Highlights:
Selling Out or Investing? Oren Cass Can’t Decide
Oren Cass wants it both ways on foreign investment. On the one hand, he decries foreign direct investment (FDI) as the U.S. selling off its assets lamenting the hollowing-out of American manufacturing and sovereignty. On the other, he has, as recently as last evening, hailed the arrival of Japanese automakers in the South. Indeed, he noted that, “and that’s why we now have the American auto industry in the South. Honda and Toyota make American cars…” Later in the interview, Cass observed that, “It was an enormous gain and the investments have led to much higher productivity over time.”
This contradiction cuts to the core of Cass’s economic argument. He wants to reorient conservative economic thought around national resilience, but his story selectively embraces market outcomes only when they flatter his policy goals. FDI is either a threat to national sovereignty or a sign of revitalization. It can’t be both.
Incoherence on Labor
The inconsistency extends to organized labor. Cass rightly blamed union rigidity for the decline of U.S. automakers as part of automakers’ shifting production to right to work states. Yet he has supported sectoral bargaining – a labor model that would strengthen organized labor by giving unions a broader role in setting industry-wide standards. If union influence is a problem, why is expanding it the solution?
Theory Meets Reality on Tariffs
Cass also reserves special scorn for critics of tariffs and protectionism. Many critics of protectionism note how trade barriers harm Americans – reducing wages and employment for the benefit of select, protected industries. The upshot of the research literature is clear and overwhelming that trade barriers fail the cost benefit test.
Cass frequently paints these critics as out-of-touch academics who don’t understand the “real world” challenges of globalization. It is rich then to see Cass in this Politico article on the Trump tariffs acknowledge that implementation – the “real world” of trade – is falling well short of the ideal. When these tariff policies ultimately fail to improve U.S. economic outcomes, one can already foresee years of “protectionism was never really tried” from Oren Cass.