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
And there was just a study by Gordon Hanson out of Harvard and some other people. Other jobs did come back, but they were jobs – at the lowest level of health care and the like. In other words, they were, did employment come back? Yeah, but the people went from having the kind of job that I described, one that you could support your family and be proud of, to one where you really couldn't.
Just look at the dignity of work is what is the key. But useful work. Useful, productive work. And what I always say, Tucker, is we need a country – where parents are hopeful for their children, but where children are proud of their parents. And we're losing that. We need that.
We need families where people work and do productive, good work, and they're proud of the work, and they feel better about themselves, and they project that to their children and to the community, to the Little League, to all these kinds of things.
These people who worked in these factories in Ashtabula when I was growing up, and some of them, and some farmers, they were proud, hardworking people who, at the end of the day, you know, said, my dad is this. You know what I mean? It was a proud, healthy thing.
Yeah, my father was a doctor.
Yeah, my father's an interesting story. The Lighthizers—of course, there's a lot of us that aren't Lighthizers, right? But the Lighthizer strain came over— to the United States in 1748. There was a guy named George Lighthizer who came up. He was an illiterate from what is now Germany. He fought in the revolution. He was two years older than George Washington. He was an old guy.
He fought at Trenton. He was at Valley Forge, this guy. At Princeton, he was on the line with two of his kids, who were quite young, all three of them on the line together. He got out after three years. Of course, by this point, I don't know what he would have been, maybe 48, which was an old, old person. The kids stayed on and fought all the way through to Yorktown.
So fast forward multiple generations, and it's a whole lot fewer generations than you think. I'll mention that because it's sort of a quirky thing unrelated to what we're talking about, but sort of interesting. But You find my father and his brother after that hundred and two hundred and some years of here were the first ones to go to college.
And both of them went to college and ultimately to medical school. My father graduated from college at 29, having worked in the steel mills, you know, before he went to college and then finally ended up graduating the University of West Virginia and then NYU Medical School. So it was like the American dream. How did he wind up in the town? In Ashtabula?
You know, he was... They were from Ohio. They were from the other side of Ohio. I think he knew some people in Ashtabula. This would have been... you know, in the mid-30s, right, 1930s. But in terms of this, it's just a quirky thing. So my grandfather's grandfather, all right? No, I never knew my grandfather on my father's side. My grandfather's grandfather fought in the Battle of Baltimore.
That's incredible. In 1814. So my grandfather, if you think of it, it's just like, you know what it is, a bunch of older guys having kids, like one after the other. But it's like one of these kind of weird, I tell people, they'll think, well, that can't possibly be true. But it's in fact true. My grandfather's grandfather.
And that guy who fought, had half brothers who fought at, you know, in the American Revolution. Amazing. It's just like a little – literally, it's kind of a crazy thought.
No, there are none. There's none in the town now. There's none in the town.
No, I didn't. I went away to school outside of Cleveland. I went to a Catholic boys' school outside of Cleveland called Gilmore Catholic High School.
Yeah, there are some. Not a lot, but there are some. It's a – It's a different world. And as I say, if it was just Ashtabula, who would care? But it's not just Ashtabula.
It's across the country. It's like this. You go to Cleveland. You can't go to these major cities. It's Chicago. It's Omaha. You go to these cities and you say – It shouldn't be like this. And the kind of notion, Tucker, was that we were sort of taught at a period – well, it's – you know, the people were lazy or they were in unions and that was bad or that the managers were bad.
And none of those were true. It was the result of an economic policy – largely in other countries and a defenseless kind of foolish notion of benign neglect in America. And all of these bad outcomes are the result of this and other things. I don't want to simplify it too much. It's a sad thing. And we now have a chance to turn it around. And is that going to create disruption?
Of course it's going to create disruption. There's never been great change that didn't create disruption. But the price, which I don't think will be great, will be dwarfed by the benefit if we have – People working class people in the middle class again and hopeful and dignified and staying married and innovating and doing the kinds of things that America needs.
In some cases, it's a combination. And then I want to get back to this question about economists. At some point, it's a combination of that. And corporations funding it. Well, of course.
Who literally benefit from it. And you're like, holy cow, why won't – and then you have to try to chase that through the political system. And so you end up with the Chamber of Commerce of the United States in favor of these things that are quite harmful to the people that I care about and that the president cares about. And they're not against these things because they help those people.
Showing 101–120 of 237 · page 6 of 12
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