This is the Cater Daily Podcast for Monday, November 13th,

2023. I'm Caleb Brown. Those on the right who endorse a heavy-handed

government approach to trade and regulation are learning some hard lessons about

how policy gets done, how it doesn't get done, and what the machinery of government does to good

and bad ideas alike.

Cato Scott Linscomb discusses how the new right is learning this very old lesson.

The new right is a, I suppose it's a big tent, it would like to be a big tent for people who have concerns about the general direction of the United States of America and what policies would contribute most to a more

prosperous, happier, secure, and safe America. So Orrin Cass is among these folks and he has a sort of a strong view about, well to put it quite frankly, people who think like you do, Scott Linsicum, about trade and economics and what we ought to value when we talk about trade and economics more broadly.

So if you don't mind, give me the best presentation of what you believe his critique to be?

Well, I think it's twofold.

One is on the economics itself.

The critique is simply that traditional measures of inflation, traditional economic theory, and empirical reality

regarding tariffs on the trade deficit,

the mainstream views of the net economic harms of industrial policy and the rest that these are wrong.

That these are wrong for various reasons, that they fail to account for certain methodological issues, that they fail to account for the fact

that they've been wrong in the past and so forth right now that misses a lot and

economists have been trying to correct the record on things like the inflation

metrics and real wages and the trade deficit and the rest but the other area that I think for our purposes today is more important.

The second argument is that free market fundamentalists like me or like members of kind of the old Republican Party or the old conservative movement

what is pejordively called the old right are really detached from political reality and the

reality of the daily lives of the American people.

And that is that we free market fundamentalists

...