(LifeSiteNews) – Vice President JD Vance defended American workers against globalism at an entrepreneurs’ conference today.
Vance was the keynote speaker at the Third Annual American Dynamism Summit, a gathering of business owners and policymakers, in Washington, D.C. on March 18. In his speech, Vance described the fears working people have concerning the leadership class attitude toward their jobs and presented evidence that they are right to be concerned:
I think the populace, when they look at the future and when they compare it to what’s happened in the past, I think a lot of them see alienation of workers from their jobs, from their communities, from their sense of solidarity. You see the alienation of people from their sense of purpose. And importantly, they see a leadership class that believes welfare can replace a job and an application on a phone can replace a sense of purpose.
I remember a Silicon Valley dinner in particular back when I was in my tech days, where my wife and I were sitting around talking to some of the leaders of the important technology firms of the United States, and this is probably in 2016 or 2017. And I was talking about my real worry that we were heading in a direction where America could no longer support middle class families working on middle class wages. And, importantly, that even if you had enough economic dynamism to provide the wealth to ensure those people could afford to buy a house and afford their food and so forth, that even if you replaced the financial element of their jobs, you would destroy something that was dignified and purposeful about work itself.
And I remember one of the tech CEOs who was there. The CEO — you would know his name if I mentioned it — he was the CEO of a multi-billion-dollar company. He said, “Well, I’m actually not worried about the loss of purpose when people lose their jobs.” And I said, “Okay, well, what do you think is going to replace that sense of purpose?” And he said, “Digital, fully immersive gaming.” And then my wife texted me underneath the table and said, “We have to get the hell out of here. These people are effing crazy.”
At the same time, Vance sought to build a bridge between American workers and “tech optimists” who, although they “may sympathize with (workers) who lost (jobs), they’re much more frustrated that the government won’t allow them to build the jobs of the future.”
He stated that America must be “tech forward” to meet the challenge posed by China, which he said would not hesitate to use AI or any other technology to get ahead of its rivals.
“We have to (lean) into the AI future with optimism and hope because I think real technological innovation is going to make our country stronger,” he said
The vice president envisions technological innovations helping workers stay employed. He favors keeping all the aspects of manufacturing in the United States, saying that “deindustrialization poses risks both to our national security and our workforce”:
And the net result is dispossession for many in this country of any part of the productive process. And when our factories disappear and the jobs in those factories go overseas, American workers are faced not only with financial insecurity, they’re also faced with a profound loss of personal and communal identity.
Vance blamed 40 years of globalism for American deindustrialization and proposed that one way forward is to stop separating the “making of things from the designing of things.” According to this outworn globalist model, rich countries travel up the “value chain,” taking care of design and innovation, while poor countries carry out the simpler tasks like manufacturing. However, this was based on false assumptions, Vance concluded:
I think we got it wrong. It turns out that the geographies that do the manufacturing get awfully good at the designing of things. There are network effects, as you all well understand. The firms that design products work with firms that manufacture. They share intellectual property. They share best practices, and they even sometimes share critical employees. Now we assume that other nations would always trail us in the value chain, but it turns out that as they got better at the lower to the value chain, they also started catching up on the higher end. We were squeezed from both ends.
The second conceit of globalism Vance attacked was the attractions of cheap labor, which he called “a crutch that inhibits innovation” and “a drug that that too many American firms got addicted to.” For Vance, innovation is key:
I think most of you are not worried about getting cheaper and cheaper labor. You’re worried about innovating, about building new things, about the old formulation of technology is doing more with less. You guys are all trying to do more with less every single day. And so I’d ask my friends, both on the tech-optimist side and on the populist side, not to see the failure of the logic of globalization as a failure of innovation. Indeed, I’d say that globalization’s hunger for cheap labor is a problem precisely because it’s been bad for innovation.
In Vance’s view, the addiction to cheap labor is the common enemy of American working people, populists, and innovators. The solution is American innovation, and he cited the “interchangeable parts revolution” as the reason why American industry “became the envy of the world.”
Innovation was what he really wanted to talk about, he said:
Why innovation is key to winning the worldwide manufacturing competition, to giving our workers a fair deal, and to reclaiming our heritage via America’s great industrial comeback. And I believe that’s what we’re on the cusp of, a great American industrial comeback. Because innovation is what increases wages. It’s what protects our homelands. […] It’s what saves troops lives on the battlefield.
To encourage the “Great American Manufacturing Comeback,” the Trump administration has a “simple” plan:
You’re making interesting new things here in America? Great. Then we’re going to cut your taxes. We’re going to slash regulations. We’re going to reduce the cost of energy so that you can build, build, build. Our goal is to incentivize investment in our own borders, in our own businesses, our own workers, and our own innovation. We don’t want people seeking cheap labor.
Vance said that the Trump administration has already begun by rearranging America’s “trade and tariff regime internationally.” He pointed to 9,000 more jobs in the automotive sector, as well as an attack on cheap labor through cracking down on illegal migration. Vance tied the dramatic decrease in migrant crossings to an important improvement in the lot of American citizens:
Thanks to President Trump’s leadership, last month for the first time in over a year, the majority of job gains went to American citizens born on U.S. soil. And that’s important. For the first time in over a year, the majority of job creation actually went to American citizens.
Vance stated also that energy prices were going down, and that last week “the administration took major steps to make energy even cheaper and liberate our companies from stifling environmental regulations.” He spoke of making tax cuts to businesses permanent, of “expanding full expensing to cover factory construction” and the creation of hundreds of thousands of jobs.
“… The fundamental premise, the fundamental goal of President Trump’s economic policy is, I think, to undo 40 years of failed economic policy in this country,” Vance said.
