J.D. Vance Might Be a Straight-Up Policy Moron
"Smart" does not equal "knows what he's talking about"
When I worked in a congressional office, we would get faxes (yes, faxes — I am 97 years old). It turns out that there are self-styled geniuses across the country who will fax in “solutions” to intractable problems; we’d get detailed plans for balancing the budget, restructuring health care, or achieving Middle East peace. Most of these plans were — to be polite — nonsensical garbage from self-important loons. I suspect that many of these people had seen the movie Dave, in which a small-town accountant balances the budget with some common sense and a TI-81 graphing calculator, and thought: “That’s probably how stuff really works.”
I was thinking about those faxes when reading about J.D. Vance’s economic vision. Vance — whose background is in law, not economics — thinks that he sees something in economic policy that all the ivory tower eggheads have missed. He told Ross Douthat:
“…I think the economics profession is fundamentally wrong about both immigration and about tariffs. Yes, tariffs can apply upward pricing pressure on various things — though I think it’s massively overstated — but when you are forced to do more with your domestic labor force, you have all of these positive dynamic effects.”
This is just part of an economic vision Vance spells out in that article and several others. It’s a vision that people are giving credence, probably because Vance seems like a smart guy. And I agree that Vance does seem smart — he’s articulate and wrote a book that he tricked a bunch of big-city liberals into buying, which is something that I hope to do someday. Of course, being smart is not the same as knowing what the fuck you’re talking about. And from where I’m sitting, Vance’s economic vision is small-minded gibberish that I’d expect to find in an all-caps fax titled “A COMMON-SENSE PLAN TO QUADRUPLE GDP AND END UNEMPLOYMENT!!!”