Robert Lighthizer
speaker
237 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Robert Lighthizer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
We're not interested in sort of the materialism of maximizing values. optimizing prices and maximizing consumption. And that's more or less where that's... There's a combination of that. There's a combination of this financialization of America of taking profit out right away so that a few people get very rich, regardless of the effect on others.
If you think of the evolution, Tucker, it's... And we could talk, you know, from the beginning of time about trade and how it evolved. But for our purposes... You would think of it basically as America really from the early 1800s basically became wealthier and wealthier, largely behind the American system.
And Alexander Hamilton kind of an idea of tariffs and subsidies, subsidies in the nature of canals and roads and the like. But tariffs were a key part. By 1870, we had started to turn surpluses. By 1890, we're the richest country in the world, all right? And it kind of progresses like that. And we can talk about that back and forth. And those were almost all Republican elections.
presidents during that entire period only two Democrats during that entire period between Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt and basically tariffs were a key tool and there were ups and downs in that and we can talk about that if people are interested but we got to the second world war And then we had a different challenge. We had to rebuild Europe. We wanted to rebuild Japan for stability.
We wanted to fight communism in the Soviet Union. These were our motivations. And so at that point, we needed a new system, and they developed this new trading system. And the trading system was sort of based on the notion of we'll all reduce barriers. We'll all do better over a period of time. I would say that was – at times it was a successful idea. At times it wasn't a successful idea.
But by the time we got a few – several decades into it, we started seeing people being more and more industrial policy. And by the 1970s into the 1980s. Late 1970s, we started to see our situation get worse. We started having trade deficits. You'll recall that Nixon in 1971 put tariffs on the whole world in order to decouple from gold. We can talk about that if people are interested.
But there were a lot of things that were sort of signals, and that was kind of the peak. By the time we got to Ronald Reagan, as I say, there was already a loss of a lot of jobs. There was an unsettling among our working class people, which, as I say – Unlike a lot of places, it is us. It's 70, 65, 70 percent of it. It is us. And then and then you found yourself the Berlin Wall fell.
There was this notion of the end of history that for now on, everything is going to be better. We're all going to be democracies and we're all going to have open markets. And there's all this greatness. You can remember Frank Fukuyama and other morons.
Yeah, they're right. So then you found yourself with Clinton in the end of Bush. It's not because I don't want to be totally partisan. The end of Bush 41, Herbert Walker Bush, and then into Clinton. And we have what I call the trifecta of stupid. All right. We do NAFTA. We do the WTO, the Uruguay around that. And then the dumbest of them all, we give most favored nation treatment to China.
And those things are done more or less in the times of about 10 years.
Is that correct? No, it passed under Clinton. So this is an interesting fact. In like 1997, I did an article for the New York Times. And you'll recall during the second Clinton election, there was this talk about Indonesian money came into the Clinton.
Exactly. Was it the Commerce Department? Yeah, yeah. I did an article recently. which the New York Times published, it sort of said, well, what's this about? This is not Indonesian money, it's Chinese money. What does China want? They want most favored nation treatment and they want to get into the WTO. And if they do, there won't be an American job that's safe. So this is in 1997.
Fast forward, you have this vote Clinton is pushing it. By the way, it passes with more Republicans than the Democrats. The Republicans are worse on this at that time. A lot of them have kind of learned. And then we have these things pass. So we have this trifecta of stupid, as I call it. And then we have 5 million manufacturing jobs lost. You just see jobs lost.
Wages are basically not going up in real-term sense then. You know, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. And a lot of these very bad outcomes for working people, I would say, for the country generally, you can say, came at that time. Now, if you say, well, is the system deteriorating before then? For sure it was.
But this was like somebody just putting on steroids and acted like – I mean, the only thing that they missed about the evolution of economics was human nature, right? The other thing else they got right. They just missed human nature. As always. Yeah. So then you saw very bad things happen over a long period of time.
You got to the point where you had – at 2016, you had President Trump, as I say, at that point had been complaining about this general notion since he was 35, since he was a kid. And and he kind of gets a populist movement. He's elected. And then we have whatever happened in 2020, a covid thing that ends up affecting our election. And now we are again because we we changed in Trump.
One, 1.0 or whatever that computer people say, we changed the way people think about these things. And they didn't really change back much in Biden. To Biden's credit, his people – I think some of his people were very good. But overall, they didn't make a lot of decisions to make better what we did. But they didn't make it worse. And now we're in Trump or we're in a position to actually –
make substantial changes. And I know that's what you want me on here to talk about, but the most fundamental thing is The system has failed America generally, and it's failed our working people dramatically. And that's been going on in an acute state for at least 25 years.
We are the only G7 country that has a life expectancy of under 80 years. And supposedly we're the richest country in the world, supposedly. Now, there's a lot of things contributing to that. Everyone sees it all their own way, and there's a lot of things contributing to it. But it's an emergency. It's an absolute crisis.
And I'm telling you, this divergence between this income inequality is another problem.
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