Oren Cass: The philosophy of J.D. Vance

via www.youtube.com

It sounds like JD is no free trader. Sounds like he’s no fan of high tech either. This much I knew but Oren Cass makes it sound worse (though he would say better) than I thought. Oren’s economics sounds very primitive to me. His talk of making real things — like noisy machines operated by burly men I presume — here in America and not “pieces of paper” on Wall Street, suggests a pre-medieval idea of trade, though that’s actually inaccurate since bills of credit and much else date back to ancient times. The thing about tariffs in particular is that they’re just another special interest grift that established domestic manufacturers get to burden their competitors, in this case, competitors from other countries. Sure, it makes sense to secure your trading partners. We’ll be sorry if China gets Taiwan and stops the flow of chips to us. But that’s a matter of protecting trade, not burdening it with special interest carve outs.

Oren says Lincoln and Reagan were protectionists, and we like them, don’t we? Lincoln certainly was a protectionist and I’m not a big Lincoln fan. Reagan had a much better record on trade, though nobody’s perfect. Sadly nobody who believes in Fraydom is on the ballot this year. But I’m still for it, both here and in Ukraine. As Moses said, Let my People trade.