Transcription
J.D. Vance just gave a magnificent, concise explanation of why globalization is bad. Globalism, one of the hottest buzzwords of the last 10 years, uh, opposition to globalism, one of being one of the clearest motivating factors behind President Trump's victory in 2016—some would say 2020 and 2024. I'm not getting into that, don't worry.
Most people, though, can't quite explain why globalization is bad because they'll hear the usual objections. They'll say, you know, "Well, look, actually, I know globalization, you know, it upends communities and sometimes jobs are shipped overseas, but it's really great because we get cheap consumer goods and it's inevitable and the world is flat anyway and we've got to keep up and there's no alternative and tariffs are bad and we just—we just have to do it and it's really good and people should stop complaining about it." And the opponents of globalization, they kind of know at a gut level that globalization is bad. The mass migration has harmed their communities; the outsourcing of jobs; the destruction of America's industrial base. They—they know that those things are bad, but they can't quite articulate why.
J.D. Vance provides the reasoning because there were two conceits that our leadership class had when it came to globalization. The first is assuming that we can separate the making of things from the design of things. The idea of globalization was that rich countries would move further up the value chain while the poor countries made the simpler things. It turns out that the geographies that do the manufacturing get awfully good at the designing of things. There are network effects. As you all well understand, cheap labor is fundamentally a crutch, and it's a crutch that inhibits innovation. Every country, from Canada to the UK, that imported large amounts of cheap labor, you've seen productivity stagnate. I'd say that globalization's hunger for cheap labor is—is a problem precisely because it's been bad for innovation. Beautifully put, so articulate. He's just totally smacking down all of the arguments that the really smart globalists make.
The really smart globalists, for decades now, have made the argument, "Look, we're not—we're not like some third-world country; we've developed. And so we're going to just move up the food chain, and we're going to have those poor countries do all those tasks we don't want to do." It's just a macroeconomic version of explaining why we need an open border so that we can get Guatemalan peasants to pick our grapes for us. Well, Americans don't want to do those jobs; Americans don't want to manufacture anything. We can just have slaves in China do it. And but don't worry, we won't lose our competitive edge because we're just going to—we're going to do the designing. We're going to call the shots; we're going to be running the companies; and we're just—we're just going to have the slaves in China make the widgets, and we'll keep it like that. But—but J.D. Vance says, "No, hold on. Turns out that the companies that do the building also rather quickly get good at designing." And when we're talking about a country like China, China's going to get really good at designing really quickly because they're going to steal our intellectual property, too. When you do business in China, you basically have to give the Chinese everything. And there's close coordination between the businesses in China and the Chinese Communist Party. So that doesn't really work.
Okay. Well, I'll tell you what. If we use the slave labor in China, okay, maybe they're going to get good at designing, and American companies are going to have to compete after helping to build up these—these other industrial bases. But, you know, at the very least, it's going to free up our time to innovate, right? And—and J.D. Vance says, "Actually, uh, history doesn't bear that out." This is kind of a version of Nancy Pelosi explaining why they had to pass Obamacare. They had to pass this massive healthcare overhaul because then health insurance would no longer be tied to people's employment, which is an historical circumstance that came about because of a Democrat president, FDR, but that's a story for another time. And—and when your health insurance isn't tied to your employment, then you're freer to change jobs. You don't need to have any job at all. You know, man, you can be a poet; you can be a novelist; you can be a painter. She said things like this, and the—a lot of people believed it. They want to believe it. Oh, if I—if I didn't have to work my nine-to-five, then I could write the great American novel. And the reality of it is, no, you won't. You won't write the great American novel. Most people are terrible poets. Most people probably shouldn't pick up a paintbrush.
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J.D. Vance says the countries that get addicted to the cheap labor—that doesn't free them up to create new products and imagine a new world. They just get kind of used to it, and they get lazy, and they get addicted. So that goes away, too. And he says, "So the reason that we've got to oppose globalization is not just because they took our jobs and it's all right and we want to build up the American middle class again." And all of those are good things, but he's actually hitting the globalist argument at its strength, not its weakness. The globalist argument, saying, "We have to be competitive. We need to innovate. We need to build the future." And J.D. Vance says, "Yeah, yeah, if you want to do that, you have to oppose globalization because the—the facts don't bear out your theory." This guy is freaking good, man. This guy is good. And—and he's good in his own right, and he's really good as part of the Trump administration because Trump understands these problems intuitively. Trump has been on and off campaigning against globalization since the 1980s. Trump has been talking about how great tariffs are, how great building up American industry is, for decades, and he knows it intuitively, and sometimes he'll get into the details a little bit, especially when he's talking about trade deals because that's a specialty of his, but often he's talking from the 30,000-foot view, the broad strokes; he's just—he's just got an amazing political gut, the best political gut I've ever seen; that's what Trump has.
J.D., I don't think understands these problems through his gut. J.D. has gone on an intellectual and political journey and religious journey; he's a religious convert, too. I don't think J.D. is primarily a gut politician. I think J.D. is a very smart, educated guy, very disciplined, who does the reading. I think J.D. has come to these conclusions through rigorous study. And those two go together really, really well because you've got President Trump who just intuitively gets it in politics. He—he just has a sense of the right thing 99% of the time, and then J.D. Vance can come in there and fill in all the details and make all of the arguments. It's—it's a very powerful team, and it's very helpful to have both of those—not just both men but both skills in politics. That was a great clip. Now stop, ring the bell, subscribe. We'll see you next time.