I'm John Batchel with my good colleagues, Gordon Chang at Gordon G. Chang and Steve Yates of the Heritage Foundation.

The headline in the Bloomberg is promising.

Trump to launch $12 billion critical mineral stockpile to blunt reliance on China.

This is where ours that are not rare and that we allowed to drift into entirely the hands of the Chinese masters who plan for this.

It's not that they have everything they need, but they have access to the processing of everything they need.

They dominate Southeast Asia where there are willing hands to participate in the processing

of errors, though that the cancer rate is three times normal when you work anywhere near them.

It doesn't bother some countries like Thailand and Indonesia. And China crushed the price

until there was no one in the markets but them, and then they dominate.

That was a plan.

It's not accidental.

It's not like we let it slip, although we did see it happening.

Steve, I don't want to blame the Biden people.

I don't want to blame the Obama people.

I don't want to blame the Bush people, but I do.

Did they not see this happening, the concentration of power?

It used to be called cornering the market. It was part of the Wall Street in the 19th century.

Do we need to refresh them, their memories about how it works?

Well, John, in my estimation, and I lived through this, as did you too, that we had a leadership class that was preaching a theology of free markets that is just alien to how China especially, but some of our other adversarial and competitive economies and governments operate.

And so we were preaching the sweet wisdom of an interpretation of Adam Smith that just didn't apply to the world as China was beginning to increasingly construct it. And the description you gave of the control of pricing, I think, is central to understanding what has happened and what will happen unless we build an

alternative system. And it's going to take money for that. So this $12 billion can't be seen as

anything other than a seed account to begin this process. But primarily what it can help

...