Hoover Dove

To hear Niall Ferguson’s predictably intelligent rebuttal, as well as to hear Cochrane talk about income inequality, listen to the conversation here.

“I'm the token Dove on this program. And so I have to stand up. This is not Cold War II. It's a very different adversary, and a very different situation. Our trade with China is bigger than ever, and I think, when it comes time to end Communism, the Communists will sell us the rope. They'll put it on container ships, and it will be ready just in time. Their prime motivation is fear. Their motivation is not world domination or whatever the Soviets had. To what extent it’s a US strategic interest: yeah, they're not behaving well in the South China sea, but they don't have tanks ready to roll across Poland and into France. Nobody around the world wants the China model. Xi Jinping t-shirts are no where near as popular as Che Guevara t-shirts, no matter how dumb American campuses are. And I think one of greatest dangers we face is the chance of whipping this up, and thereby shooting ourselves in the foot [with] a massive industrial policy to build things at home at 10x the cost. (Of course it has to be made with Union Labor and American materials.) We can shoot our own economy, and one of our biggest strengths is openness. We should be letting Chinese people come to the US and see what the US is like! We should be letting every computer programmer and chip engineer from Taiwan into the US with a brand-new H-1B visa. Shutting ourselves off from China and the intellectual exchange is one of the worst things we can do here. There's a huge risk in [claiming] we're re-playing the Soviet scenario.”