We're back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Trishnski,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on Twitter at fdr LST.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts as well. Co hosting
today is Christopher Bedford, executive or executive editor over at the Common Sense Society,
and our guest is the one and only so rub Amari, a very
busy man these days because he is the author of the wonderful new book Tyranny,
Inc. How Power, How Private Power. I'm reading the Chris just
opened the book for me so that I can read the subheading how Private Power
Crushed American Liberty and what to do about it? So Rob, the book
is fantastic. Thanks so much for joining the show. It's good to be
back. Yeah, asolutely, So sorry. This is this is kind of
part of a long evolution that you've had over the years, from more to
the man of the left, to think of self described Marxists at one point,
to a man of the Catholic faith, through neo conservatism at one point,
and kind of now but through through your magazine compact, trying to find
a new kind of realignment in American politics between socially conservative values American nationalism,
but also really caring for those who seem to have been left behind with the
economic experiments of the last thirty forty years. I guess, unless I'm mischaracterizing
that, then correct me. But if not, then walk us through kind
of the journey that brought you from where you were to where you are now.
Yeah. I mean when I when I was a college student, I
was on the on the hard left. It's you know, because I've written
a memoir, my nastiest critics like used that against me. So they're like,
oh, use at this and at that. But if you look at
a lot of people's intellectual development, having a kind of socialist phase in college,
it's a it's a pretty it's not an exotic thing. It's a pretty
mundane thing, you know. And since then, I became two things at
once. I became more of a conventional small c conservative, you know.
I went to work. My first job out of law school was not to
be a lawyer, blessedly, was to work for the Wall Street Journal editorial
page, which is sort of the bastion of let's say, Paul Ryan ideology.
Right, it's a conservatism that's pretty queasy about even touching cultural issues.
You know, it's all about lowering the marginal tax rate and foreign policy hawkism,
honestly. And so that was my entree to the conservative world was through
that end of the of the right kind of establishment, right. And then
you know, alongside that, I became a Roman Catholic, and as I
became more Roman Catholic, I also that just happened to be around the time
of the Trump phenomenon, and so I became more populist friendly because the more
I tried, the more it seemed to me that that kind of Paul Ryan
attempts to blend the Catholic faith with basically kind of market fundamentalism. That was
an unstable synthesis that the Church is thinking on economic affairs is more complex.
It is not obviously socialists, and the Church is pretty resolutely opposed to that,
but it's thought market fundamentalist either. It emphasizes solidarity, it emphasizes kind
of the economics rights of people to live in the basic conditions of human flourishing
that people need. It does support labor unions, in the nineteenth century,
Pope Leo the Our Teams wrote a famous encyclical Rareum Novarum, which set off
the sort of modern Catholic social teaching tradition, in which he recognized that as
a result of the Industrial Revolution, this vast disparity in power had emerged between
working people and their employers in most industries, and so he supported the idea
of working people banding together to try to collectively bargain. So anyway, I
mean, that's that's really the evolution. It's not nearly as kind of haphazard
and frequent as my worst enemies make it sound like. You know, I
became a Catholic, and the underlying kind of political economic philosophy of tyranny ink,
even if I don't constantly refer to it, is that Catholic vision of
markets are fine. Markets are good, They have their place. They can
be pretty useful at allocating goods and services efficiently and capital for sure. But
markets aren't the be all, end all, and sometimes markets can be abused,
and they can be they can bear down pretty hard on ordinary people,
and in those cases, you know, there's a political responsibility to address that.
So that's the evolution. I think it's it has far greater inner integrity
if you're if you're willing to view it charitably and not abuse the fact that
I've written a memoir, you know, as some people do to be like
ah, he changes his mind. You've just always been a bleeding heart.
You've always been someone who feels for the people. Whether it's I mean,
all those things kind of fit into that, someone who's concerned. And also
it's I think it's okay to be reactionary in some ways. I've gone through
most of my life reacting to things. That's that's true, go ahead song,
No, that's it. And I also, I mean it just the
idea that you know, you would have the same opinions about, you know,
taxes, free trade, or any issue, no matter what the evidence
of history and the daily headlines present to you. That to me seems like
a more foolish posture to take than you know, being willing to look at
certain things and change your mind. Like I definitely was cheering the post nine
eleven Wars when I was at the Wall Street Journal, But in my defense,
I was in my twenties, mid twenties and late twenties compared to some
others, but we had to look at the outcome, and they turned out
pretty terribly. We wasted trillions of dollars, ten thousands of American lives,
blood and treasure, and of course all the devastation brought over there, and
what we got for it was, you know, Iranian domination of Iraq,
statelessness in the Middle East, and civil wars and a migrant crisis in Europe.
You got to change your mind if you if you're honest, I think
I think you've just done an admirable job knocking down the strawman. A lot
of people build to attack you so rob especially when you made your point about
about markets, which I think if people read you charitably in good faith,
is obviously there. But the question I wanted to ask about the title of
the book, I was actually surprised that in the subhead you use the word
liberty, because as you're mentioning Paul Ryan kind of going hearkening back to the
era of Paul Ryan, sort of that wing maybe people would call a fusionist
of the conservative movement, constantly trotting out the word liberty and then using it,
I would say for or even sometimes dressing it in this justice of the
church or in the context of the church. But what is your definition of
liberty as opposed to tyranny if those two things are sort of in contrast,
but then also just liberty on its own as well. Yeah, I mean,
that's that's a huge and big question. But we could start with the
definition that I don't mean to keep picking on him, but he's he's a
good punching bag. I'm sorry. Paul Ryan would say that liberty is basically
the absence of coercion or restraints, and mainly what he means by that is
governmental restraints and give governmental coercion. So yeah, I mean, I think
someone like Paul Ryan would say that liberty means the absence of undue restraints,
the absence of coercion, and he would mainly describe coercion as you know,
what government does to us. The thesis of the book, and here I'll
get to my definition of liberty, is that the thesis of the book is
that coercion is not limited to the public sector, that you can also be
coerced and sometimes unjustly coerced in the private economy. In fact, it happens
all the time, And that the American tradition in a broader sense used to
have a clear sense of this, whether you look at the founding generation talking
about the dangers of faction, of how economic faction can contour or distort our
democratic and republic small r republican ideals, or whether you look at the Jacksonians
with their anxieties about the power of the Second Bank of the United States being
a private entity that would restrain the kind of popular democratic liberties of the people,
and so on and so forth. And in restraining people's freedom in the
private sector or in the coercion that we face in the marketplace or in the
workplace, what happens often is that our actual liberty to be able to achieve
human flourishing is vitiated. And so that's my definition of liberty is that the
ability to be free to pursue human flourishing, and that requires you, for
example, to be able to make ends meet at a basic level. And
what we have to day, for example, is an economy in which half
of fast food workers have to rely on public welfare to make ends meet,
and that actually subjects them to two forms of coercion. The first is the
fact that precisely because their hours and wages are precarious that they don't have.
They're basically at the mercy of the employer, and they never have that sense
of security of being able to live through life knowing that if they go to
work and work hard, they will be able to make ends meet. But
it does another thing because they're reliant on public welfare, because we've built recently
by getting rid of manufacturing and emphasizing services so much that they need, like
I said, half of their income to make ends meet for the working poor
has to come from public welfare. So that also simultaneously subjects them to the
whims of the welfare administrator as well. Right, the person who can say,
oh, did you spend twelve dollars on beer and cigarettes with your public
money, with your with your welfare funds. And so if you look at
a person like that, and I'm here, I'm talking about the lowest rungs
of the labor market, they're squeezed on both ends. They're at the mercy
of the employer who doesn't pay them enough, and they're at the mercy of
the administrative state, which kind of disciplines them for their daring to buy not
you know, buying the wrong thing with their welfare money. So and then
meanwhile, you know, the liberty of all of us as the rest of
the tax as tax paying citizens, is also violated by that, because when
we allow employers to do precarious wages, cut dramatically cut the labor share of
their out to social income, the rest of us have to foot the bill
through as taxpayers through welfare. So in that sense, we we get to
publicize, publicly take on the costs of a low wage, precarious economy,
and the private sector, or especially large private employers, get to privatize the
gains. Is that liberty? I mean, is that not coercion? I
think he would argue that it is. So I think it's just a matter
of recognizing. And this is the key point of the book, is that
it is possible to be coerced in the private economy, especially since the Industrial
Revolution. And I'll just make this one last kind of wonky economic history historical
point and then I'll stop. But that what is the kind of Paul Ryan
libertarian or lesse Fair defense against the idea that you can be coerced the market?
Well, what they say is, no, you can't, because the
market is so full of all these different actors, that you can always find
a better deal elsewhere, so no one actor can coerce you, because the
price mechanism exists and everyone has to compete, and that the existence of the
price mechanism means that you can always find a better deal elsewhere. And if
any one actor tries to coerge you or put one over you, that will
ultimately sound their death melt, because you the consumer or you the worker,
whoever will find some other employer, some other person to buy things from.
That's econ one to one. And that picture of the economy that they describe
applies to certain industries today, namely agriculture, and it certainly was the reality
in the late eighteenth century when like Adam Smith was writing before the rise of
the Industrial Revolution. In that era of like yeoman farmers and individual mechanics who
own their tools, we really did meet you at an arm's length. We
transacted, but I could always walk away from you, and there was a
multiplicity of sellers and buyers on every side of every market. That hasn't been
the case since the mid nineteenth century. Since the mid nineteenth century because of
the nature of the Industrial Revolution and when most industries are characterized by factory and
network effects. Like factory effects like the enormous barriers to entry that are involved
in starting a tire, manufacturers say you can't have like a zillion small tire
manufacturers tends toward concentration or network effects, where it makes more sense to have
one railroad that serves two hundred towns rather than each pair of towns having their
own individual railroads. What would the result of that is that most markets since
the mid nineteenth century have been dominated by like two or three actors, and
so the idea that you can always find a bit better deal elsewhere is kind
of a mythology. In fact, you know, most market in most situations
like that which is called oligopoly, it's not the same as monopoly. The
few factors that exist they get to more or less set their own prices,
and so the price signal is no longer this like perfect index of supply and
demand or marginal productivity for wages. It's just what big powerful actors get to
say it is. And so my argument is not that you can get rid
of coercion entirely out of human society. That's impossible, but to recognize that
market life can also be quite coercive, is all. Hey, y'all,
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I remember during the vaccine mandate arguments, having to go getting the really serious
arguments with a lot of governors and chiefs of staff and senators about their unwillingness
to tell private businesses that they were not allowed to demand medical procedures to do
business. They were saying that this is violated, you know, the Ten
Commandments. For Ronald Reagan. I don't think that's true. They say things
like, why don't just go to another grocery store, and without any seeming
knowledge of the fact that you know, if just visiting, if you go
to Hillsdale, Michigan, if the one grocery sources you need a vaccine to
get in there, you have to drift thirty miles to get to the next
one. And that's not really an option if your job kicks you out.
And you know, my focus over the last ten years or argument with libertarians,
it's often been on the corporate on like the Walmarts that come in that
it's hard to tell if a town gets worse when Walmart comes in, or
if Walmart comes into dying towns, but it certainly wipes out the main street
businesses, the things that create middle class there. It changes main street into
a parking lot, sells sheep, subsidized goods to American workers from foreign markets
that we don't make anymore, and a lot of their labor force or parts
of their labor force, are and their a lot of their customers are subsidized
by food stamps to buy their crap and buy welfare. But what's what interested
me about your book is instead of just going right after the walmarts and all
these things, you really start with the people. And it's not just kind
of the conservative heroes of like the working union who's working on the railroad or
working in the factory. It's the tech worker, the waitress, the folks
from all different aspects of society seem to be the stories are telling, and
you know, not all of them are really terribly awful, but a lot
of them to show just the constant pressures locking me through kind of your line
of thinking is starting off with these examples that are kind of every day things
that we recognize every day, as opposed to you know, what a lot
of authors do, which just takes something this is so unbelievably heinous, like
this child who was pulled into a machine can start with that. Yeah,
I mean, I tried to give a picture of how our political economy works
or doesn't work, from the point of view of a wide range of ordinary
Americans. And as I've watched, the Republican Party, first of all,
gained enormous shares of working class people. This is undeniable. Trump won the
highest marginal share of union households for a Republican nominee since nineteen eighty four with
Ronald Reagan, and then he consolidated that group in twenty twenty and added to
a working class people of color. And so the Republican Party is trying to
adjust to that, and I think it's valuable. But as I watched this
discourse, this kind of realignment discourse, I couldn't but help notice that the
picture that the typical Republican politician or operative has of who a working class person
is is not wrong, but it's kind of narrow slice. It's always a
typical like either. In fact, what they're talking about is not a working
class person but a small business owner, like someone who owns his own roofing
business, or it's like the burly teamster, you know, the electrician,
carpenter, et cetera. Which, by the way, that's part of our
that's definitely part of the working class. But there's many other people who are
situated in our economy who are faced this kind of coercion but don't fit that
picture. So I do tell the story of the service industry, which is
enormous in our time. Now it's about you know, it's something like attempt
of the population works in the service industry, or as you mentioned, there
are employees in the tech sector who you know, obviously certainly make more than
the waitress that I mentioned, but they still have a great degree of precarity
where we all feel right that tomorrow the carpet could be the rug could be
pulled out from under your feet, and your possibility of falling down into an
abyss. Specifically, in those cases, I talk about how lopsided the employment
agreements are, where again classical theory says, oh, people meet and they
can each walk away from an employment agreement, so they have this kind of
symmetrical power. In reality, you know, you've already bought a house,
you've already moved across the town or the state or the country. You've uprooted
your husband or wife, et cetera, et cetera. And you show up
and they give you a fat pile of documents. You're an at will employee,
and you're supposed to agree to them. There's there's no real negotiation in
realistically speaking, and you give away like your right to the right to your
own voice now your speaking voice, your picture, your persona which can be
licensed to commercial third parties, and you have no right to sue those third
parties if they, for example, use your picture and doctored virtual pornography.
You're supposed to give up the right to kind of total surveillance of your online
activities. This was a kind of thing that educated You know professional class workers
face and you know they're relative to their employers, they can be just as
vulnerable as as as kind of people who work with their hands. I tell
stories of accountants who whose wages were underpaid but couldn't couldn't bring suit in a
class action under the Fair Labor Standards Act, which is a New Deal era
law that guarantees you a minimum wage and overtime protections. And it was because
it's a new deal law. It was specifically in encouraged. It was supposed
to encourage collective action. But using private arbitration, which is these kind of
privatized courts which corporations typically can control, they more or less employers like Ernst
and Young in this case can get away with not paying wages that are legally
owed. And because they force you to go to this private arbitration chamber where
it might cost you two hundred thousand dollars to litigate your case individually, then
you know you can't do that. You can't, that's irrational. So you
more or less give up on you over time that was owed to you,
and so on and so forth. So the point of that, and again,
I certainly do have blue collar workers whose stories I tell, but I
was just trying to give them more realistic because I'm a man of the right
and a lot of my readership is conservative, give them more realistic picture of
what the labor market today looks like, as opposed to kind of some of
these romantic images that some on the right have. No, that's so sure,
it trist me crazy. And there's something about the banal miseries of sort
of middle class life in America that are in some ways equally as disturbing as
the kind of romantic miseries that conservatives often lament of the coal miners or the
truck drivers. So I also want to ask you one of the things that
got me really excited about this book is an excerpt of it that American Compass
published specifically on private equity and financialization, which is fascinating. And when I
read your excerpt, I was like, conservative media should have had reporters on
this beat for years. The conservative movement should have had people studying this deeply
and advocating on behalf of actual market freedom for years. So tell us a
little bit about as you were digging into it for the book Tyranny, Inc.
How you came to the conclusion that you did on private equity sort of
malign influence over the political economy. Yeah. Well, I mean, the
book, again is about private coercion, and so I obviously an enormous aspect
of that today is the fact that the Wall Street takeover of the real economy.
What is the real economy. It's where we you know, build stuff
or offer services that are actually useful to people in the sense that ordinary people
can understand their usefulness. And you know, most people's picture of American capitalism
is that a corporation has a product. Let's say, you know, mister
Bedford has come up with some new you know, grill that uses ultra violet
light or something like that, because I know he likes grilling, and I
like, I frequently find myself with my mouth watering when I look at his
Facebook feed. And he's come up with this scientific role that does the perfect
salmon in matter of thirty seconds or something. And he goes to a bank
or some other financial institution. He borrows money in order to develop and then
market this product and pay for the workers required to manufacture it, etcetera,
etcetera. He it proves a hit, as I'm sure it will, and
so he makes a profit. He has to pay taxes, he has to
pay there's certain set costs that every business has to pay. And after that,
he returns some of his money to the shareholders, the you know who
lent him money and got equity in return, or to the bank in the
form of interest, you know, because they took a risk on his product
and they deserve that, and that's perfectly fair. But then he has enough
money retains enough money to then reinvest in the business. Because what happens to
any business, it's capital depreciates, it it's it's you know, it's workers
leave the company. He has to recruit new workers, he has to invest
in research and development because competitors might catch up, etcetera, etcetera. If
you have that picture of American capitalism, it was an accurate picture roughly until
you know, the nineteen eighties. But as our friend or in casts documented,
ever since the nineteen eighties, more and more American corporations are literally sort
of they're cannibalizing themselves because what they do is they return one hundred percent of
their profits after taxes, etcetera, etcetera. They return them to Wall Street,
to big finance. And this is kind of the pressure that private equity
and hedge fund puts because they have this short termist mentality. So what does
that do to the businesses? It means they erode themselves. Businesses are eating
away at themselves, and frequently that means that business eventually collapse. And we
know, for example, again thanks to research by our friend or in cast,
that you know, when private equity owns a business, the likelihood of
bankruptcy dramatically increases because they have this kind of model of squeezing, squeezing cash,
squeezing cash, squeezing cash out of a business and then adding some more
debt on top of until it collapses. Now their their mentality is, Okay,
we own ten businesses, if nine of them go bankrupt, but the
tenth one is a huge hit, it's all awash, and we still walk
away quite you know, having made nice profits. But the ordinary community or
the ordinary worker can't do that. You know, you can't take ten jobs
and hope that nine out of the ten might bankrupt, but at least the
tenth one will be a success, and it's a it's all awash. You
can only take one job, or there's only the one big firm in the
community. By the way, Tucker talked about this a lot on his show,
where hedge funds would take over perfectly kind of profitable businesses and drive them
to the ground. That's the only game in talent. So now it's lost
because it's been eroded by private equity. And then I tell the story.
What you refer to is increasingly we're privatizing emergency services and firefighting, which is
bad enough because that's those are goods that should be eminently common public goods.
But then Wall Street takes over those privatizing firms and does the same thing to
them. It erodes them. It doesn't invest enough so that you know,
there's medicare fraud that happens as a result of that, drug thefts, ambulances
and firetrucks don't get there on time, etc. Etc. That's that's pretty
atrocious and the worst part of it is, and this is the real scoop
in the book, is that many firefighters and emergency services workers in the public
sector are actually capitalizing the privatization of their own jobs because their pension plans invest
in private equity and hedge funds that are in the business of privatizing their jobs.
So, in other words, by every time they contribute to their pension
plan, they're marginally working to destroy their own livelihoods. These public servants that
you know, Republicans, Democrats, we all honor right firefighters, EMTs,
police officers were supposed to honor them, and yet their own pension plans are
sort of undermining their viability in the long term. The watched Aolto on Wall
Street podcast with Chris Markowski. Every day Chris helps unpack the connection between politics
and the economy and how it affects your wallet. There's a method to the
madness. Biden plans to ask Congress for billions more dollars for another COVID vaccine.
With more masks and vaccines, maybe stimulus checks Americans wallets can survive another
free money hand out. Whether it's happening in DC or down on Wall Street,
it's affecting you financially. Be informed. Check out the Watchdolt on Wall
Street podcast with Chris Markowski on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your
podcast. From the left, David Saroda has been doing a ton of reporting
on that for years. But to see it, I think laid out in
the context of conservative argumentation was I just it was really really helpful, and
it made me think, Chris, back to the sort of Obama era when
the Great Recession happens and the republic Party enthusiastically smugly nominates a private equity baron
the presidential nominee. Mitt Romney and George will were the voices of the moment,
and there were a couple of people out there saying, hold on a
second, maybe the same right. Maybe maybe the tea party is actually not
just about putting Paul Ryan and Shark. Maybe the tea parties not just about
private protective private equity in the Wall Street rents that we saw we used to
look at, sorry, the break from private fire departments that would pillage your
home to public service. It was like an e leap for civilization from early
New York City in Boston and other Eastern cities to a more modern, civilized
city that takes care of its residents. And those those things seem like they're
are easier to fix when when you have people actually listening and paying attention,
it's kind of clear cut, like there's not allowed to have private prisons anymore.
I allowed to have private this, But some of the problems you talk
about your book seem more difficult. I spent half of my life or so
fifteen years in the service industry as a bartender, caterer, waiter, bouncer.
And some of those jobs were hard. They're all hard, but some
of them were much more reasonable schedule, much more repetition than others, and
some of them were kind of ad hoc. And so you talk about the
waitress and how she's being coerced because she doesn't know what her shift's going to
be. She has to balance that with childcare. She can't work the great
shifts because the expensive of getting someone to take care of her child, et
cetera. And this is the unpredictability of it. But when when you look
at a restaurant tour, they're under a lot of different pressures too. The
failure rates extremely high, and granted that's exaggerated in my personal experience by the
number of idiots and criminals who start restaurants, but still it is very difficult
to run a restaurant. They don't know where the surgeres are going to be
there, they have to cut. They can't be thrown out through this leftover
every extra waiter and a shift is this money out and a lower and a
low margin industry industry. So maybe there are certain restaurants, for example,
as opposed to others that can't cater to that lifestyle. So where does the
responsibility really end up? Following following Some of these things just seem like the
companies are in a protective state and they're trying to guard themselves and they're not
necessarily villains, but they're part of the same system. Yeah, so let
me give several answers to that. I. First of all, I I
think I totally get where you're coming from. The first answer is that we
used to have a restaurant and service industry in which the burdens associated with periods
of low demand was more equitably distributed between employer and employee. Right, what
we're talking about with this kind of just in time scheduling where you know,
workers only come in for like the first opening two hours and then the cloak
and it's called clopening shifts, the first opening two hours and the last opening
closing two hours. The idea is that that those are the periods of high
demand. These are all practices, you know, giving vote workers like much
less notice about what their schedule is going to be, lots of cancelations,
of shifts, last minute, et cetera. These practices have grown in recent
years. It wasn't always, It wasn't ever thus right, these are there
because what business is trying to do is to shift all the costs associative periods
of low demand onto the back of workers. If you had an economy in
which that was more equitably distributed, you know, people get more regular schedules
that are predictable, and yes there are periods will come up where customers aren't
showing up, and both employer and employee take a hit, right because workers
don't get tips or whatever and employer doesn't get profits. So some of the
practices can become quite extreme. And it's not at your mom pop diner is
typically you know, people who can even afford algorithmic human resources of this kind
are like you know, these kind of not the super nice restaurants which pay
their employees quite well often, you know, like the fancy steakhouse, will
the waitress there can easily make like a really fat amount on just one night's
tips. But and not like a mom and pop diner was like yeah you're
coming in Monday through Friday, blah blah blah. But like the kind of
chain corporate chains, which is where you see these practices especially frequently, and
so there that's genuinely unfair, and I think we can have a fair distribution.
Talk about private equity, you know, you know, these these firms
took advantage of COVID relief, would come people, you know, basically people
who completely didn't need COVID relief got COVID relief. But that's a different story.
So we can we can, I think, mitigate against some of these
practices without without harming the most vulnerable type of small business. The second point
to make is not all of the you know, I call for right raising
up rates of unionization, and you know, I think not not in,
not in That's not true for every industry. There are industries that are both
very hard to unionize and where it's just not practical. And in those places
I would argue that a higher minimum wage can do the job. And you
say, well, okay, but like you know, automation may come,
et cetera. And I think we're getting into like these macroeconomic speculative arguments.
But if we have a generally high wage economy that's based again on manufacturing,
on sectors of the future, energy, et cetera, where the bulk of
workers is earning enough, then as you know in other places like service,
you can have higher wages and the economy will sort of it'll absorb the costs
associated with higher wages. You know. In other words, even if the
cost of a burger is higher because of a higher minimum wage, it's okay
because then the bulk of workers themselves are earning even higher than that because they're
now have you know, decent manufacturing jobs, and so they're not you know,
the two dollars more a more expensive burger is not going to I mean,
I live in New York City for most of the year or much of
the year, and as you know, it's like you used to be able
to, even in New York City, used to be able to go out
and have a meal for two at a decent and I'm not talking about like
a Michelin start at a decent of Italian restaurant for under one hundred dollars.
Now that's it's it's impossible. If you, if any of you gets a
single drink, it's it's going to be over over one hundred and then easily
into two hundred. Prices are unbelievable. Yeah. Well, and one question
that I wanted to ask, and I'm sure listeners have all kind of kinds
of questions question through their mind, but one thing that Christ brought up earlier
was the vaccine mandates. And you know, I think Adrian Vermuel fell on
the other side from most of the conservative movement on vaccine mandates, but it
does bring this this question to the forefront of when we haven't increasingly, I
would say, like tyrannical government that wants to surveil every breath you take,
every thought you would have which made me possible in the future, what is
how is there? Like I think about Twitter, for example, I think
there's a real argument to like a nationalizing Twitter as a public utility, treating
it as you know, or treating it as Clarence Thomas would say, a
common carrier, railroads, telecom, you know model that we have. But
I also am incredibly hesitant to turn over, you know, go from Elon
Musker, Jack Dorsey to the Biden administration and all of the bureaucrats that would
staff you know, Trump administration unwittingly or a de Santist administration unwittingly, just
because they are the ones that have been embedded as careers are given to a
sella. They manage the all the all the same jerks were on Twitter.
Remember when Hunter Biden was on the board of Hamtrack. So as conservators kind
of think of balancing those two things. A government that seems sort of impenetrable
because the bureaucracy has been has been weaponized in anti democratic ways and then a
private sector that seems anti democratic and anti market as well, anti free market
as well in so many ways. How do people, how should people be
thinking about balancing those two problems. Yeah, that's a really good question.
I mean, first of all, you mentioned the common carrier doctrine and and
justice Thomas's suggestion. I mean, he's he's a kind of a throwaway line
in a short I think the senting opinion. Well, that's you know,
that's a pretty good solution to the problem of Twitter, because I don't I
don't trust any oligarch, whether he has my values or not on whatever issues,
to not be kind of abusing the power that they have over the democratic,
digital, democratic public square. And so you know, just like your
phone company can't your phone company cannot kick you off their service because of what
you say on the phone, and likewise, I think we're getting to the
point where we have to do that with social media and banking, because we
saw with the truckers protests in Canada, We've seen it with the January sixth
defendants where and we've seen it with Nigel Farage in Britain where banks will de
bank people get kicked them off the off their services, which is devastating because
we all need money. We can't pay for everything in cash, and we
don't want to keep our money under our mattresses, and most of us don't,
and so that kind of politicize the personing of people, whether it's PayPal,
whether it's a Coots bank in Britain with Nigel Farage, or whether it's
social media for Facebook, etc. I think the easiest way to fix that
this is not really empowering the administrative state. It's just applying a common law
doctrine called the common carrier doctrine, which is it is like, you know,
toll bridges, you know privately on toll bridges can't not unreasonably discriminate against
you. And in the same way, I think banks and social media should
be regulated, but that's not necessarily empowering the the administrative state. On the
larger point of what to do about the administrative state, I mean, I
think, first of all, as a minimum, I think, as you
know, Emily, and you know, maybe some of your listeners were like,
yeah, if this guy, I can't stand anymore. But when I
hear people say abolish the administrative state, I just can't. I can't help
but roll my eyes because the reason we have an administrative state is because the
ever since the nineteenth century, we've had a really large, complex economy and
that's very hard to regulate, you know, at the for Congress to make
rules that are specific enough for rail, right what we need a rail We
have a big, large rail network, and we need complex relations because it's
a big complex issue. And so this kind of fourth branch of the government
has emerged to deal with that problem. And I just cannot come up with
a better solution other than to say, you know, if you want to
abolish the administrative state, I invite you to take the first flight after the
FAA is gone, or to eat the first can you know, can of
can beans after the FDA has been abolished. I'm going to be wary of
doing that. That said, you're totally right that the administrative state can be
quite undemocratic. It's not supposed to be. You know, when they make
rules, they're supposed to have public hearings where or at public comment period where
the various interested groups can we can push back or discuss or contest the rulemaking.
And of course it should it should be responsible to the executive branch which
is where these agencies get their power from the person of the president. But
as we know, especially when Republicans are in office, basically the agencies have
learned to resist the democratic will or the will of the democratic collected politicians.
I think the q can be exaggerated, but it's certainly a real problem.
There are important reforms we can do to avoid that. I mean, I
you know, like making it easier to fire admin agency officials so that they're
a little bit more responsive to the political will of the of the executive branch
and specifically the person of the commander in chief is something that various Republicans put
forward, and I happily will sign my name to that, but not to
abolishing the administrative state, because that's bonkers. Go ahead, sorry, so
does that. I mean a lot of those rules and make it so difficult
to fire someone for sexual harassment, for alcoholism, for not showing up at
work, for or not alcoholism, but for DUIs and stuff. Clean that
up, like you know. But those were carved out by the unions.
My views of the public sector unions are more complex. I'm very much for
private sector unions. Public sector unions are more complicated, especially when it's not.
You know, sometimes people think public sector unions and they forget that sometimes
you're talking about SEIU operating an environment in which it's organizing, you know,
garbage collectors whose jobs have been privatized or contracted out to a private entity,
but they're still ultimately sort of public employees right in these complex public private situations.
And so in those situations, I'm pretty supportive of public sector unions as
well. But when you're talking about federal government employees, I have, I
have much more complicated thoughts. I'm not I'm not about to say that they're
they completely don't have a place, because as an employer, the federal government
can be coursive, just as it's pretty coursive when it you know, enforces,
Uh, there's all sorts of other things, and so how the workers
defend themselves against that. But I agree with you that that, you know,
giving public employees a complete carte blanche is why it's one reason why the
administrative state is connor and I support that, you know, various reforms that
are out there to make it easier for the president to exert his will over
the over these agencies. And then so which one last point is you know,
one way to disempower the administrative state is just to empower people as in
their other corporate forms of belonging. Empower them as members of churches, empower
them as members of you know, local community clubs. Empower them as members
of you know, the Rotary club or whatever. And as in this one
crucial sense, as neighbors of labor unions, as workers with particular vocation,
and they have their pride of their work, their guild, their sort of
belonging in that. And if you raise up the power of these other forms
of belonging and power, then you but necessary by necessity, you sort of
weaken both the large unaccountable employer and the large unaccountable, you know, an
administrator. It's hard to do. I mean a lot of these clubs,
the Elks Club, the I mean they're sitting there, they're waiting forward members
people would they would love to have you join. I mean I could join
the American Legion Club on Capitol Hill. I didn't. I didn't serve,
but they're so hungry for members. Maybe it's not the American Legion but the
VFW nearby. They have a bar. They're excited. I love drinking at
old elks clubs, cheap drinks, wonderful stuff. So so this goes back
to my point that the larger point of the book is that we have an
economy in which everyone is very harried, everyone is coerced, and it is
not easy to make ends meet just on one income, which is, you
know, what the what most working class Americans want. If you ask them
what they want. They don't want universal healthcare in the sense of pushing both
land and wife to be always at the at the service of the market.
What they want is an economy in which it suffices to have one income to
make ends meet. And that's what we used to have, you know,
in this sort of new deal order after nineteen forty five to roughly seventies and
eighties. That's what the majority of people want. Now you bring that up
and some progressives will say, okay, well that's the return of patriarchy.
Mom has to stay at home, et cetera. Well, we know American
families today are more complicated, and there will be situations in which it's mom
working and the guy who stays at home. Maybe I don't know, but
the point is that if you ask the ordinary working last person, they want
an economy in which that's possible, and conservatives have a you know, I
was on a different show with Emily yesterday and she asked me, is this
I can't remember where they put up her shut up? Put up her shut
up. Okay, I was going to come up with a with a more
obscene one involving a toilet getting off the pot. But the point is that,
know, that's what we need is is Republicans. Yeah, Blake Masters
said it. Of course his Senate run wasn't successful, but he said,
I want to work to weards an economy in which that's possible. Again,
and if that's that's the end goal, you work everything around it. It's
not like unions for their own sake, or it's not like you know,
the X y Z reform for its own sake. It's because you have a
vision that you promise the people, and then you know, you work around
it. You work with the economy you have, You reform what you can,
you could Joe what you can, you build the coalitions. You can
work with Senator Warren on x y Z as Senator Vance is doing. But
of course you don't work with her on the weird culture stuff that you don't
want to work with her on that understand abortion for all. Yeah, of
course we don't cooperate, but good servits have to just have a vision.
And so you know, I just get to this all the time, and
you guys are familiar with it. But I just I feel like that's been
lost. There was a kind of cleer maga element that was and a crisply
reformist vision, believe it or not, in the twenty sixteen campaign. But
what I see the kind of conservative populism today. It's all culture war.
And I'm a culture warrior. I mean I've thought some you know, you
guys both know I've thought some culture wars that I'm proud of that. You
know, there's some weird stuff that they want to shove down the throats of
our kids, and I don't want that. But not everything is a culture
war. And that's all it gets so frustrated. Like the Silicon Valley bank
collapses, my favorite example. You know, it's like, we have a
complex banking issue in this country, and actually the big banks are fairly well
regulated now, small banks, you know, they can't do too much damage.
It's these weird regional banks like Silicon Valley bank that can cause a lot
of trouble for the economy. This happens by an administration. Actually, I
think response pretty effectively to their credit and they do to clawbacks so that you
know, or New Americans don't feel like they're bailing out venture capital. But
what is the response Republican response? It's, oh, this it failed because
it went woke. I'm sorry, but you look up the board of Silicon
Valley Bank and it's still majority are overwhelming majority of white guys. What are
you talking about? What those are the leaders right beyond the white women.
Yeah, because it's like, you know, it's not not everything is this
kind of easy culture war issue. And I think if we can get beyond
that and go back to sort of offering a populous vision, it's out there
for the taking because you know a lot of American people are pretty frustrated with
the economy. Well, speaking of families, we know you have to go
do some school pickups soon with the book? Is Tyranny ink I sorr Amari,
Founder and editor of Compact Magazine. So where do you prefer people buy
this book or does it make a difference you honestly, yeah, I think
if it's a well, go to your local bookstore. That they'll never do
that, So go on Amazon. And Amazon is a target of this book's
critique. Believe me, you know, I know you both have read it,
and the opening starts with Amazon. But if it means you'll buy it,
buy it on Amazon, because that's probably the fastest and easy. Love.
No, no, no, actually, let me revise that. I
think I think my publisher Pick and Random House is does not want any one
seller to be privileged, So I'll just say buy it wherever good books are
sold. Yeah, there you go. Well it is it's Light Compact.
If you're not reading Compact, you absolutely should be. But Light Compact Jurney
Inc. Is a useful, provocative, and really beautiful contribution to the discourse.
So so Rob, thank you very very much for joining us on Federalist
Radio Hours. In real guys, thank you, thanks, you've been listening
to another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emilias Shensky, culture editor
here at The Federalist. Will be back soon with more. Until men get
lovers of freedom and anxious for the frame you work at, hold hold to the lond