Justin Wolfers

who want to make a difference in public life.

And so you think about, if you think about what the president's undermined, the president has systematically tried to enrich himself and his family, he's invited foreign countries to essentially bribe him in a variety of ways that yield payoffs for him and in return he's enriching

folks elsewhere.

What he's done is he's got a system of, some people call it crony capitalism, but basically he's the king.

And if you come and compliment him and you give him a nice bar of gold or you bow or you kiss the ring, then you get blessed.

And if not, he'll come after your company.

And what that does is it moves competition between companies from being something they fight in the marketplace, right?

Fighting in the marketplace is how you ensure the best companies survive, the best products survive.

It's what ensures the prices go down and quality goes up.

We're moving competition from that to who can best kiss the ring.

And the thing is a shitty product can kiss the ring, a shitty product at a high price.

And so this is the foundation of what foundations of American capitalism.

And I think the foundations of our prosperity.

And so, look, that was a long, fancy, self-important academic answer to your question.

I love that.

But I think rebuilding those institutions and fortifying them and understanding how important they are and making them so that they're going to be completely resistant to attack in the future.

That's how we take American prosperity and lock it in the box and say, you're here to stay.

I know we're out of time, but what I want to do actually is try and give an intellectual framework that gives birth to what you just said.

So a very natural way of thinking about an economy is that it's all about competition.

And if I win, you lose.