibuprofen in our medicine cabinets and a good portion of the rest of the pharmaceuticals that we take to keep Americans healthy.
	That doesn't make any sense.
	Well, if you think that doesn't make sense in the pharmaceutical industry, by the way, if that's what they're going to do when times are good, wait until you figure out what they do when times go bad.
	More concerning is the fact that the U.S. military, it's little known to many Americans, depends on China to provide inputs for our own military equipment and the weapons that we actually use.
	Over 40% of the semiconductors using Department of Defense weapons systems are actually imported from China, which is the largest supplier of technologies deemed as critical for the Army, Navy, and the Air Force.
	It's well known now that Chinese-made drones can be remotely reprogrammed to spy on our critical infrastructure all the way from Beijing.
	And I think these are real national security threats that were unforeseen consequences of the neoliberal trade policy that said that more trade was good.
	Raytheon's CEO last year shockingly said that this is why we need to make nice and make friends and get along with China.
	It raises the question of why on earth we are stockpiling these weapons if not to protect ourselves in a scenario of, God forbid, a major conflict, and ask ourselves what exactly that adversary would do in that scenario of conflict.
	I don't think it takes a four-star general to tell you that if, God forbid, we are in a conflict scenario with China, they're not going to continue to supply The very military equipment that we're going to be using to fight them in that hopeful war that we never encounter.
	So I think that that's the first place.
	And by the way, for the libertarians in the room, if there are any, Friedrich von Hayek would have agreed with me on this too.
	He believed that it was perfectly appropriate for a nation, even committed to free trade, to not depend on an adversary to provide its own military equipment.
	It just doesn't make any sense.
	So that's the first place where the neoliberal consensus got it wrong, was U.S. dependence on China, an adversary, The second place where they missed the plot, though, was it also had an inadvertent effect of creating a false moral equivalence between the United States and China.
	I'll give you a couple of examples to give you the actual texture of this.
	In 2020 to 2021, when Xi Jinping was pressed by international actors about the Uyghur human rights crisis in the Shenzhen province of China, the first thing he often said in those interviews was that Black Lives Matter shows that the United States is no better.
	This wasn't an accident.
	Just that same year in 2021, Yang Jiechi faced off with Tony Blinken, our little puppet of a Secretary of State, at the Alaska Summit.
	It's been a 15 minute opening monologue lambasting him in the United States where China called on the US to be more proactive on protecting human rights and to stop slaughtering, that is his word, not mine, stop slaughtering black Americans.
	This would be laughable if it weren't for the fact that our own companies, from Nike to Airbnb to BlackRock to JPMorgan Chase, were in those years effectively saying the same thing, criticizing social injustices in the U.S., without saying a peep about actual atrocities in China, which in turn creates a false without saying a peep about actual atrocities in China, which in turn creates a false moral equivalence between the United States and China, which in turn erodes our greatest geopolitical asset of all, which is not our nuclear arsenal, but it is our moral
	and third.
	So that's the second area where the neoliberal consensus missed the plot.
	First is the dependence on China.
	Second is the new class of international moral arbiters in the economy that create a false moral equivalence between the United States and China.
	And then third, and most subtly, it was the rise of international bodies that imposed constraints on U.S. companies, particularly climate-related constraints and social constraints on U.S. companies that weren't applied to Chinese companies.
	In the international climate negotiations, China conveniently characterized itself as a developing nation, despite being the second largest economy in the world and a military that, if we're being honest, is potentially on parity with that of the United States, classified itself as a developing nation.
	And as a result, China and much of the rest of the world burned more coal last year than in any year in its history, while the United States forcibly burned less coal than we ever have in our own history, one of the major sources of baseload power generation For our electric grid, and the economic impact of this can't be overstated.
	So in those three ways, the neoliberal consensus missed the plot, certainly with respect to the U.S. relationship with China.
	Now the national protectionist answer to this recognizes those failures and risks of the neoliberal view.
	But it commingles those concerns with a totally separate concern about protecting American manufacturers from the effects of price erosion from foreign competition, including but not limited to China, to stop other countries from flooding our market with their products.
	And imagines an industrial policy that allows us to use taxpayer resources to purposefully subsidize certain critical areas for American production where we're less competitive today.
	That is the national protectionist direction that I described at the outset.
	By contrast, the national libertarian view is different.
	It is focused exclusively on eliminating US dependence on China in those critical sectors for US security.
	But here's the rub.
	If we're really serious about decoupling from China in those critical sectors, from pharmaceuticals to our military industrial base, That actually means more, not less, trade with allies like Japan, South Korea, India, the Philippines, Vietnam, Mexico, and other countries around the world.
	And I think that that's an irreducible trade-off because there's no way to actually seriously decouple from China in those areas that are critical for U.S. security interests, at least for the foreseeable future, without nearshoring those supply chains to allies.
	Yet if your top objective is to Protect American manufacturers from the effects of foreign competition, then you're necessarily extending the time period it's going to take to actually decouple from China in those critical sectors.
	There's no free lunch.
	It comes down to a slight difference of priorities.
	90% of the policies might be the same, but the prioritization that leads us there is a little bit different between the national protectionists and the national libertarians.
	So the bottom line on trade here, on the issue of trade before I move to immigration, is this.
	The neoliberal consensus was wrong because it ignored the national security implications of increasing U.S. dependence on China in certain critical sectors, particularly our military industrial base.
	But if we're really serious about reducing our economic dependence on China, not just talking about it, but actually serious about doing it, that necessarily means more, not less, trade with other allies.
	But if your top priority is to protect American manufacturers from the effect of foreign competition, Then that impedes our ability to decouple from China in those critical sectors on the fastest timeframe possible.
	That's the simple but uncomfortable truth.
	And I think our movement will be stronger if we're able to have the debate about the trade policies we do or don't favor on that basis.
	So I'm going to open this up at the end to Q&A and I expect and hope for challenging questions to the view that I've presented here on trade.
	But first, in finishing up the areas that I'd like to review in the speech section of this, I'm going to move to the issue of immigration.
	The historical neoliberal consensus on immigration is that legal immigration is inherently good because it allows companies to reduce the cost of production to achieve the same level of overall output, which in turn has the effect of increasing the size of the overall economic pie.
	So let's make that specific.
	On the old view, if a company were able to hire two legal immigrants to do a job for $10 an hour, For the same quality, for the same output that an American worker requires $20 per hour to do, the right answer was to design policies, including an immigration policy, that allows the company to hire those two cheaper foreign-born workers.
	By contrast, the national protectionist view is that we should adopt policies that stop those two immigrants from taking the job so the single American worker could earn the higher wage.
	Now, the old-school classical economists' response to that is that, well, that's going to reduce the size of the economic pie.
	It's going to reduce the number of American workers who get hired by companies at all.
	And I think the national protectionist response to that has effectively been, well, that's just an ivory tower myth that doesn't actually play out in reality.
	And more recently, I think there have been some creative and thoughtful arguments made that the influx of cheap foreign-born labor has actually impeded the quality of innovation in the United States.
	So, for example, when McDonald's is able to hire cheap foreign-born workers, they're less likely to innovate with digital kiosks at their shops.
	Instead, what they're able to do is now use those digital kiosks.
	There might be fewer American-born workers who are operating them, but they're going to be paid that $20 instead.
	This is an argument recently and thoughtfully made by my friend J.D. Vance in his recent interview with Ross Douthat in the New York Times.
	That is the national protectionist position.
	So the old neoliberal view, what it viewed as immigration policy is inextricably linked to economic policy, where the sole objective was economic growth.
	Where the National Protectionist view, historically viewed as the NatCon view here, in response to that said that, you know what, we're going to view immigration policy as inextricably linked to labor policy.
	And we're seeing that in a lot of the statutes that are being proposed.
	A number of Republican senators have actually favored raising the federal minimum wage by over 50%.
	And one of the bill's co-sponsors in that case expressly said that raising the minimum wage to $20 an hour would make it more difficult for a company to replace a native-born worker.
	With an immigrant who would work for less.
	Agree or not, that's an important part and parcel of the national protectionist position.
	The national libertarian position rejects the historical neoliberal consensus too, but on different grounds.
	The United States is not just an economic zone.
	This is what puts the national and the national libertarian.
	We're a nation bound by a common set of civic ideals, shared citizens who share not just a geographic space, but a common set of ideals that unite that country, one that we've badly lost in the United States of America today.
	We are in the middle of a national identity crisis.
	We have lost our sense of who we are as citizens of this nation, and sloppy immigration policies have only worsened that crisis.
	So the right immigration policies would be those that look after the security interests of the United States, amounting to a hawkish position, of course, on the border and on illegal immigration, but it would also look after preserving the national identity of the United States, manifest in the form of greater screening requirements for legal immigrants.
	Screened not just for their ability to make economic contributions, but also for their willingness and readiness to adopt and share American values during their time here.
	Values that are enshrined in the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.
	That necessarily means heightened civics exams, not just for citizenship, but even for green cards and other forms of entry.
	Necessarily means the elimination of dual citizenship as a category altogether, the idea that you could pledge allegiance to two nations at once.
	It necessarily means, in my opinion, the adoption of English as the national language of the United States.
	A nation founded on ideals can't exist if you can't communicate those ideals to one another.
	And it further means ending birthright citizenship for the kids of illegals in this country because an important part of the American national identity is that we believe in the rule of law.
	That is who we are as Americans.
	For similar reasons, I actually, by the way, just going on an aside here, I don't know if all of you will agree with this or not, but I actually favor civics exams, the same ones that we require of immigrants before they're able to vote in this country.
	I actually favor the implementation of civics exams for every high school senior who graduates from high school before they're able to cast a vote as well, because if we require it of immigrants, we should require it of ourselves.
	I think our lack of a shared national identity in the United States is one of the greatest threats to the continued existence of our republic.
	This republic was founded not in a common genetic lineage, not a common ethnicity, not a common religion even.
	But a shared set of civic ideals that brought together a religiously divided, diverse group of people 250 years ago.
	And if you believe, as I do, that these common ideals are essential to our national revival, then it should inform not just our immigration policy, but what we expect of our own citizens as well.
	So to a national libertarian, and I think I'm blowing my cover here, but that's the camp I fall in, the top objectives here of US immigration policy are to protect U.S. national security, to preserve U.S. national identity, and to promote U.S. economic growth in that order.
	That's different from the myopic neoliberal worldview of yesterday, which promoted economic growth at all costs, even at the expense of national security and even at the expense of national identity.
	But it is also different from the national protectionist view, who I believe myopically promote American wage growth, worker wage growth, even at the expense of these other important national objectives.
	In the National Libertarian view, immigration policy should not be labor policy, certainly not just labor policy.
	And on this view, the quality of immigrants, both in terms of their allegiance to the United States of America and their ability to make contributions to the United States of America, matters far more than the quantity of immigration.
	With more stringent screening of those immigrants for loyalty, for civic knowledge, confirmation of their ability to make contributions, there would almost certainly be fewer, far fewer immigrants entering the United States by reducing chain migration, asylum seekers, and refugees.
	But I think that's the right way to, in a principled way, achieve that objective rather than arbitrary, and I believe sloppy numerical caps on the numbers of immigrants that enter on a given year.
	So here's the bottom line on immigration policy.
	Entering the United States of America is not a right, it is a privilege.
	And with that privilege comes a duty to this country.
	Immigration policy is summarized for me in three simple maxims.
	No migration without consent.
	Consent should only be granted to migrants who benefit America and who share American national values.
	And migrants who enter unlawfully without consent must be removed.
	It's that simple on immigration policy.
	But we have to be tethered to the first principles for actually carrying it out.
	And that means we're going to have to turn most immigrants away.
	I mean, the reality is the Center for Immigration Studies actually put these numbers out.
	Approximately 700 million people would enter the United States today if we actually did have open borders.
	So the reality is the overwhelming majority of immigrants are going to have to be turned away, but it won't be because domestic labor unions are afraid of foreign competition.
	It'll be because we have national boundaries and a national identity and a rule of law to preserve in the United States of America.
	And I think it's worth seeing the difference between those two justifications, even if they get us to, if not the exact same place, to mostly the same place in the end.
	And that brings me to the most important difference of all between the National Protectionist Wing and the National Libertarian Wing.
	Which is our attitudes to the regulatory state itself.
	This is a topic that's near and dear to my heart.
	The National Protectionist view, I believe at its core, believes in reshaping and redirecting the regulatory state to achieve objectives that advance the interests of American workers and American manufacturers.
	By contrast, the National Libertarian view is different.
	We don't believe in reshaping the regulatory state to accomplish any objective.
	We believe in dismantling the regulatory state altogether.
	Not because we don't care about American workers or manufacturers, but because we believe this is the way to best advance the interests of American workers and manufacturers.
	Reform is not an option.
	The only option is to shut it down.
	That is a stark view.
	And while I appreciate the applause, I think it's worth noting where the rubber hits the road, because I do think even in this room, or certainly in our movement, a movement amongst friends that reject the historical neoliberal consensus, I do think when push comes to shove, there is a diversity of our commitments to actually seeing it through.
	I don't mean this metaphorically, shut it down.
	This isn't deep state bashing, you know, normal verbiage stuff, all right?
	This is how serious are we about actually getting in there and shutting it down, national protectionists.
	Many believe in expanding the scope of certain agencies like the FTC. Many national protectionists believe that Lena Kahn is doing a good job.
	And I give credit to those who are actually courageous enough to be principled to their own convictions to actually verbalize that.
	They believe the FTC's job isn't to simply focus on the historical objective of consumer protection, but to focus more broadly on what we might call fair competition.
	By contrast, the National Libertarian, and I share this view, believes that a government regulator should not be empowered to pass judgment on what does or does not count As fair competition, certainly not without going through the constitutionally ordained lawmaking process of Congress, delegating it instead to an unconstitutionally unelected federal bureaucrat.
	The same thing goes for other less discussed agencies, the CFPB, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or the Department of Transportation.
	National protectionists believe that the failure of poorly run companies in regulated industries like aviation and railroads It means that we need more regulations to protect workers and passengers in those industries.
	It's a reasonable view, but it's a different view than mine, where the National Libertarian believes that the regulatory state was the root cause of those failures in the first place.
	To be clear, we all agree that it is utterly unacceptable for American companies or government contractors like Boeing to build airplanes with doors that fly off mid-flight or trains that contain toxic chemicals flying off the rails in places like East Palestine in my home state of Ohio.
	But we differ in our diagnosis of the problem and therefore in our respective vision of the ultimate solution.
	Take the CFPB. A lot of good national conservatives in the protectionist camp, people we know and love, have introduced bills that are aiming to protect consumers from higher credit card interest rates, setting a ceiling at two percentage points below the average credit card's APR. You could debate the policy merits.
	I personally think there are some significant issues with that.
	Most average credit cards could actually be deemed illegal if that law were to pass.
	You could risk cutting off hardworking Americans from the credit market.
	But put aside the policy debate on the merits, the deeper issue is that laws like this would expand and empower agencies like the CFPB, which was created in the post-2008 Dodd-Frank Act and was inaugurated by none other than Elizabeth Warren.
	The agency is supposedly self-funded.
	It's actually a misnomer.
	It all is footed by the taxpayer in the bill in the end, but that's a discussion for another day.
	The fact that they call it a self-funded independent agency allows it to escape democratic accountability and the backstop of congressional oversight.
	That CFPB, that agency was the same agency that very recently just started demanding, you guessed it, that small businesses disclose for their loan applicants.
	They require their loan applicants to disclose their race, their ethnicity, their sex, whether their business is minority-owned, whether it's woman-owned, whether it's LGBT-owned.
	And of course, everybody in this room is totally against that.
	Every national conservative is against the weaponization of administrative power to advance this kind of rank social progressivism.
	But the real question is, why on earth would we then empower that same government agency with even greater authority through added consumer protection regulations?
	The question is this, is do we as America First conservatives really want to be handing rogue government agencies like the CFPB with more power?
	The national libertarian answer to that question is simple.
	Hell no is the answer to that question.
	The right answer is not to give the CFPB more power while admonishing it to do the right things.
	The right answer is actually to get in there and shut it down.
	You're starting to get the point.
	I like that.
	So I think, look, we've talked a big game as recently about 2023. I'm going to give you a couple more examples, and then we're going to open this up for Q&A. But to really shed light and to see the contrast here, I think it takes getting into the details a little bit.
	In 2023, you've seen a lot of conservatives step up and talk about recouping bank executive pay for banks that have received bailouts.
	Sounds like a reasonable idea.
	If you're a bank that's been bailed out by the taxpayers, that executive should not be getting their bonus or keep their executive pay.
	Fine.
	But there's a difference in the question of emphasis.
	If you're a national libertarian, you believe that the government should not be in the business of bailing out banks in the first place.
	That's where the real root cause is not recouping the executive pay.
	And a strong national libertarian position would go even further.
	Certainly my view, to dismantle the scope creep of the U.S. Federal Reserve itself by limiting its mandate to dollar stability, period, instead of trying to centrally manage inflation and unemployment as some sort of centralized god.
	It's like the equivalent of a drunken bar patron trying to throw darts, hitting two different targets at the same time with one dart badly missing on both.
	That's what our Federal Reserve has been doing to the detriment of American workers because they have viewed wage growth as a leading indicator of inflation.
	When, in fact, anybody who's ever been in the business world knows that wages are the last thing to go up in an economic cycle, which means they tighten monetary policy right into a downturn of the economic cycle, which gives us booms, busts, and then, what do you know, bailouts in the end, and having a side debate about whether or not we should recoup bank payments when, in fact, what we need to be doing is put the Federal Reserve in its place.
	That's the National Libertarian view, which is a very different emphasis than arguing after the fact of a National Protectionist that looks the other way when Silicon Valley Bank gets bailed out, but then the question about how we actually recoup executive pay is the only thing that's left.
	The Department of Education is another example.
	The National Protectionist view is we've been paying too much for four-year college degrees and subsidizing that.
	I agree with it.
	Now, in one view, the right answer is, well, we need to instead subsidize more trade schools and vocational education.
	To be clear, I think trade schools and vocational education are important for the fabric of the United States.
	But the question is, what role do we want the Department of Education playing in that?
	Do we really want the same agency that has infected woke dogmas in our public schools across the board, inflated the cost through subsidies for four-year college education, to now be the same bureaucracy that somehow is tasked with carrying out the noble goal of fostering education?
	And subsidizing vocational programs and two-year college degrees instead?
	No, the right answer is not to reform the Department of Education.
	The right answer is to get in there and shut it down.
	That is the principled position.
	And return that money to states and their citizens.
	And so I think the bottom line on the regulatory state is this.
	I think everybody in this room agrees, myself included, certainly, that we need to get in there and start deporting millions of illegal aliens who should not be in this country in the first place.
	But I think we might vary in our level of commitment to the second kind of mass deportation that I believe we also require, which is the mass deportation of millions of unelected federal bureaucrats out of Washington, D.C. as well.
	That's what it means to actually get in there and shut it down.
	And it's notable that the conditions have never been more ripe in our history, certainly in the 100-year history since the advent of Woodrow Wilson's administrative state expanded under FDR and probably mostly nearly every major president since then.
	This is a historic opportunity that we actually have to get in there to do it.
	After 2022, West Virginia versus EPA that held major questions cannot be decided by administrative fiat, by the recent rulings of the Supreme Court this cycle in Loper and in Jarcusy from the Supreme Court that effectively said that many of these agency actions are unconstitutional.
	An amenable U.S. president has never been more empowered than he is today to actually take back the power from unelected bureaucrats and put that power back and vest it in those who have actually been elected.
	The mechanics of how that would occur, it's important.
	That's a topic for another day.
	I'm not going to plan to get into it unless it comes up in Q&A. But what I will say is for the first time in modern American history, certainly in a generation, the national libertarian dream is no longer a fantasy, but an achievable reality.
	So in conclusion, the difference between these two philosophies of national conservatism comes down to a question of prioritization.
	The neoliberal view was concerned with two core objectives above all else, maximizing the size of the economic pie and using capitalism as a vector to spread democracy around the world to project U.S. power.
	That was the neoliberal view.
	By contrast, the national protectionist view focuses on guaranteeing wages for American workers and to elevate the prices that American manufacturers are able to command in the marketplace.
	Whereas the national libertarian view is concerned for most of With getting in there and actually dismantling the regulatory state as its top concern.
	Not because this objective is more important than adopting policies that help workers and manufacturers, but because it is the way to help American workers and manufacturers.
	I don't think we're going to beat the left by adopting the methods of the left.
	I don't care to replace a left-wing nanny state with a right-wing nanny state.
	Our goal is to dismantle the nanny state altogether, permanently once and for all, to burn it and metaphorically burn its ashes once more, and if we succeed in doing so...
	That will mark the beginning of an American revival that starts with the radical principle of the American founding that the people who we elect to run the government will once again be the ones who actually run the government.
	We say hell no to the vision of old world Europe that distrusts we the people, that said we the people can't be sorted, can't be trusted to sort out our differences on climate change or racial equity.
	We say hell no to that vision.
	We the people for better or worse will govern ourselves without the managerial class of the administrative state telling us how we live our lives and we will not take over that apparatus for the purpose of redirecting it.
	We're going to get in there for the purpose of actually once and for all shutting it down.
	Thank you for your warm welcome everybody.
	I look forward To opening this up for a few questions of conversation before we wrap tonight.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	My only challenge is, Vivek, is how do we get the Republican Party to cooperate with us?
	I mean, they may need a gender change or something, but the reason that we are where we are is that there's no opposition party to the Marxist left.
	Yeah, look, I don't disagree with you.
	I will say that This year presents a unique opportunity for that.
	I'll tell you why.
	So I've been saying this for a year and a half.
	Back when I was saying this in April of last year, it was deemed a conspiracy theory.
	Now the very people who called it a conspiracy theory acknowledge it's a reality that Joe Biden is likely at this point not even going to be the nominee.
	I said this year and a half ago, it's obvious today.
	And I think this presents an opportunity for us because we don't know who they're going to put up now.
	But the question is, who they put up?
	It doesn't matter, actually.
	We obsess over that too much.
	We obsessed over the radical Biden agenda.
	We got a red wave that never came in 2022. I think the way we're going to succeed in saving this country and in a practical sense in winning this Upcoming election, dare I say it in a landslide, is by forgetting what the left puts up on offer, which puppet they put up to replace Biden.
	He's not even really the President of the United States, after all.
	It's a puppet for the managerial class.
	Instead of focusing on them, focus on who we are and what we actually stand for.
	We offer an actual alternative vision of our own.
	And I think it's been a very long time since we've done that.
	And that's a big part of the purpose of the speech I gave here today.
	These are topics I have not yet really covered in much of my public commentary that's going to change in the months and years ahead.
	Because I believe we have to understand not only what we support but why we actually stand for it.
	Especially in the tough cases where the rubber hits the road.
	And so that's what we're missing in the conservative movement.
	We can't just be against what the left puts up.
	We have to offer an alternative vision of our own.
	And I think the future direction of this country is a fusion of that libertarian nationalist vision that both protects our national identity, but dismantles the regulatory state in a way that our founding fathers envisioned.
	Thank you, man.
	I appreciate it.
	Vivek, good comments on legal immigration, but I want to call you on something.
	You danced around the critical question, which is in legal immigration, how many?
	How many?
	And currently, before Biden blew things up, we're taking 1.1 to 1.2 million a year.
	And what would be your number of legal immigrants?
	Keeping in mind that just family reunification, that is husband marrying wife, brings in 250,000 a year, not even the children.
	So right there, unless you're going to deny the American the right to bring in his spouse, You have 250,000 immigrants every year.
	So I want to make sure I heard it because you're saying legal or illegal.
	The right number for illegal immigration is zero.
	I think we're not stopping until we get that job done.
	On legal immigration, The answer is going to be less, but I think the question of what number is the wrong question to ask respectfully.
	I think the right question to ask is what is the quality of immigrants we want?
	Do you demonstrate civic loyalty to this country?
	Are you willing to abandon citizenship to any other nation?
	Citizenship is really about loyalty other than this one.
	Do you adopt English and embrace it as the national language?
	Do you demonstrate an understanding of the ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence in the U.S. Constitution?
	Do you have a demonstrated commitment to work hard to be able to actually advance the interests of American citizens?
	The sole purpose of U.S. immigration policy should be to advance the interests of U.S. citizens.
	So if the number of immigrants who meet that criteria is zero, then the answer is going to be zero.
	If the number of immigrants who meet that criteria is in excess of the number proposed in whatever congressional bill is floating around on a given day, then it may be in excess of that.
	But I think the right question has to focus on the quality of those immigrants It will, on a pragmatic note, almost certainly mean vastly less immigration than the status quo.
	A lot of the chain migration, the spousal case is the hard case.
	A lot of chain migration has nothing to do with spousals coming over, it's distant family members coming over as part of chain migration.
	The number of asylum applications, refugee applications, and humanitarian goals, I think all of that really goes out the window for a proper immigration policy that asks what type of immigration advances the interests of the U.S. citizens who are already here.
	And the failure of current policies is that in many cases we're not getting certain immigrants who have been actually crowded out by the otherwise backlog process that could add value to the immigrants who are here, but we're letting in far more who actually do erode both our national identity as well as even our own national security.
	That's the way I view it.
	Thank you.
	Thank you, Mr. Ramaswamy.
	I very much agree with your policy proposal to decouple from China, but I wanted to pick your brain on the reality that in the status quo, our sanctions regime and various mechanisms we would probably use to decouple from China rely upon broad statutes and how much that would be undercut by cases like Loper Bright, West Virginia, insofar as they circumscribed the executive's ability to interpret those statutes and rule-make to then decouple from China.
	So you're saying there's a tension between curbing the executive, the power of the executive, versus actually taking the steps required to declare independence from China?
	Yeah, like, for example, IEPA, which is the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, very broad statute.
	And the question is, if we are going to buy your whole view on the administrative state, do you think it's possible we can pass new statutes that are specific enough to decouple China?
	And it's a great form of question because you could ask that same form of question also fighting illegal immigration because how much more are you going to get done through DHS if DHS is much more constrained in its ability to interpret the law.
	So this cuts both ways, admittedly.
	Here's my view on it.
	First of all, there's a difference between two types of executive actions.
	Executive actions taken by the person who we, the people, elect to run the government, that's the US president, versus executive actions that are taken by administrative agencies that nobody ever actually elected to that office.
	So when I talk about shutting down the deep state, I'm not talking about eliminating the presidency.
	I'm talking about making sure the President of the United States is actually the one taking the executive action rather than unelected bureaucrats underneath him.
	And the scope of the Supreme Court decisions in, for example, the Undertaker Loper, which was overturned Chevron deference, what that said is these administrative agencies no longer enjoy deference In their actual interpretation of the law.
	So if you separate that from what a strong U.S. president is able to do within the bounds of law versus what many of these agencies have been doing, which is outside the bounds of law, I think that maps out the path forward.
	Strong president acts, unelected bureaucrats in the agencies don't.
	And that's my answer.
	May you follow up or?
	Briefly, but I want to be respectful of the other questions.
	But how do you respond to that to seal law, for example, which basically held that unless you're a multi-member agency like the FTZ, you basically have to be under presidential purview.
	And what we're bright does, I don't think, makes a distinction between presidential rulemaking or agencies under presidential control rulemaking and independent agency rulemaking.
	So, like, I don't know if this is actually true.
	Yes, it'll be right for the Supreme Court.
	I mean, this is work on bleeding-edge terrain.
	But my view is, to make it really simple for a broad audience watching online and everything else, is The people we elect to run the government are no longer the ones who actually run the government.
	And on my view, we restore power to the people who we, the people, elect with the backdrop of democratic accountability, including the U.S. president, to effectuate the laws.
	But that means we have to dismantle the three-letter agency apparatus that sits underneath them.
	And the current Supreme Court rulings, that's really the center of gravity of where they've taken the power back and given it back to the people.
	That would be my answer to the question.
	Thank you.
	I'm going to add a dimension that I think complicates the distinction you want to make.
	To onshore industries that are vital to our security also means protecting jobs with the skills vital to our national security.
	And that means protecting jobs not just in current plants or current industries, but in future industries to which those skills are relevant.
	So, I think some of the contrast, because you actually have to, if you want to have those people working in America doing those vital tasks, even some of them we don't know what they are, you actually do have to protect jobs and protect wages, not just supply chains and manufacturers.
	So look, I think that my goal in the speech today was to lay out a contrast where the view, other than the one I am advancing, is still one I respect.
	I think you raised a valuable point.
	But if there's one point you leave this discussion with that we're having here today is that there is no free lunch with respect to what we're trading off when we do.
	When you talk about the competitiveness of American manufacturers and onshoring to the United States, that should be the first and best option for any of our supply chains.
	But if we view it as an urgent need, and I do, to be able to, for example, decouple from China, then that is necessarily going to mean, if you view that as the top priority that the gentleman who asked the last question believes it is as well, that is in the near term going to require nearshoring in combination with onshoring as well.
	And so it's a question of prioritization.
	Same thing with the regulatory state.
	Do we need more vocational and trade education In the United States of America, we do, actually.
	But what I'll say in closing, in wrapping this up is, first of all, thank you for the opportunity to use this forum as a chance to air what I believe is an important conversation that refines who we are as a movement and where we're going from here in America first.
	Donald Trump laid the foundation.
	He revived it this century.
	But that America First movement, as I laid out at the beginning of my speech, really began in 2016. In one sense it did, in one sense it actually began in 1776. And I think we still have another 250 years and then some still left yet to go if we revive the principles of our founding in the first place.
	I do believe that I'm seeing this late in the day perhaps so many young people in the audience I do believe that our country right now is, in some sense, everything we've talked about is a symptom of that deeper hunger for a national identity that we're missing today.
	And I think that that's the root cause from the invasion of our southern border to our economic malaise to our loss of self-confidence to the erosion of our standing on the global stage.
	Underlying that, I think, is the largest loss of national self-confidence in the history of our country.
	And if we're able to fill that void of identity, With, to your question, our own vision of who we are and what we stand for, not just as conservatives, but as Americans, then I believe, not in some fake politician way,
	but in a true way, I actually believe that our best days as a country Are actually still ahead of us, that we're not destined to become some backwater relegated to the footnotes of history, an elegant decay of the kind that the United Kingdom went through over the course of the last 250 years,
	but a nation that is still, like you, young, on its way, still to our best days, which may yet be not just years, but centuries ahead of us.
	That's my hope, and I think the conversation that we began tonight will be part of what gets us there.
	Thank you, guys.

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