Sohrab Ahmari
speaker
699 appearances
6 recordings
2 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 10 Aug
Sohrab Ahmari’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Like how do we, how do we square that? Yes. So a couple of, I want to address the Adam's point. I mean, I think it's right that The manufacturing share of the GDP can go up somewhat, but that doesn't necessarily translate into huge gains in terms of the manufacturing share of the workforce precisely because of automation. I think everyone in this space recognizes that.
The first thing I'd say is, first of all, the jobs that are currently in manufacturing are worth protecting. Once a month, there's like a kind of gathering of manufacturers who've committed to manufacture only in the United States. And they will tell you that, you know, Chinese dumping threatens their current employees, which are significant numbers.
You know, would that get us to 30 percent manufacturing if all these jobs were protected? No.
I agree. I agree. But, you know, I mean, there are jobs to protect right now in this in the sector because of its other dimensions of its national security dimension. The fact that, again, to go back to this idea that the Hamiltonian model sought to bind capital to place to political community.
Right. And because of the capital investments involved, the manufacturing, the local factory boss is a lot more, I mean, he might be a jerk and you have to fight him with unions. And I'm all for that. As Adam knows, I'm a pretty, for someone who is of the center, right, I'm all for, you know, trying to boost our union density and all that.
But still he's connect, he or she is connected to the local community in a way that Wall Street or distant, you know, Silicon Valley tech firms are not. But okay, so if we try our best to increase the manufacturing share of the workforce, that will hit a limit.
However, let's try at first, because the thing is, if we get to the point where we break corporate America's addiction to cheap labor, especially through offshoring, it will force them to pay higher wages here locally or to innovate. Right now, the current kind of globalization model that we're hopefully transitioning out of incentivizes them
not to actually do labor-saving technologies, but to try to do the same things with cheaper and cheaper labor.
But just to finish this point, and I agree with that, you know, I welcome our robot overlords. Like, let's bring them over. And if we're going to have like a full luxury automated communism. Let them be our robots.
You know, and then, you know, you have an economy that can pay more for its caretakers, for the kinds of workers that Adam mentioned, that the strength of the manufacturing sector can absorb higher wages in, you know, Burger King or in, home healthcare and all those other sectors. But they won't.
So the way I'd put this is that they're pursuing Hamiltonian means by Jacksonian ends. Now, let me explain that. By the way, both are in my wallet right now. Yes, exactly right. I just want to make that clear. May there be ever more of them.
But Arthur Schlesinger, the great New Deal historian, described the New Deal project as Hamiltonian means for Jeffersonian ends, meaning using big governments, using sort of directing markets and so on and so forth. for the Jeffersonian ideal of a kind of prosperous, relatively egalitarian order. Of course, the Jeffersonian vision didn't include African-Americans in its ambit. Right.
But still, the idea was to use this kind of big state interventionist model to achieve the small-r Republican Jeffersonian model. So now I think if you want to use these kind of categories, the Trumpians are coming in. They have I think Hamiltonian ends in mind. They want a manufacturing-led economy, et cetera, et cetera.
But they're using the methods of Andrew Jackson, of course, the co-founder of the Democratic Party, who believed in breaking things. He thought that the Second Bank of the United States was a vehicle for entrenched Northeastern elites, and in some ways it was. So Hulk smash. He broke it. But the results, it didn't redound to the benefit of those people.
It actually, as Adam knows better than I do, that his war on the second bank immediately resulted in inflation and a depression as a result of like wildcat banking, lots of messy small banks, et cetera, et cetera. And the U.S. really didn't stabilize its financial system for nearly a century until the establishment of the Federal Reserve. So I see some of that
kind of contradiction in the Trumpians. I like some of their protectionist efforts and so on, but I find the, you know, frankly, the Elon Musk Doge stuff really disturbing and really contradictory to, you know, you need state capacity if they want to do stuff like that. You need workforce development. By the way, unions can be a part of workforce development. They're very good at it, as we know.
Unfortunately, what they've done is they've crippled the National Labor Relations Board, which I find very disturbing. Lots of regulators that do good things, like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, that would have regulated Elon's own ex if he wants to turn it into a payment app.
Gee, why would he have done that? In a completely self-interested way. So, I mean, that's the Jacksonian part. And the problem with the Jacksonians is... They harness populist anger with the economic order, but it redounds to the benefit of other elements of capital. And that's the problem with the Trumpians.
I mean, as with all these things, I think it's a mix and we... We should be careful about the Trumpians as a whole because there are very serious internal divisions between them. There is definitely the Lex Luthor-like kind of techno overlords. Who, by the way, all do have the Lex Luthor.
At least in some dimension, insofar as the that's called the tech right or the techno billionaires are asserting, you know, an ever greater role in the Trump administration. It's to the to the detriment of its populist elements, some of whom, You guys might disagree.
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