Carol Roth wishes Americans would be more individualist
In a wide-ranging conversation—touching on tariffs, COVID-19, protectionism, and American individualism—Anastasia Boden, senior attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation, spoke with Carol Roth, entrepreneur and bestselling author of You Will Own Nothing and The War on Small Business. Here are a few highlights from the conversation. (You can scroll down to watch the full video.)
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Carol Roth: Something that I’m struggling with in our current policy situation is that people who’ve made very clear cogent arguments during COVID are now making the exact opposite arguments during the tariff situation. And I always say, look at it blind. Just look at the policy and put someone else’s name next to it. If that person did it, would you be happy with it? And I don’t think a lot of people are willing to do that exercise or be honest about the outcome… It’s a very dangerous way to live. [Note: Read Luke Wake’s blog post making a similar argument (in the opposite direction) contrasting Gavin Newsom’s COVID position with his tariff position.]
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Anastasia Boden: If we scale back the size of government, we necessarily scale back the threat of these big businesses who have harnessed government power at our expense.
Carol Roth: That’s exactly it. This is a fight that I have ideologically with some of my friends who are progressive and on the left who can’t seem to understand that the issue that the crux of the issue is big government—that the reason these big businesses seem anti-competitive sometimes, or are being favored, is because they are. And if the government didn’t have the ability to tilt the playing field, put their thumb on the scale, then we wouldn’t have that same sort of issue.
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Anastasia Boden: If you betray your principles, they can be weaponized against you in the future. In constitutional law, I think of Chevron deference, which formally used to require judges to rotely defer to the interpretations of law given by administrative agencies. Even if judges thought that there was an objectively better interpretation out there, they were forced to accept the bureaucrat’s interpretation of law. And that’s when individuals were fighting with bureaucrats about things that threaten their whole livelihood could destroy them, and these judges could not step in. They had to just defer, at least in cases where laws were ambiguous. And at the time it was thought: Well, actually this is good because we have a sort of conservative administrative state, and so hey, maybe this is a way to fight back against what was perceived as activists, lefty judges or whatever. And then of course, that switches. And we’ve seen the growth of the administrative state and the destruction of liberties. It was like, Oh, this is a bad thing. And then now that the Supreme Court jettisoned Chevron deference and said, no, judges are the ones who judge. At the time that was under the Biden administration, you saw a lot of critics saying, oh no, this is going to kneecap the government. This is terrible. And then as soon as Trump is in office, you see people say, Oh no, we need to weaponize Chevron. We love overturning Chevron. We need to fight back against the Trump administration. And it’s like, guys. Chevron was bad because it’s bad. It was bad. Not because it affected one group or the other.
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Carol Roth: It’s a frustration with Congress not doing its job. And so the executive branch has either felt like they were forced or took the opportunity—depending on your slant—to pick up these powers to actually take action. And it’s really led to bad consequences.
Watch the full interview:
