This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, November 24th, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

There are several paths forward for the American economy.

One path readily advanced by a movement on the right

looks a lot like a loser's playbook, protect industries and workers with the heavy hand of

government, and otherwise move toward more state interventions into economic affairs.

Samuel Gregg is author of the new book The Next American Economy.

We spoke last week.

How do you evaluate the so-called conservative nationalists at least with respect to trade policy and sort of a more general economic policy?

It's very clear to my mind that economic nationalists of today are echoing the same arguments that economic nationalists have made forever.

So they're clearly skeptical of the benefits of trade.

They're inclined to use things like industrial policy to try and generate particular outcomes in different sectors of the economy,

often with a view to trying to shape the economic

circumstances in which particular segments of American society find themselves.

The problem with these policies is the problems that these policies have always had.

That protectionism leads to an inward looking increasingly uncompcompetitive economy that generates less growth,

that tariffs and other means of protectionism invariably become captured by interest groups, by lobbyists, and that when it comes to things like industrial policy,

industrial policy has a terrible record of success.

One need only look at examples like Japan, which tried this on a relatively systematic way for several decades and it contributed to the 20 years of stagnation

that the Japanese economy entered into in the early 1990s. Not to mention the way in which industrial policy like protectionism and other such policies

get very quickly captured by different interest groups and don't generate, and these policies don't generate for the most part the type of outcomes that they promise.

So economically speaking, the people on the right who are embracing these ideas about the economy

...