 Section 232 of the Trade Act of 1962 is a section of the law that gives the president broad authority to restrict imports deemed to be a threat to national security. I don't know how we manage until 1962 without such a law. So 1962 Congress, Congress generally over the last I'd say 60 years or so, feels like it has too big of a burden. Like all these laws it has to pass, very controversial stuff. It's not worth it while to deal with it because then they lose votes and they get voted out of the House, voted out of the Senate and they don't want the responsibility on certain issues. They just don't want it. So what they've done over the last 50, 60 years is give more and more and more and more authority to the president to let him do things that the Constitution explicitly makes the responsibility of Congress. I'll give you one example. I'll give you a few examples. One example is war. Congress is supposed to declare war. It's its responsibility. The president should not be able to engage in military action overseas unless it's an emergency and you don't have time without getting authorization from Congress and a declaration of war from Congress. What Congress has defaulted on that and it's basically over the years given more and more and more power to the president to engage in military activity outside of U.S. soil. And again, it's undermined its own authority responsibility given to it by the Constitution. Another issue that's true of is immigration. You saw the executive acts that first Obama passed and then Trump passed and now Biden's passing on immigration. This is all Congress's job. Congress is responsible for immigration. But immigration is contentious. It's people get very riled up about it. And Congress doesn't want responsibility. It's too difficult. It's too complicated. So they've handed immigration to the presidency and they write these vague laws and the president fills it all in with executive orders. It's also true in terms of almost every aspect of regulating business. Today, Congress, like in the 1930s, Congress wrote very, very detailed laws about how they want to regulate business. Today, they write laws that are shells that lay the outline of what the regulation should look like and then they hand it over to the executive branch or, if you will, the fourth branch of government, the regulatory agencies, to actually write the content. The content is all filled by the regulators, not Congress itself. So Congress defaults on that. Congress has no power to restrict immigration, but it has taken upon itself the power to restrict immigration, right? And once it took it on, it discovered there was a hot potato and it's delegated to the authority to the presidency. All right. So one of the issues in which Congress has done this is trade. Congress explicitly is responsible for trade. Congress is explicitly, explicitly supposed to deal with trade and treaties and so on. And yet it's delegated that authority to president and does not want to vote and does not want to be engaged in issues of trade. And as a consequence, one of the powers it's given the presidency is Section 232, which basically allows the president to restrict trade based on, quote, national security reasons. Now, this is one of the worst trade laws on the book. National security reasons is not defined. Substitutive and procedural loopholes are unbelievably wide. It basically gives the president almost unlimited authority to arbitrarily impose tariffs whenever he sees fit. And you, now, lots of presidents have used it, but you saw it used more often and in the most arbitrary way by President Trump. Trump, on eight different occasions, initiated the process of using Section 232 to impose tariffs on particular goods. The most notable of these are the steel and aluminum tariffs that were imposed and then not imposed. All claiming to be national security. But it's funny on national security went out the window when he gave exemptions of these tariffs to particular parties that he negotiated something else around. And suddenly national security was no longer a concern. So, and of course, you know, at some point, the claim was, and there was an investigation. The Congress Department came back and discovered that automobiles, the importation of automobiles was a national security issue. And there was talk about imposing tariffs on Japan and on Europe, allies of the United States for the sake of national security. Luckily, that never happened. He never got to it. But that was the kind of stuff that the Trump administration legitimized as being part of what the right the Republican Party represents. And of course, the consequences have been horrific. I mean, study after study showing that, you know, we probably steal tariffs and aluminum tariffs destroyed in excess of 75,000 jobs that still prices in the United States are the highest they are, pretty much in the world, which hurts the people who use steel, which is, you know, the 16 jobs of people who use steel for every steel job. It's been incredibly destructive to the US economy. And yet, it's funny because Trump used national security excuse to put tariffs on steel. And then the solution to the problem is tariffs on steel created, that is rise of steel prices which made it uncompetitive for manufacturers of other stuff to compete who had to buy steel. He was going to place national security tariffs on goods imported that you steal. And you can see how this spirals, how suddenly everything has tariffs and everything is national security all because you imposed one tariff at the beginning. And that's logically inevitable. It's logically economically inevitable. So this national security excuse was a major theme of the Trump presidency, using national security as an excuse to raise tariffs. And again, we're not talking about tariffs primarily in China. Those were done under a variety of other reasons. We're talking about tariffs on our enemies, our mortal enemies, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, European Union, countries like that, South Korea. Sorry, I mean, God, I try to do positive shows. I do your own rules for life. I do shows on fintech. I do shows on once in a while, I do shows on art and movie reviews. And you know, the reality is, and I'm not blaming you guys because you guys are probably some of you guys are the ones who watch those shows. Very few people watch them. And it's clear that the market is sending me a message. The signal the market is sending is the doom and gloom shows sell. So do more doom and gloom. Now, if you want me to change the market signal, you have to help get more people to watch the more positive shows. You have to help promote them and share them and get people interested in them and so on. And of course contribute more money in those shows. But as long as the most viewership happens when a I mean, the most views I get is when I attack the left, although I do get a lot of views when I attack the right, because all the right wing guys show up to to attack me. But the doom and gloom sells. And it's doom and gloom unfortunately is also reality. So it's a combination of those two. So one of the hopes was that by getting rid of Trump, we'd maybe step back from using section 232. There was even some talk about Congress repealing section 232 and taking it upon itself to vote, which is difficult and hard as the Democrats are discovering right now. Difficult and hard to get anything passed. But to vote on what is truly a national security threat, have a debate, vote on it, try to get past the filibuster, which is difficult. But alas, it turns out the Biden administration, of course, this was always the danger. Love section 232 and is encouraging its extended use by Biden and by future presidents. It sees it as a legitimate tool to protect the so-called interests of the so-called interests of American companies and American national security. And it's a great tool. It's power. You see, every time a president takes some power for himself, Democrat or Republican, it doesn't matter. That power sticks. And the next president, that's the starting off point. So now Biden administration is talking about using section 232 on many other goods out there. And you shouldn't be surprised to see tariffs going up under Biden, even though he claimed to be, you know, everybody says, ooh, Democrats are the free trade. They're the globalists. No, Democrats have always been anti-trade, always. Publicans have been pro-free trade now. And this is what Trump did to the Republican Party. Now, everybody's anti-trade. Left and right, Democrats and Republicans. And again, not just trade with China. Trade period. We are now left and right. Muck into lists. And if we need to use the national security excuse to impose on Muck into lists, lists, views, so be it. So I if you're interested in this kind of stuff, if you're interested in trade, globalizations, the massive benefits of globalization, the massive benefits of trade, then I really encourage you to listen to, or to read Scott, Scott, Lindsey, I think that's how you pronounce it, Lindsey. He's on the dispatch. He has a sub-stack. He writes for Kato. He's very, very good. He's very, very good on these issues. I'll be interviewing him tomorrow on these issues for the ingenuous site. Go subscribe to the ingenuism, ingenuism.supstack.com and ingenuism channel on YouTube. All right. I mean, there's a lot more to say about trade. I'm a huge fan of trade. Trade is good. It's win-win. You know, Adam Smith showed the trade was good. This is not controversial. Yeah, Trump was a populist, not a free trader. And now everybody's a populist because we're left a populist too. So now we have our entire political spectrum is a populist political spectrum. And that's a disaster. That's a very, very bad place to be. What we need today, what I call the new intellectual would be any man or woman who is willing to think, meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, women's or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of the spare cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist broads. All right. Before we go on, reminder, please like the show. We've got 163 live listeners right now. 30 likes. That should be at least 100. I think at least 100 of you actually like the show. Maybe they're like 60 of the Matthews out there who hate it. But but at least the people who are liking it, you know, I want to see, I want to see a thumbs up. There you go. Start liking it. I want to see that go to 100. All it takes is a click of a click of a thing, whether you're looking at this. And you know, the likes matter. It's not an issue of my ego. It's an issue of the algorithm. The more you like something, the more the algorithm likes it. So you know, if you don't like the show, give it a thumbs down. Let's see your actual views being reflected in the likes. But if you like it, don't just sit there, help get the show promoted. Of course, you should also share and you can support the show at your own book show.com slash support on Patreon or subscribe star or locals and and show you support for all for the work for the value. Hopefully you're receiving from this. 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