Vance Disparages Friedman, Reagan

Yup.

This country was BUILT on meritocracy. Meritocracy is what made this country so great. It is what separated us from the class system of Europe and other countries. It is what made us superior to socialist and communist countries. Effort meant achievement, not equalization of outcomes where effort and merit were discarded.

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Vance Disparages Friedman, Reagan

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nice. you boomers need to move on from Reagan. his brand of "conservatism" was a disaster to America.

I don’t know if Reagan would disagree with much of that. Reagan was a free trader in a very different environment. There was no risk of a strategic collapse of our basic industrial capacity. There was no risk to our food supply.

I don’t think Ronald Reagan would argue that his, and Friedman’s, positions on free trade should be pursued past the point at which we can no longer defend our country.

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"Milton Friedman's ideas made more sense in the 1980s because they were being advocated in a country that still had a very rich and powerful institutional Christianity."

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I guess I'm going to have to see those comments in context.

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Jesus Christ

He's turning into Oliver Stone or AOC

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Vance is a shapeshifter.

I have no idea what he really believes in

When he said anyone, he didn’t mean everyone.

Pete Wilson did that.

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Vance is already starting to sound like Carter on foreign policy.

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Why? Because he's not sucking Israel's dick?

Okay, now that I've looked at that section of the interview, he wasn't disparaging Friedman or Reagan. But he was saying that their approach was dependent upon "Christian guardrails," which no longer exist in today's society.

The element of his messaging, which I found troubling, is that it appears Vance feels those "guardrails" can be emulated through political policy. So I think we come to the same critical conclusion of this interview, but from different paths.

I found his diatribe on "feminism" a little troubling as well. He seemed to belittle the concept that a woman would relegate herself "to a cubicle at Goldman Sachs." I don't know what he was getting at with that. There are women who eventually regret the sacrifices career imposes. But to put it mildly, he wasn't clear.

Here's some of the transcript:

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I don't want to say you can go back to the future or, you know, forward to the past, but I do think fundamentally that Hamiltonian tradition is going to be what we see on the American right and will dominate American conservative economic thinking for the future. Yeah. Which is not laissez faire. It's actually much more about, you know, building the kind of tools, building the kind of infrastructure that allow human beings to flourish, that allow national and native industries to flourish at the expense of a hyper globalized economy. And I think those are the basic principles that are going to carry us into the future.

But to me, it's fundamentally about the dignity of the human person. The economy is a tool to service the dignity of the human person. If a set of economic policies make it easier for a person to raise a family, to earn a living wage, to give back to their community, to maybe go to church on Sunday or to actually spend some leisure time building the kind of life that matters. Like that is the sort of thing that we want to be supportive of.

Now, obviously to do those things, you do need economic development. But if you turn economic development into a sort of idol, then you end up sacrificing a lot of the things that matter most. And I and I do think that, you know, for our friends who are sort of on the more laissez faire fair side of the American right, in hindsight, part of why Milton Friedman's ideas made more sense in the 1980s is because they were being advocated in a country that still had a very rich and powerful institutional Christianity.

And so like being laissez faire in a world where there are Christian guard rails on everything is a much different proposition than being laissez faire in a world where globalized liberalism has become the sort of status quo of American elites. of course because so much of that liberalism uh classical variety or more modern variety it it is resting upon a foundation that it did not create you know and a foundation that it it in many ways weakens. So obviously we think that's exactly right.

I think you could say this you could say that about you know I have a British friend who has been in in British conservative politics for longer than I have maybe longer than I've been alive. he's, you know, on the on the older side of things. And he he was making this observation about Margaret Thatcher to another British conservative who was just scandalized by it, but couldn't push back against it in anything besides an emotional way.

He said, you know, Margaret Thatcher, an amazing human being, like a a true giant in the history of of Western politics. But like fundamentally Margaret Thatcher was trying to preserve the shop and the community around the shop that her father had when she was a little girl. And yet if you look at modern Britain and the result of Margaret Thatcher's policies, you would say that her policies actually got Britain further away from that ideal and not closer to that ideal. That's not, by the way, criticizing her. I think she was trying out something in a very new era in a situation where things were quite broken. But we have to be honest like what worked and what didn't work.

And I think unfortunately I would say Thatcher's politics and a lot of um 20th century conservative politics was it sort of bought the premises of modern liberalism and was not infused enough with the basic Christian underpinning of the West. Yeah. Einrand is not going to save your culture. It's not going to happen. So then we're we're throwing around all these names. All of our good dead friends.

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