Ep. 410 Breaking Down Oren Cass Talking Free Trade With Tucker
Adam Haman returns, this time helping Bob to evaluate Oren Cass–a leading protectionist on the right–in his recent appearance on the Tucker Carlson show.
Mentioned in the Episode and Other Links of Interest:
- The YouTube version of this conversation.
- Oren Cass on Tucker Carlson.
- Bob’s interview of Oren on the InFi podcast.
- Oren’s essay on free trade’s “origin myth,” and Phil Magness’ response.
- The HamanNature substack.
- Help support the Bob Murphy Show.
About the author, Robert
Christian and economist, Chief Economist at infineo, and Senior Fellow with the Mises Institute.
Tucker says we shouldn’t be able to fire truck drivers because driving trucks is their life! Also, notice his name, CAR-lson TUCKER vs CAR TRUCKER. He was born day 136 of the yr, the 16th triangular #. “Driving age” is 16. The gematria of his name, Carlson Tucker, is 160.
It’s a bizarre random concern to clump billions and billions of people into nation-state categories and then claim victory for this one or that one. That would clump me together with my American sister’s American murderer and with the murderers of the county that I live in and the Bernie Sanders voters and the profane and the atheists and the bullies. How are we on the same team Just because I exited my mother’s womb in the same building?
I can’t help agreeing that Oren Cass is not real different from most Progressives … and it does remind me that one of the earliest Progressives was the Republican President Theodore Roosevelt who expanded government power considerably and kicked off the “Government will fix it!” mentality.
To put a bit of nuance into this … of course I think we are all hoping that the War on Child Hunger can result in a great victory … and protect us all in much the same way as the War on Drugs, for example.
I can’t help having this niggling doubt, that maybe incentives do matter … what if the people heroically solving problems might quietly be tempted to look for ways to prolong the very problems they were sent to solve? I mean, when you think about it, no worker wants to put himself out of a job. I dunno how I became so cynical … it seemed to happen around the time I saw the World “Health” Organization working hand and glove with very people who were caught doing gain of function research … and then we were all supposed to ignore that, pretend it never happened, and sign over more power and money. Somehow that little incident got me scratching my head a bit, ya know.
So just to ask the question … what if child hunger and drugs are only incidental problems, and the real deeper issue is trust itself? Once you know you can’t trust a guy … how can you then go and hand over authority to that guy and get him to fix things for you? It’s almost like the whole social structure could fall in a heap.