09/03/15 – Doug Bandow – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.scotthorton.org libertyradionetwork.com twitter.com slash scotthortonshow.
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Anyway, next up, our friend Doug Bandow.
He's from the Cato Institute.
He also writes for Forbes and for The National Interest at nationalinterest.org.
And, well, first of all, welcome to the show, Doug.
How are you doing?
Happy to be on.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
I appreciate you joining us here again today.
Now, I wanted to interview you about this one in The National Interest.
Thanks to Libya, North Korea might never negotiate on nuclear weapons.
But you know what?
I already explained it to everybody earlier in the show what the article's about.
And now that I've found this, I'm more interested in this one I haven't read yet.
How China and the United States can learn to get along.
Tell them, Doug.
Tell me.
Well, both countries have to recognize, I think, most importantly, that war would be really, really stupid, that there's nothing kind of between the two countries that makes that worthwhile.
And that's something, especially for the United States, which wants to dominate East Asia, I think has to be willing to step back and recognize you've got to give China some space.
All right.
But now, come on, the right-wing hawks are going to say, yeah, but what you're saying is let the Chinese run roughshod over all their neighbors and steal all their resources in the sea near there and this, that, and the other thing.
And like Cheney's new book, all this Obama leading from behind has led to the re-rise of China, challenging Vietnam and Korea and Japan and the Philippines for their possessions.
Yeah, it really is wonderful to have a good old Dick Cheney out there telling us what to do.
It's frustrating.
What's amazing is that these folks on the right who domestically talk about responsibility and incentives and don't believe in kind of social engineering, when it comes to everything overseas and nobody can do anything, everything has to be America, you can't expect people to take care of themselves.
And what we see going on in East Asia is these countries recognize that China is being a little pushy and they're responding.
I mean, a lot of folks over there are building submarines and thankfully they're actually not building them because of America.
They're building them because of China.
Countries are working together.
The Philippines actually wants Japan to do more.
India is showing up with its navy in kind of the South China Sea sort of area.
It's doing training with Vietnam.
So these are good things which we should encourage as opposed to think that we have to step in there and try to do everything for everyone.
Yeah.
Now, well, so part of the thing about China is people are afraid of China.
It's a billion people.
It's a pseudo sort of kind of communist dictatorship.
And I'm trying to remember what old funny novel I read where there's some Tom Robbins or Kurt Vonnegut.
Maybe it was Kurt Vonnegut talking about how nobody knows what's going on over there.
So everybody just assumes that they're building a 50 million man army to conquer the whole world and this kind of thing.
Now, that was back more in Mao days, I guess.
But the point being is that China is a great boogeyman.
Unlike Al-Qaeda, which is still only a couple of thousand guys, at least China is a real place and they got H-bombs and stuff.
Right.
So, you know, I don't know.
I wonder, though, whether you think that, you know, their power at this stage in the 21st century is all that it's cracked up to be in the PR.
Well, it's not a long way from being a great power.
Now, this is a country that over the long term is going to be very important.
You know, and what we kind of talk about, you know, the way people talk about it, it could be a peer competitor of the United States.
That is, it could be America's equal.
It could be out there and also have a globe-spanning military.
But it ain't there yet.
I mean, this is a country that remains quite poor.
You know, it's a big economy, but you have to divide that by all the people.
You get outside of Beijing, Shanghai, the other big cities, there's still a lot of poverty.
We see the economic problems they're going through.
I mean, no one believes their numbers.
Everyone believes they're growing, but not as fast as they've claimed.
They have all sorts of internal political issues.
So it's really silly for the United States, which is this enormous power, to be kind of cowering in the corner, worried about what the Chinese are doing.
You know, the best thing we can do is to kind of get our own economy in order.
The best thing we can do is to work well with other countries and expect them to take care of themselves and to deal with potential threats down the line.
And we also have to not be stupid.
Because we would not allow another country forever to kind of dominate us along our border.
We're not going to be able to do that along with China.
So we have to be willing to step back.
Well, what's vital for America and what's not, trying to dominate China along its border is not vital for us.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, what's funny here, too, is from the whole Cheney view, everything is, you know, from the eyes from the bridge of an aircraft carrier or something.
If there are real disputes in the sea over there over who owns what mineral rights, well, if America was, you know, temporary limited constitutional republic, a normal country in a normal time, then we might have a pretty nice role there to host peace talks where these guys can negotiate these issues.
Maybe they can create some international consortiums to exploit these resources in harmony together or whatever.
Why not?
There's no reason any of this has to be a zero-sum game anyway, other than the American empire is the one over there lording it over everyone.
Well, that's right.
There are a lot of alternatives for them.
You know, they can kind of do joint research development.
They can put, you know, sovereignty aside.
And you're right.
At this stage, it's very hard for us to act as if, you know, we in some sense are, you know, not partisans, not biased.
I mean, the point is we're part of this.
Our allies are involved.
We promised to protect our allies.
The Chinese correctly say, you know, you guys are part of this.
And we have that same problem, of course, in the Middle East and elsewhere, that no one looks at us as being disinterested.
If we actually were, we could play a much more effective role, I think, in terms of promoting peace.
All right.
Now, listen, there's just no escape in the fact that a huge part of the excitement behind Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump both are that they seem to be powerful enough, one a senator, the other a billionaire.
They're of high enough rank in our society that they, you know, conceivably actually could win.
And they're willing to say what apparently huge portions of the American people have been thinking all this time and that the establishment centrist, you know, liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats that run this country have been unwilling to really even discuss this whole time.
And that is free trade and immigration.
And these guys both say shut it down and especially fear the Chinese and use the law to prevent the Chinese from competing with us.
Look what they've done to our entire economy.
They imported all these Hispanics we can't understand, and they shipped all our factory jobs away.
And so what do you have to say to them?
Well, look, it's easy to demonize foreigners.
Unfortunately, that's been something we've done historically.
You know, most foreigners come here to work.
I mean, Donald Trump's simply wrong on the crime issue.
Actually, native-born Americans are more likely to commit crimes than foreigners are.
I mean, you know, if you have somebody who comes over, we should throw them out if they commit a crime, obviously.
You know, there's some important issues here in terms of welfare benefits and other stuff that are quite reasonable to talk about.
It doesn't make sense to kind of do this demonization.
Of course, what's interesting about Trump, excuse me, is that in talking about China, he's talked about the economics.
He hasn't suggested we should go to war with them.
So if you look at what other Republicans have said, it's actually worse.
I mean, he's the bombastic one.
But on this issue, I mean, he focuses on trade with China.
It's the other guys who are talking much more in military terms.
And I think that if you look at both these guys, it's not just those issues.
I think it's a broader sense that the establishment has failed.
You know, Americans are very frustrated.
They have this kind of one party, you know, and it's foreign intervention.
It's big spending.
It's kind of corporate welfare.
Republicans and Democrats alike kind of glom onto the status system.
Both of these guys, I mean, there's certainly no free-flowing libertarians from my standpoint.
But both of them are attacking pieces of this.
Where you look at Hillary Clinton, she's as much a corporate welfare person as any Republican.
You know, you look at kind of how the establishment runs things, you understand the frustration.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, but so what about the idea, though, that, you know, when our government signs these free trade agreements, that, hey, it's a race to the global bottom.
And guess what?
The global bottom is a penny per hour.
And American laborers can't compete with that.
And so they live like shit, Doug.
They wait tables, where they used to have a good job.
And so government's got to do something about it.
What about that?
Well, the problem with that, of course, is that productivity is what determines pay.
And American workers are among the most productive on Earth.
You know, American corporations aren't going to put their factories in a place that has no, you know, legal kind of system that has no protection of property, in which workers don't know anything, in which everything's dangerous.
You know, do you want to put your factory in the middle of Pakistan?
Go ahead.
What are you going to get out of it?
Indonesia, a lot of other countries.
So, in fact, American jobs haven't been disappearing like that.
American workers are more productive.
What's happening is we simply produce more stuff with fewer workers.
Our challenge is to create other work out there.
Every country is losing manufacturing jobs, even China.
But we need to be better domestically at freeing up people to create jobs rather than putting burdens on them in terms of trying to create them.
And that's really where I think especially somebody like Bernie Sanders would fall down.
He's going to have much more regulation.
It's going to make it actually harder to create jobs here.
So, yeah, we'll have fewer jobs, not because of trade but because of this other stuff.
Yeah.
Well, and this is the same old song.
From the libertarian point of view, it's just watching the same slow-motion train wreck over and over and over again where every government intervention creates new problems that, quote-unquote, necessitate further intervention and on down the chain.
Exactly right.
Whether we're talking about wars or war on poverty or anything else.
But, listen, I know you've got to go.
So I'll just thank you for coming back on the show, Doug.
It's great to talk to you as always.
Hey, happy to be on.
Take care of yourself.
All right, y'all.
That's Doug Bandow.
He's at Cato.
He's at Forbes.
And he's at The National Interest.
This one is called How China and the United States Can Learn to Get Along.
Hey, Al Scalhorten here for Liberty.me.
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