Victor Davis Hanson

speaker

2,022 appearances 16 recordings 5 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard 23 Mar

Victor Davis Hanson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 2.

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The Charlie Kirk Show · Victor Davis Hanson Helps Make Sense of a Confusing World · 3 Apr 2025 podcast

And I think he could apply that logic and tone, vocabulary, diction to all of these Europe, China, maybe not China because we expect it from them, but Europe, Canada, Mexico, and not let them get away with the idea that we're waging a unilateral trade war when we're just asking for parity and reciprocity.

Well, to put it another way, We didn't have an income tax. It was envisioned in 1913, but ratified 1916. So then that begs the question, where did the federal government get their money? They had no other source of revenue other than tariffs, essentially. And that was... It wasn't just...

the idea of protecting domestic industries, but it was also a revenue generating mechanism for the federal government. And one of the reasons, to be frank, why people did not want an income tax is because they felt that government by needs would be small and manageable. the federal government would be if it relied on tariff income rather than everybody paying a percentage of their wages.

That was never envisioned by the founders. But tariffs were pretty much part and parcel of the American project until about 1916. And then all of a sudden, we substituted them with this vast new influx of the IRS and income tax revenue. And then people said, well, they're kind of obsolete now.

But they were designed both to fund the federal government, but fund a small federal government, and also to protect vulnerable industries. But remember what the opposition is saying, Charlie, the free but not fair opposition. They're saying... Well, we believe that free trade must be maintained at all costs without exception.

And when you say it hurts Americans, Americans lose jobs in American industries or offshore or outsourced, they say, no, no, it doesn't matter. because the subsidies of our foreign governments are not sustainable if they're dumping product here below the cost of production. And we found that not to be true. China's been fine doing it for almost a half century.

Then they said, well, it lowers consumer prices. because you're bringing in cheap stuff that domestic people have to adjust to. That may or may not be true, but if the other side is being subsidized and your own producers are not being subsidized, then it's a way to put people into bankruptcy. And I can attest for that as somebody who farmed

during the Reagan period when EU agricultural produce was subsidized and dumped in this country. And we were told that that was good for us because it would make us more efficient. And that's the third fallacy.

They say, well, if you allow foreign stuff to come in without a tariff, even though it's being produced at below the cost of production, then you're going to have to compete with it and that'll make you lean and mean. But there's only a certain point where you can compete when you're losing money.

So it's a deliberate policy that, and I'm speaking as a conservative, but a lot of the libertarians believe that even the most abusive tariff, asymmetrical tariffs are in the interest of the target almost as if, you know, get with it or get over it. And it's destroyed the interior of the United States.

There had been a view— In the 1960s and 70s and 80s, as we remember, in 1945, there was no China as an industrial power. Russia was destroyed. Europe was completely leveled, to speak, and Japan was destroyed. So we were providing about 85% of the washers, the dryers, even the vehicles, the planes,

And that started to end as we subsidized the rebirth of these once powerhouses by letting them send their products in here without a tariff, either in the case of our allies... that we owed it to them and they would get back on their feet and they wouldn't turn communist. Or in the case of places like China, they would be liberal.

The more affluent they got, affluence was the twin supposedly of consensual government, which didn't turn out to be true. So we were losing the Rust Belt in the 70s. And then what happened was, I think part of it was during the Reagan administration and the George H.W. and the Bill Clinton, there was this idea that finance was more important than assembly, global finance.

So why this was, the trade was destroying manufacturing and assembly in the middle classes. Then the service classes, and I'm talking about insurance and law and media and academia and and all sorts of investment we were pretty good at. And now we had under globalization, not a 300 million person market at the time, but 6 billion.

And so these areas, anybody who could have a product that was globalized, and that was mostly in these areas, made out like bandits and they sold it to the middle class by saying, well, you have 401ks. That's right.

So maybe you're not making what you want, but you've got all this investment now because, and the high tech as well, you know, we're selling a billion Apple computers or iPhones, and this is all good for you. But the problem was if you had muscular labor, that could be outsourced or offshored, and it was, then it was.

So they said, well, we're gonna provide people with high-tech communication devices, social media services, financial services, law services, academia, all that stuff. But the muscles of the United States will be over with, and that's kind of passe. So even in the case of agriculture, millions of acres were being farmed in Latin America and Asia, and industries were offshore and outsourced.

And the idea was that the middle class, and you could see it when Hillary Clinton went to West Virginia and she said, we're going to get you guys out of business.

Well, it was the idea that we were going to be the brain of the world and the world would be the body, and the body was inferior, and that we were going to make so much money that it would trickle down to everybody in their 401ks and everything. And you saw that the vocabulary adjusted. Joe Biden said that people had to learn to code if they were minors or something.

Hillary said something the same thing in West Virginia. We had this... kind of thinly veiled class disparagement vocabulary, irredeemables, you know, clingers, chomps, dregs, etc. So there was a kind of a demonization as if they were the losers of globalization. And there was a geographical element to it. It was in the interior of the United States. The

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