I'm John Baxter. Paul Mueller is here, senior research fellow at the American Institute for

Economic Research, and he's done me the favor of writing up a book that I do not believe can make

my reading list. It's 600 pages, and it requires the attention of professional economists

and those who read this.

I'm an amateur reader, but I consume the news.

And so I come to tariffs, now a debate, but also I'll put them in action.

Tariffs and the People's Republic of China's EV production line.

Is it relevant to these cases, Paul, that the EV production line in China is said to have somewhere between 120 and 150 companies producing EVs?

BYD is the number one of that lot.

However, I'm told on bad days, BD BYD does not have a profit to show.

And in July of this year, their production of new

vehicles declined 3.8%. Meanwhile, they wait to get through the tariff barriers or even the

permission barriers of major states around the world. All of that, I'm presuming, is a product of

industrial policy. The CCP said,

do this, and everybody suddenly was building EVs all over the country. Now, that doesn't strike

me as an amateur or something to emulate, is it? I don't think so. I mean, the issue with China, and the way you describe it, I think, is accurate, where the CCP is giving directions, incentives, stimulus to produce, whether it's solar panels or EVs, it's very easy, or maybe I shouldn't say very easy. It's relatively easy to focus on producing a lot of one thing, right? Producing a lot of

steel, producing a lot of roads, producing a lot of vehicles. Now, I don't want to downplay. I mean,

there are a lot of impressive things about China. Their adoption of technology is impressive.

They have a lot of market signals that they're listening to in various parts of the country.

They're open to market. So they're in a far better situation than, say, the Soviet Union was back in the 60s and 70s.

But they have this problem, which is they can tell B.YD and these other manufacturers, build more cars,

dominate the EV market, build, build, build. But the whole point of a price system in markets

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