Observing American Freedom

The Law & Liberty Podcast

On the first episode of The Law & Liberty Podcast, host James M. Patterson sits down with Richard M. Reinsch, who was the founder of Law & Liberty and the host of our original podcast series, and is currently a Senior Writer for the magazine. Listen to Patterson and Reinsch discuss contemporary trade policy blunders and prospects, the economic resilience of blue-collar towns, and Reinsch’s new projects at the American Institute for Economic Research.

Richard M. Reinsch II is Editor-in-Chief and Director of Publications at AIER. He is co-author with Peter A. Lawler of A Constitution in Full: Recovering the Unwritten Foundation of American Liberty. He writes regularly for National Review and Acton’s Journal of Religion & Liberty.

Further reading:

Richard’s writings at Law & Liberty

AIER’s The Daily Economy

Peter Augustine Lawler and Richard M. Reinsch’s A Constitution in Full

Philip Hamburger’s Is Administrative Law Unlawful?

Liberty Fund is a private, non-partisan, educational foundation. The views expressed in its podcasts are the individual’s own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Liberty Fund.

Transcript

James Patterson:

Welcome to The Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books and culture, and formed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty and this podcast are published by Liberty Fund.

Hello and welcome to The Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m James Patterson. This is my first podcast taking over as host, and I just want to thank everyone at Liberty Fund for trusting me with this great responsibility. Made all the more difficult because my first guest in this capacity is with the original host under what was then called Liberty Law Talk. We’ve changed it slightly, to his great dismay. I’ll get a tongue-lashing during this interview, no doubt. And that is Richard M. Reinsch II. He is now the Editor-in-Chief and Director of Publications at the American Institute for Economic Research.

He’s a senior writer here at Law & Liberty, but he also founded it and was editor for 10 years before moving on to AIER. His most recent book was the book, A Constitution in Full: Recovering the Unwritten Foundation of American Liberty. He co-authored the book with the late Peter Lawler, a man of great intellectual gifts. So Richard holds his own in this book wonderfully, and he’s also a regular writer for the National Review and the Acton Institute’s Journal of Religion and Liberty. Most recently, I just enjoyed reading his review of Yuval Levin’s most recent book, American Covenant, and we hope to have Yuval on in the near future. So, Mr. Reinsch, welcome to The Law & Liberty Podcast.

Richard Reinsch:

James, thank you so much for having me. It’s wonderful to be on. I think the title is great, The Law & Liberty Podcast. Liberty Law Talk was my idea, but of course, I think I was. … There are a couple of things I do right, one of which is to put up good content and find great people to interview. As far as branding, titling, and promoting things, I always came up short in that regard. So, I think the title change is good and apt and reflects what the site is. I think you’re going to be a wonderful host, and all I ever did was read great books, read great essays by great authors, and try and ask them intelligent questions, and I’m sure you can do that as well, James, even better than me.

James Patterson:

Thank you so much, Richard. Check’s in the mail. So, we are looking at a little bit of a sort of history here of Law & Liberty. This is your deal, this is your thing, even if you are not running it anymore. Tell me what went into its creation.

Richard Reinsch:

Yeah, the idea, so what I started Law & Liberty, you’ve got this organization, Liberty Fund, that I had been working for at that point for a number of years that has this anchoring effect, if you will, on classical liberal, libertarian, conservative academics and public intellectuals. Inviting them to conferences all over the world, reading classical foundational essays and books on any number of subjects. And my thought was we do an online presence when it comes to economics. We do nothing when it comes to law, political thought, history, and literature, and we should embark there and put together really smart essays, debates, book reviews, and podcasts that would reflect what liberty is in the conference seminar room online.

And we could do that. We could bring in a range of thinkers who didn’t necessarily have to agree with one another but had to be willing to be a part of a website where they would act together if not necessarily always agreeing with one another. And we would have sort of a robust conversation. I think from the beginning, we had Mike Rappaport, he had a new line of thought-out original methods, originalism, which was you should do originalism according to the interpretive methods of the founding, his co-author in that regard, John McGinnis joined him shortly thereafter.

We had Mike Greve. Michael Greve has his book, The Upside Down Constitution, which is I think sort of the standard right now in academic federalism, had come out and he was writing great essays on federalism, which was in vogue at the time because we were in the Obama administration. And the Obama administration was doing everything possible to squelch federalism and Republican attorneys general were pushing back. And Mike Greve was right there with great commentary and also reminding us that federalism was not just this sort of vertical federalism, that conservatives tend to think of it as just states’ rights and states want to govern themselves.

It’s that, but it’s also states being free in a lot of ways to govern themselves economically, commercially, and fiscally, and not have everything decided for them by the federal government through the Commerce Clause. And he brought in a lot of historical examples to talk about that. So, I think we really made a mark early on. We didn’t necessarily have a massive audience, but we had a devoted audience of people who appreciated the commentary we were putting forward. And I think we were sort of positioned well to embrace what was happening within conservatism at that time.

Another thing: This debate has been somewhat forgotten with the rise of Trump in 2016, but we had excellent debates with Randy Barnett, his co-author, Evan Burnick, Clark Neely and others on what kind of originalism should be our originalism. Should it be libertarian originalism or more of a judicial restraint originalism? And I think at the time, we were one of the few voices arguing for the former. Not necessarily that was the only thing we were doing, but we definitely had a lot of interesting voices in that regard. Adam White, and Mark Pulliam among others. Mark Pulliam, of course, is still writing for the site on a frequent basis.

So, I think in that regard, we were immediately adding. And then the book reviews, we had this amazing network of people to pull from to help launch this site. And that’s everyone who would attend the Liberty Fund conference, we would reach out to them, and they wanted to be a part of what we were doing online. And people were delighted that there was a place where they could write thoughtfully, and deeply, and it not be sort of cabin into clickbait or short pieces or op-eds, but they could really talk about what they believed in.

That was all appreciated, I think, from the beginning and helped make the site something that at the time, The Federalist was now very new. It was a very different website, but they wanted to reprint our articles. And that sort of told me we were doing something multifaceted in that regard. The idea was always deep, elegant, thoughtful writing and arguments from speakers for whom ideas and the truth about being constitutional, having small government, having a vivacious civil society, all of that really mattered. And we didn’t want to compromise in any respect.

James Patterson:

The thing about it, coming out in January 2012, it had been a couple of years since the weekly standard had been closed, and a lot of people kind of felt that vacuum and this kind of filled that gap. You talked about the Federalists, that actually I’d forgotten that they often republish stuff by Peter Lawler. And that’s actually how I found out about Long Liberty. The Federalists was kind of a different news source back then, or a commentary source. I actually wrote for the Federalists as a young author, not as necessarily very formed.

I read Peter’s piece at The Federalist, and it said, “This is from Law & Liberty.” And I went there and I was like, “Peter, can I write for this? The site looks great.” So, that’s one of the things about it is that I’m going to use the word for you so you don’t have to say it about yourself, but this is a prestige outfit. And in a way, the prestige outfit with getting really excellent scholars, getting really excellent thinkers, doing a lot of hard work, was a natural fit for the Liberty Fund, more so than even The Weekly Standard was because it can kind of be immunized from a lot of the pressures that something like The Weekly Standard had to suffer with.

Richard Reinsch:

No. And I think The Weekly Standard closed down more like 2018. But I think your point is still valid. The Weekly Standard was a voice of second-wave conservatism and a voice of that foreign policy and that domestic policy and had sort of in certain respects, grown stale and did not have the same audience. And I think my recognition when we started Law & Liberty, what we needed was sort of voices from throughout, if you want to say the conservative spectrum, classical liberal spectrum, who actually wanted to think holistically about, so we’ve got 70 years of history here post-World War II thought in America about the ways in which progressivism is wrong.

We’ve got a lot of silos that have gone up in that regard. Who can actually talk between and among them, find out what’s best and what’s wrong, and go from there? So we brought out, I mean, we brought out voices who were not necessarily household names at this point. Some were, many were, but many were not. And many were just really deep thinkers that I knew about through going to Liberty Fund conferences or just doing a wide range of reading. And we just gave them opportunities and see what they want to do. And as I’ve learned, great writers want to be heard, and if you can connect them with the right opportunities and the right ideas, they can do wonders for you.

So, that’s on any number of subjects. I mean, particularly Philip Hamburger obviously didn’t need Law & Liberty, yet we made his book on the administrative state something we promoted endlessly and wanted to bring out in public argument as much as possible because I made the decision that this was just such a valuable historical work on not just the administrative state the way American conservatives have thought about it, but Philip Hamburger had uncovered the deep common law ways in which the administrative state compromised our liberty. And so we talked about this book endlessly on the site, and that became one example of many of how I thought we were doing the right thing. We also talked about Carl Schmitt a lot. We anticipated, and as you know, James, Carl Schmitt becoming the court philosopher of the integralists of the post-liberals, of the post-constitutionalists. We talked about him in a number of essays, and why he was both mesmerizing but also dangerous and just wrong.

So I think that’s maybe a way of segueing into saying, has the right became unbound in 2015 and 2016? I think we were very well positioned. We saw it coming, we diagnosed it. And I think as someone recently said, integralism seems to have come to an end after about an eight-year run, we might say. But one of the reasons why it came to an end is a lot of great people came together to repudiate it, and I think Law & Liberty, if it’s remembered for nothing else, will be remembered for that amongst many other things.

James Patterson:

Let’s hope it’s not remembered for the host misremembering the date. Actually, no, weekly standard close. Actually what happened is I wanted to double-check the date, and I read a number I was looking at rather than the date, but it’s December 14, 2018.

Richard Reinsch:

But I think your example as I was saying is, and you see this now, it’s the Republican Party conservatism shaken up by the 2016 events, and yet what remains is the thoughtful men and women who drill down very deeply to see what’s wrong and what’s right and write about it very courageously. And at times that’s earned Law & Liberty, we’ve been on the subject of a lot of criticism from various people. At the same time, those people don’t neglect reading us and reading the site. So I think that’s a testament to what happens when you put together commentary that isn’t presentist and just geared towards trying to win an argument.

James Patterson:

A funny thing about Law & Liberty is that the emergence of Donald Trump as the new standard-bearer for the Republican Party meant that a lot of people had to make a choice. National Review wrote their against-Trump issue, and what’s funny is if you go back and look at that magazine, a lot of the people who wrote articles for it have very different views than they do now.

Richard Reinsch:

Rusty Reno among others.

James Patterson:

There are many people.

Richard Reinsch:

He’s a big one.

James Patterson:

But people had to make a choice, and Law & Liberty just said, “No. We’re going to have a debate over this. We’re going to happily engage in a high-level thought on the question.” But certainly, the way that it affected Law & Liberty, the emergence of Trump, was the nature of the questions posed, and I think you’re right. When I think back to the early days of Law & Liberty, once I had started reading it, it was much more a law and economics, federalism, lawyerly kind of site.

Issues that have become less salient, at least to readership somewhat since things moved over towards a Trump or even approaching a post-Trump world, one of which included this effort to create a regime ideology like post-liberalism or integralism, something that this was refused to do at Law & Liberty, and part because it’s contrary to the mission, right?

Richard Reinsch:

Right. And I think in many respects it was thinking about that moment. To me it was clear as it was not to others, the Trump phenomenon, the post-liberal phenomenon, the challenging of the conservative movement was also due to a lot of failures of the leadership class. And while some of those I think were wrongly perceived, some of the failures were real, and you don’t get a figure like that and you don’t get ideas like that unless something has gone wrong. And so then the challenge becomes not just to criticize and to put people down, but to one, listen to them, hear them, and then try and articulate the reasons why constitutionalism is good, civil society is good, free markets are good. I mean, how many articles has Law & Liberty done around trade and emphasizing free trade is good? People who are willing to trade with one another don’t do so unless they perceive it to be good.

And to the extent that there are exceptions to it, they’re rooted in national security and really drawing out the deep reasons for why we settled on free trade. Same thing with something like religious liberty, but also not being afraid to point out as negatively of things seem to be going right now in terms of constitutionalism on the right, there are massive problems happening with the progressive left and the ways in which they go this on and have in many ways started this whole series of unfortunate events. So I think our goal was to tell the truth, but at the same time, we weren’t trying to be popular or win donors or other things that, say, certain political thought leaders in Washington, names available upon request, are trying to do.

James Patterson:

It’s too late for tact, Richard.

Richard Reinsch:

Well, that’s one of several.

James Patterson:

So you bring up trade, and this is important. This segues nicely into your new project. Well, not so new, but you’ve been working at AIER for a while now. What do you think was the cause for people to hear about tariffs and think this is great? I mean, it was 20, 30 years of people understanding gains from trade as a good, as we specialize in the production of certain things, especially like high-end technology, whereas other places specialize in the development of low-end manufacturing or what have you. These were all things that we generally understood. It seems like the American right became obsessed with zero-sum economics. Why do you think that happened?

Richard Reinsch:

Well, I can only comment. You mentioned I now work for AIER. I did work at the Heritage Foundation for almost two years. What I witnessed in that post and in Washington when I was there was a conservative movement chasing headlines, chasing short-term political victories, chasing donors, and basically refusing to think about what are in fact first principles, what are in fact foundational ways of thinking about freedom and responsibility, freedom and virtue, constitutionalism, even if those conclusions are unpopular with a certain portion of, I might say, conservative media. And that really filled me with dismay. But there it is, and we’re still basically there.

I think the Republican National Committee now refers to people who defend free trade as outsourcers. So we now have an epithet attached to our name. But what I drew on there was being an employee of Liberty Fund for a number of years, which gave me a great education in markets and economics and helped me understand that just because trade crosses borders, it doesn’t become something other than trade between the states of Florida and Indiana, or between people trading who are neighbors, or trading with your grocery store or something like that.

And you start to just think about what is going on. And as you look at data, you start to become skeptical of a lot of the data that you’re looking at. I remember being the editor of Law & Liberty, debating Oren Cass at the National Conservatism Conference. And I’m basically sitting there and I’m reading the Liberty Fund, Adam Smith. I’m reading my Schumpeter, which I’ve got, and I’m thinking about deeply, “What does this all mean?” And the conclusion was pretty clear that what had been lost in the free trade debates were what we might think of as late-stage manufacturing jobs, that is manufacturing jobs that were easily replicated overseas, and our manufacturing sector had become, quite frankly, high-tech with a lot of guys in lab coats, and that’s where really the gains were. And we should expect that from the most developed high-end economy in the world.

So manufacturing employment had been decreasing since the late 1970s in the American economy, yet American manufacturing productivity, even after NAFTA, even after China entered the WTO, had been increasing dramatically, with brief interruptions after 2008 in the financial crisis, but had then recovered. And so if your productivity and your overall manufacturing base are improving even though you’re losing employees, what that obviously points to is tremendous productivity in that sector. And the question becomes, well, why not just do better what you’re doing now? And the only thing standing in the way were these short-term political calculations. So we just really wanted to point that out for people, and that remains difficult obviously to this day.

James Patterson:

The thing that we saw a lot of criticism of, David Bahnsen wrote a book about responsibility saying that there was an unwillingness for people in these sectors that had lost their dynamism because of outsourcing, moving to places where there was more work where there was a lot of work. But of course, one of the problems with people leaving areas like West Virginia or formerly industrialized Ohio is they had to move to cities that they couldn’t afford to live in. But that wasn’t a product of demand, it was a product of progressive regulations. So why wouldn’t that become the message rather than they took our jobs?

Richard Reinsch:

Well, there’s a lot there. One, the places in America that have been hit by manufacturing, job losses have gone into directions and many, many, many places. And this somehow never gets reported. Cities, regions reinvented themselves, made themselves open to foreign and direct investment, opened their economies in various ways and are doing just fine after that initial shock. Places like Spartanburg, South Carolina, for example, people forget Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is not a manufacturing town anymore. It’s doing fine. It is much more diverse economically than it was before. Western North Carolina was hit by the furniture industry relocating and factories relocating to China, yet has done fairly well in recent years. And those were decisions that were made that we could either work again, we could change, we could evolve our economies, or we could become like Youngstown, Ohio. I don’t live far from Youngstown, Ohio. To this day, it is no great shakes.

And they made a different set of decisions. They made, “We want the government and we want the same jobs to come back, and we’re willing to lobby and move in that direction,” and so the biggest employer now in a place like that is healthcare and local government. That’s not a dynamic economy. So, there are all sorts of these sorts of relative gains and losses that are not discussed. We have seen tremendous movement in this country to where you live, to Texas, to my home state of Tennessee, so people are very much on the march in search of places to work and live. So, there’s a clear recognition and desire for that.

Another thing too is a lot of men of prime working age, as David Bahnsen you mentioned discusses aren’t working, and their lifestyles are being financed in many respects by various government welfare programs. That’s tragic, that’s sad, it distorts who they are as human beings, and that’s the exact wrong way to go. But that’s a progressive way to go, and quite frankly, as we look at certain figures on the so-called New Right, again, names available upon request, that’s the direction they want to move in. And that kills America, that kills the real promise of the American life, which is to live on your own two feet, to be self-governing, to make decisions in your life that lead to your flourishing, and not have other people tell you how to live. And too many Americans are choosing for the government to tell them how to live.

I do not believe ultimately in the aggregate that decisions this country has made regarding trade and commerce have led to a lack of flourishing overall: they have created challenges for some, but the overall amazing benefits are substantial. Something else we forget even during the so-called China shock, you’re losing for a period of about a decade, 200,000, let’s just say China shock is real, many dispute it, 200,000 manufacturing jobs a month for about a decade. How many more jobs during that same time period were created in this country? And it’s far more than that, and then also you consider the average manufacturing wage is not even at the top. It’s actually, surprise, in the service industry, and it’s in other industries as well. Manufacturing, usually according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it’s third or fourth. So, there’s a narrative, and in postmodern terms that narrative is false, but sounds convincing in many respects.

James Patterson:

Yeah, I remember back in 2012, I’ve actually looked up the episode here, this time I’ve checked 2012, not 2009, is a really great podcast that Russ Roberts did on EconTalk with David Autor about social security disability insurance, and how it had trapped a lot of people with enough income to get by, but not enough to really flourish, to buy a home, or to afford to. … And they can’t leave because then they might risk losing the benefits. But this was back in 2012, this was back before this had really become a subject of political disagreement. At the same time David Autor’s speaking, Mitt Romney’s running for president, and so in a way, this stuff was staring us in the face, but we were too busy with a different set of questions than we have now.

Richard Reinsch:

Yeah. No, I think that’s true. So you go back and ask yourself, “So, what was wrong with a broad center-right, intellectual appeal and message?” This is not an original observation, and the foreign policy was cast in the wrong tone, we talked a lot about entrepreneurs, but we seemed to struggle to talk about the dignity of work overall. We talked some about the welfare state, it was always in terms of dollars and cents and dependency, it was never about what it means to the spirit and the human character. So I don’t want to skip over that.

I also do think there was an unwillingness to think deeply about religion, civil society, family, and education as well as of, we want to ultimately be free, not to be free, but we want to be free to support the deeper purposes of human life, which are always bound up with community, and family, and religion, and these things that make us flourish, make us happy, give us a spirit and a new lease on life. As the way Tocqueville describes, being engaged in voluntary associations makes your heart bigger, it makes you flourish, it makes you a better person, and I don’t think that message was developed and came out as strongly as it could have. And there was a, “Well, this is about dollars and cents and economic opportunity,” and not discussing the deeper hold that we needed to make on the human spirit. And I think there’s a recognition of that now, but it’s also coming out in all sorts of ways that I don’t think are helpful by a lot of figures.

What is interesting to me too is things that we talked about a lot at Law & Liberty, higher education: there’s just a general understanding now that higher education is dysfunctional for a number of reasons, and there has to be massive systemic reform efforts. And we were talking about that, you were talking about that, and those reform efforts go to both what should be the philosophy of education, how American institutions have historically thought about philosophies of education, and why large-scale government involvement inherently distorts it.

James Patterson:

Yeah, the story of higher education is very complicated, but one of the funnier things about, or curious things about what you mentioned about the towns that recovered from de-industrialization quickly were the ones that, not all of them, but many of them actually had a large number of higher education institutions within their borders. And so like Pittsburgh now, the biggest danger you have from Pittsburgh isn’t inhaling all of the ash from the industrial centers, it’s tripping over robots that are all … I think I saw someone, there was a robot that got hit by a car or something. It’s like living in the future if you live in Pittsburgh.

But a curious thing about Pittsburgh is that it also is, it’s got a lot of very strong religious communities in it. And so these two things, as you said, really do seem to converge. But I wanted to bring back something that you mentioned earlier, which is what is the appeal of the American Compass vision for the economy? Why is it that there is this very strong push for what they like to call the end of neoliberalism and instead a move towards greater management of the economy, especially when it comes to tariffs?

Richard Reinsch:

Yeah. Well, a number of things, some of which you’ve written about, James, and you’ve helped me understand clearly. But one is we say the appeal of American Compass. It’s not clear to me that a lot of people in the center-right are really turned on by their policies. Those policies range from extensive tariffs, heavily constraining international trade antitrust policies constraining the development of digital technology, having the federal government strongly regulate AI, and increasing taxes as they’re now Oren Cass wants to increase taxes, but doesn’t really seem to want to do much on the spending side. I don’t think there’s a huge constituency for that.

There is a constituency which understands, and this is sort of timeless, it’s a weakness of capitalism, it’s something [inaudible 00:34:29] described amongst many others that you see things that are right in front of you. And what you don’t see is sort of the extended ripple effects of a capitalist economy creating wealth through investment and the ways in which that can create all sorts of opportunities for people. But what you do see is when if a factory is shipped overseas, you do see the shuttering of that factory and you feel it directly in your economy and you can see it, and people react negatively to that.

So, I think what American Compass is really able to appeal to is this sort of nostalgia in America, and it’s a nostalgia in many respects for an America that probably never existed, but that time in America of single-family incomes, of social stability, where there did seem to be a lot of Tocqueville on every street, and they’re able to appeal to that and say, “It doesn’t have to be this way. See? Look, China. Look, WTO. Look, trade deficit. Look, financialization, see all of these people getting wealthy, but they don’t actually contribute to the economy: they just take from you. And that’s the reason why you’re struggling.” It’s not, “Gee, because you don’t have good discipline on your credit card usage per se,” or, “Maybe you need to consistently work full time.” Things like that seem to get lost, but what matters is a story of being victimized.

That’s very dangerous, and that’s what David Bahnsen’s trying to address in this great book he’s written on work and the moral dignity of work. And so what is now on offer is something else, which is a series of victimization stories many conservatives are now participating in for various short-term political reasons. They are participating in these narratives that they in no way recognize in their own lives, nor would they raise their children to believe them but they work very well politically in a sense. With all of that said, it becomes incumbent upon people to show why this isn’t true, to talk about why the ability to invest and not pay twice or three times on your investment in terms of it being a tax actually helps the economy overall, why imports can actually create jobs. They create jobs in any number of sectors. Somebody’s got to move them through the economy, advertise them, logistically, promote them, things like this.

There are all sorts of ways that it actually helps us. So this is sort of a difficult scenario, but grievances are easy, and grievances feel good. What might actually be hard now is actually just work itself and creating your own life for yourself, particularly if you’ve been told by a lot of people that everything is against you. So that’s sort of the difficulty that we’re in. I don’t think though … I mean it does seem, when you talk to people about, “What do you want to do with your life?” They don’t give the answers that elites commonly tell us. They give different answers. Even though despite whatever our ideological differences are, those answers would seem to speak towards the appeal of a universal American promise that we should build on.

James Patterson:

When it comes to people relying too much on credit card debt, one of the things you would think would be an issue would be increased prices. Certainly, that would be the consequence of imposing tariffs as it would give a kind of base price on which people in the United States manufacturing goods could peg their own goods because there’s no longer international competition. But also because we’ve had a policy in Covid that just flooded the zone with cash. And so given that tariffs aren’t the answer to the problem of inflation, what is the real agenda that you and the people at AIER imagine would actually be beneficial to ordinary Americans that are feeling the squeeze?

Richard Reinsch:

Yeah, I’m glad you asked that. We’re going to be publishing a book soon on. … If you think of the supply-side tax revolution of the Reagan presidency that Art Laffer helped build, so what does the supply side revolution look like now? And I think a supply-side revolution now is in part a tax story. It’s not the same tax story. We don’t have 70% tax rates, but we still have very high tax rates when you add in … Particularly if you’re in a blue state, particularly if you take into account investment income. So you still have people paying upwards of 50% of tax on earnings and income. But that supply-side revolution that we need now is also … It’s regulatory, it’s energy, it’s healthcare, it’s real estate, it’s the ability to start your own business, all sorts of ways in which we need the administrative state and regulatory pressures to be rolled back substantially to create space for people to live and work and create economic opportunity for themselves and for a lot of other people.

And the administrative state’s regulatory burden on this country, on this economy as a whole is immense. Every year it’s immense, and that’s one of these things, we don’t see it, but it’s there. And that has to be substantially rolled back. So I think that’s got to be the goal. And one of the things going right in our politics amongst many things that are going bad is sort of the recognition that we are, it seems, two nations right now, but there is a huge part of this country where things are still working relatively well and that that’s labor markets, that’s the ability to buy a home, that’s the ability to work and save and live a decent life free of sort of lawless criminality.

And that goes forward. And education choice is a part of that, and so is religious freedom, which now seems to turn on what state you live in. So those are good things in our country, and we have to build on that and show the life of flourishing that leads to and what progressive states lead to. And now I think the goal for many progressive states will be, “How do we get a democratic presidential administration to bail us out?” Because their debts are so immense, there’s no way they can pay them back.

James Patterson:

When I was scrolling through Twitter last week, I saw … Maybe it was two weeks ago, I saw a story about an Austin homeowner who had moved from California and invested a fair amount of money into his house so that he could sell it at a premium only to discover to his horror that despite investing in upgrades to his home, his house was actually worth less than what he bought it for. The reason being that unlike in California where he had primarily grown up and become accustomed to living his life, Austin has very few regulations on building new homes. And so what happened is that there was a massive production of homes that decreased the price because of the increase in supply. And that really does speak to the two America’s problem, that he didn’t really understand that there’s an entirely different way to handle housing than securing just enough capital to flip it, to make more-

Richard Reinsch:

Yeah, I mean, imagine that your home is a consumption good and not an investment good, which is how a lot of people. … They think about it in the latter sense. And also I think that speaks to, are people still … When they move to Texas, the leading cities in Texas, are they still moving to Austin? I mean, the growth in Texas has been so pronounced and now for so long, that maybe Austin is seen as not the same desirable location that it was not necessarily for commercial reasons, but for a lot of reasons that that city has made about how it’s going to govern itself. But no, I think your point is well taken and speaks to a strength that Texas possesses and being able to build homes.

I mean, it’s a question of how and where will our American civilization continue? And the way I see it, there are places where it’s going forward and places where it’s receding. And is it still the case you can put together a national government, education, institutions, families, and religious institutions that will support the latter and ultimately redeem it over these forces of decay, division, and as we’re seeing also, just this flight from reality?

James Patterson:

A wonderful note on which to end. We have had a wonderful conversation. I hope all of you enjoyed it. I know I’ve enjoyed it. Of course, after you finish reading all of the new articles on Law & Liberty, the first thing you should do is move over to The Daily Economy, which is at the American Institute for Economic Research and under the editorial watch of our own guest here, Mr. Reinsch. And of course, do you have a title for that book that’s coming out?

Richard Reinsch:

The tentative title is The Supply Side Revolution Now.

James Patterson:

Which will be coming out under their imprint. Thank you-

Richard Reinsch:

Under our imprint, Stone House Press, probably later this year, if not early 2025. First of many books we will be publishing that will speak to economics, constitutionalism, and classical liberalism.

James Patterson:

Outstanding. So thank you so much, Mr. Reinsch, for coming onto your own former podcast.

Richard Reinsch:

Thank you.

James Patterson:

This might be a little surreal.

Richard Reinsch:

James, this was great. Thank you for having me. I wish you the best.

James Patterson:

Thank you so much.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Law & Liberty Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and visit us online at www.lawliberty.org.