by Matt Agorist, The Free Thought Project:
(The Mises Institute) The 2024 Republican National Convention will be remembered for the raw emotions evoked by an attempted assassination the preceding weekend of its presidential nominee Donald Trump and for the now mostly Trumpified Republicans posing as the populist champions of American workers against the elitist Democrats.
This convention, however, should be remembered for another reason too. It marks the entrenchment of an organized “national conservative” movement within the party that espouses an anti-free-market ideology, overtly scorning individual liberty in favor of a powerful nation-state. This shift in Republican thinking is most clearly evident in Trump’s choice of J.D. Vance as the party’s nominee for vice president (who recently explained his “NatCon” principles in a Foundation for American Innovation podcast) but is also hinted at in Trump’s advocacy of retaliatory tariffs in his acceptance speech:
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“And right now as we speak large factories, just started, are being built across the border in Mexico. So with all the other things happening on our border and they’re being built by China to make cars and to sell them into our country, no tax, no anything. The United Auto Workers ought to be ashamed for allowing this to happen and the leader of the United Auto Workers should be fired immediately and every single auto worker, union and non-union should be voting for Donald Trump because we’re gonna bring back car manufacturing and we’re gonna bring it back fast. The ability, some of the largest auto plants anywhere in the world, think of it, in the world.
“We’re going to bring it back, we’re going to make them, we don’t, we don’t mind that happening. But those plants are going to be built in the United States and our people are going to man those plants and if they don’t agree with us, we’ll put a tariff of approximately 100 to 200% on each car, and they will be unsellable in the United States.”
For his part, Vance closely echoes the talking points of such NatCon champions as American Compass and the Claremont Institute. While conceding that free markets are better than government planners at allocating resources and empowering people to meet each other’s needs (Vance even cites the Austrian economist F.A. Hayek on that point), NatCons like Vance protest that America already has a de facto industrial policy that punishes capital-intensive industries while leaving them vulnerable to the malign policies of the Chinese Communists. According to the NatCons, Americans have a moral obligation to reorient their existing interventionism toward favoring American victims of Communist Chinese policies, not continue to favor the Wall Street and Big Tech elites that profit from the existing globalist order.
There are two fundamental errors in the NatCon portrait of America’s deindustrialization and the NatCon recommendation of “industrial policy” as a remedy, one theoretical, the other historical. From a theoretical perspective, the erection of new trade barriers and fresh governmental malinvestments of labor and other productive inputs can only diminish, not increase, the productivity of workers and thus can only lead to a deterioration of their living standards.
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