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The Humble Grocery Store and the Case for Capitalism · Liberty + Leadership

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast, a conversation with TFAS alumni, faculty, and friends who are making an impact today.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Ann Bradley.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a TFAS economics professor and the current George and Sally Mayer Fellow for Economic Education.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: Today I have the pleasure of guest hosting Liberty and Leadership, and I'm thrilled to have Emma Camp join me on today's episode.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_01: Emma was a 2025-26 Robert Novak Fellow and is the senior editor of the Wall Street Journal's Free Expression Newsletter.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_01: Her essays have been published in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Slate, America Magazine, and Persuasion Magazine.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: Her forthcoming book, No Hard Feelings about Gen Z and Risk Aversion, will be published in 2027.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome, Emma.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's great to have you today.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, thanks for having me.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_01: Well, your recent piece and uh video about what you call the humble American supermarket went absolutely viral.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: I saw it all over social media.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's really exciting, been sharing it with our students.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I wanted to ask you just why you think it struck such a nerve with people.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's really just you're kind of browsing the grocery store and you're picking up different items.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_01: And this is something that we experience every single day.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: So what do you think made it so successful?
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_02: There aren't enough people making the optimistic case for capitalism.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_02: There's a lot of sort of the optimistic case for socialism, how socialism can create this utopia.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_02: There's a lot of people bragging on capitalism and why it's bad.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_02: There are a lot of people making the case for capitalism, but in a way that is very, I don't know if harsh is the right word, just not enthusiastic.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm very enthusiastic, Beffery Marcus, because I think it's how you get the most economic prosperity for the most people.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_02: And the grocery store is a great example of this.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_02: And I think maybe some people thought I was hamming it up for the camera how much I love grocery stores, but this was 100% how I feel as a person in my day-to-day life.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_02: Like if you gave me a medieval peasant and were like, Emma, you need to blow this person's mind as quickly as possible.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_02: I wouldn't take them to NASA.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_02: I wouldn't even take them to a hospital.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_02: I would take them to a grocery store and watch as their, you know, subsistence farmer brain is exploded by like, what do you mean there's all of this food and you didn't have to grow it yourself?
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_02: And half of it is from halfway across the world, and I'm only gonna spend like 10% of my income on it, and I can have more food than I could ever possibly eat.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_02: What's chocolate?
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_02: What's a tomato?
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_02: That is what makes me feel optimistic about the world we live in and feel grateful to have been born in 1999 instead of 1899 or 1699.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: I love that you use the word Marvel in the video, that what we're seeing around us in the grocery store is truly extraordinary.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: That word Marvel is, and I'm sure you know this, but maybe not everybody does, it's used by Leonard Reed in his short essay I Pencil, where he's talking about, you know, how the pencil comes to be, which is a miraculous result of the market.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: And Hayek uses the word Marvel very intentionally.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: He says to jolt the reader out of their complacency.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_01: I think that you're right, that we should be optimistic about all the abundance around us.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: And then, you know, maybe from your perspective, can you talk about how the grocery store might be able to change our mind about that abundance and make us, you know, kind of think about what types of institutions we need to keep that abundance going into the future?
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_02: I think when you look closely at what is being sold in the average American grocery store, you see so much evidence of global trade, competition, and technological innovation.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, think about something like so I'm vegan, which is, you know, I'm a weirdo, but that means I've benefited so much from technological innovation over the past five, 10 years.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_02: Like when I first went vegan, Beyond Burgers were just on the market.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_02: Like the first time I had a Beyond Burger, it was this surreal experience.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_02: It was like, this tastes like meat.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_02: And I haven't had that in a long time.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_02: What's going on here?
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_02: I'm used to these like black bean patties.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_02: I've gotten to try lab grown meat a couple of times, which is so awesome that this is a thing we can do now.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_02: Food manufacturers have economic incentives to create better products, and that's exciting because then there is so much more variety.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_02: And then, you know, you look at the food on the shelves and it comes from all over the world.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_02: Half of the produce comes from Mexico or Chile or Thailand or even, you know, America is this huge country that spans a continent.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_02: You know, we have vegetables from California or maple syrup from Vermont.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_02: And it's easy to take for granted that just a couple decades ago, people were limited to seasonally available produce from around the area that they lived in.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_02: Anything that was imported was incredibly expensive.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_02: And now we take it for granted that we can have, you know, grapes grown in Chile in our supermarkets in January.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_02: And I just think that is so awesome.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: In the video, you say there's 50 kinds of rice and we get blueberries in January.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: And then I love this part of the video.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: You point to something in a container and you say, and whatever that is.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: And so I was wondering, just for fun, did you ever figure it out?
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, it's a grind your own peanut butter station.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_01: Amazing.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_02: So it's like a vat of roasted peanuts, and then you can grind your own peanut butter.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_02: I'm like, that's cool.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_02: And then of course, like that's competed with all of the 70 different kinds of peanut butter.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_02: I think sometimes the sort of anti-cabalist response is like, oh, actually, we don't have that much variety because it's only a couple companies.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_02: And it's actually more than you'd think normally competing.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_02: And even then, it's like people underestimate the level of competition because they're looking at, okay, you know, maybe there's three breakfast cereal companies.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_02: That doesn't seem like that much.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_02: But they're underestimating that those breakfast cereals are also competing with the small business that makes granola that is also on the shelf at Whole Foods, or the fact that I could have cereal for breakfast, but I could also have yogurt, or I could have eggs, or I could have, you know, so many other products.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_02: There's so much variety.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_02: I was thinking about this.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_02: Like every morning I have this specific brand of non-dairy protein yogurt for breakfast.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_02: And I was thinking about how much variety is available at grocery stores by kind of zooming out.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_02: Like, okay, there's this one brand of protein yogurt, non-dairy that I really like.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_02: But there are like four different kinds of non-dairy protein yogurt, which is so highly specific.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_02: And then it's like, okay, what about all of the non-dairy yogurts?
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_02: And then all of the other yogurts, and then all of the dairy products.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_02: And it's just astonishing.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_02: And when you think about, you know, if this was some kind of planned economy, the number of Americans who are interested in non-dairy protein yogurt is vanishingly small.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_02: Like one of the nice things about living in a capitalist economy is that I can still have my highly specific preferences catered to, because a business does not have to cater to everybody to be successful.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_02: So like the niche that I inhabit is well responded to by the market.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_02: And that's great.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_02: I get to be weird.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's great.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, there's a lot of reasons that someone might need to be vegan.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: So I think your point is, you know, you're saying it's your weird choice, but you get to have those preferences and they are catered to.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_01: But there might be a lot of other reasons to be vegan.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: And those are catered to too.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_02: You can have your non-dairy yogurt and it tastes pretty good.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: That's wonderful.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_01: On that note, what do you think this kind of humble grocery store, again?
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_01: We walk by them every day, we drive by them, and we don't think much.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_01: I actually always ask my students to reflect on the idea that, you know, when you know you need to go to the grocery store and you write your little list for the weekend, like these are the errands I need to do.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes we think it's just kind of like a drag.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, I don't want to go there.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's, you know, I have to do it all the time.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_01: And it's just part of my routine, but I'm not kind of amazed enough by the grocery store.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: But I think you're trying to get us to rethink that, which is wonderful.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: What do you think this humble grocery store can teach us about some of the stuff you've already mentioned, which is consumer preferences and consumer choices, but also more broadly about economic freedom and prosperity?
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think I'm taking it too far?
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_01: Can the grocery store do that for us?
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_02: A story that I love, and I mentioned this in the original video, is that when Boris Hilton visited the United States, he on a whim decided he wanted to see a typical grocery store.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_02: And so he went to this grocery store outside Houston.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_02: And what he saw blew his mind.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, talking about blowing the mind of a medieval peasant, blowing the mind of the head of the Soviet Union, you know, he saw that the average American had fully stocked shelves with this wide variety of food.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, there's this iconic photo of him literally with his arms out in awe at a row of what looks like the like ice cream and popsicle section.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_02: And he later wrote that what he saw made his heartbreak for the Soviet people and that he thought there might be a revolution if the average Soviet citizen knew what the average American had.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_02: And so it really like shows the flaws of communism, of this centrally planned economy that, you know, it's pitched as like this is how we bring more prosperity to the average person.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_02: But in fact, all it does is make everyone equally poor.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_02: And not even equally poor, because of course Soviet elites were able to have nice things.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_02: It was everyone else who had aligned up at the breadlines who had to deal with having, you know, empty shelves or shelves only stocked with one variety of meat, if there was even that.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_02: And it's so easy to take that level of prosperity for granted.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_02: And I think sometimes the response to an argument like this is like, oh, you just want people to shut up and be grateful and not complain about high grocery prices or other problems that they're facing.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_02: And I don't feel that way at all.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_02: I don't bring this up to tell people to stop feeling the difficulties that they experience.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_02: I bring it up more to argue that we know how to improve the quality of human lives.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_02: We've done it before.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_02: A hundred years ago, the average American did not live like this.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, someone like Dolly Parton, right, was born in the 1940s in a shack without complete plumbing.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_02: And that was very common for the poorest Americans.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_02: And now almost no Americans live like that.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_02: We know how to improve human lives.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_02: Let's take the lessons of the past to continue improving people's lives in the future.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_02: Like the solution to the problems of today isn't to do something that we know from the past doesn't work.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_02: It's to learn from the improvements that we've made so far.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_01: And I love the Boris Yeltsin story.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: I was so happy that you put it in there.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_01: Your point is exactly right, which I think what is important about Yeltsin's visit is that as you point out in your comments just now, he's a wealthy person.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: He's a person that has all the political privilege in the world.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_01: He has people who just do whatever he says whenever he asks them to do it.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_01: And he visits an American grocery store and he really kind of can't comprehend the abundance that's there, which is to me, that's the remarkable point because as you mentioned, in the Soviet Union, a centrally planned economy, the elites did certainly live better than everybody else.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_01: But they didn't even have access to what Boris Yeltsin witnessed.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: I think my favorite part is that, and one of the pictures that you can see online is, you know, he's kind of in the popsicle aisle.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_01: By our standards, right?
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's like a very antiquated kind of grocery store.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's just like a big bin of frozen things.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: And the legend is he kind of became enthralled with jello pudding pops, which, you know, if you're a child of the 80s, you know what those are.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think that this is very important to say that even the people that live the best lives in an authoritarian society without economic freedom don't have access to the abundance.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think that that's an important part of the Yeltsin story that we can learn from?
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah, absolutely.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_02: It's like this is someone who is living one of the best lives you could live in the Soviet Union.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_02: And he still realized that he did not have access to things like, you know, a lower middle class American could have had.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_01: So do you think that your video, which again, congratulations on it's done so well?
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it's just a great tool for a variety of things, just making us think about and having some intellectual curiosity about these things.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think that's why it did so well and is continuing to resonate with people?
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_01: Were you surprised by the reaction to your video?
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_02: That video had went very viral in the wake of another video that had gone very viral about rent control.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_02: And so there was something about like my videos on econ 101 concepts that people were really digging.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm not quite sure why, because I've been making videos sort of like this for many years, starting at Reason Magazine.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_02: And I don't know why this specific video at this specific time just got people's attention.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm very grateful that it did.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_02: My biggest hope is that they're going to be played in a lot of AP econ classrooms this fall.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_01: That would be wonderful.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: Because I do think that there are so many young Americans, you've kind of alluded to this already today, misunderstand what capitalism is.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: I think that word has a ton of baggage.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_01: You've had other kind of conversations on social media, I think, about that, about, you know, just kind of what does that even mean to someone Gen Z or maybe even younger now, who's starting to say, you know, socialism maybe is a good idea, maybe not the Maoist version, but you know, maybe democratic socialism is something that we should try.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_01: So why do you think that this is so misunderstood?
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_01: Because I agree with you that it is, and I think getting this into even high school classrooms would be a wonderful opportunity to start having new conversations.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not the first person to point this out, but I think we have a problem where people say capitalism when they mean the status quo.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_02: So if there is something that is a problem, there's a genuine real problem with the way American society is working, people often blame that problem on capitalism when very often the problem is too much government intervention.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_02: Housing is a great example of this, right?
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_02: Housing is way too expensive.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_02: Way too many young people cannot afford to move out of their parents' houses, not just buy a home with their own.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_02: But the reason why we have a housing crisis isn't because like free markets have gone haywire.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_02: It's because we have onerous zoning regulations that make it very difficult to build new housing.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_02: It's that we have rent stabilization regimes in many blue cities that make it very difficult to build more housing.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_02: It's that like the government has prevented the free market from providing the housing that it wants to.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_02: And I think it leads to this problem where a lot of people on the left, even if they recognize that there is a housing problem, don't understand where it's coming from.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_02: So when I made the video about rent control, where I made that very simple point, like what we have is a shortage, and you can't solve that by preventing landlords from charging like an economically solvent amount of rent, people were like, oh, so you're choosing big companies, you're choosing housing developers over people.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, well, people need houses to live in, and you know who builds houses?
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_02: Housing developers.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_02: So if you want more homes to be built, you do have to do things that make the environment friendly to the people that are going to build the houses.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_02: If your only goal is like doing whatever seems like it's going to hurt businesses or, you know, big businesses, you're not going to get the things that you want.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_02: So I think there's just like a fundamental misunderstanding about what free markets even are.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, I agree with you.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_01: I think that using supply and demand as our analytical framework gets us a long way to what you were just saying.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_01: If you want more, you know, kind of lower cost and more accessible and better options in housing, we need to build more houses.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_01: So would you say that those principles are also true for how we should think about grocery stores?
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think you and I are certainly will agree on this, but maybe most people, and maybe you could talk about this.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: I think most people do not know kind of what margins grocery stores operate on.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_01: And the idea that we can just manipulate that probably doesn't work out in reality.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, this is the problem with the state-owned grocery store land.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_02: So yes, grocery prices have increased.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_02: It is complicated, but the overly simplistic explanation is tariffs and inflation.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_02: Like inflation increased prices on everything.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_02: People feel that especially with something like groceries, because while you might be buying a car, you know, once every couple years, you buy eggs every week.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_02: So you notice pretty quickly when the prices increase.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_02: And people don't like that very understandably.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_02: But like grocery store prices have increased because of things the government has done, right?
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_02: Not because grocery producers suddenly discovered greed yesterday.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_02: Like any explanation for increased prices that comes down to like the people at the head of these businesses are greedy, like sure, maybe they are greedy, but you have to explain to me why they're greedier today than they were three years ago.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_02: Like I think human greed is kind of a a constant.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_02: So I think being able to like make that clear to people will get us a long way.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and and the idea that grocery stores operate on very, very thin margins.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_02: And so you can't offer a 30% discount on staples without taking a huge loss.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, when pressed about this, City Hall has basically said, well, you know, taxpayers are going to make a big investment in this, which means these stores are going to hemorrhage money and they're going to use the tax base to make up the loss.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_02: What's frustrating about this is these stores were created with a goal of let's make it easier for people to afford food.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_02: So we're going to create grocery stores that have significantly lower prices than typical stores.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_02: But in order to do that, we're going to need to spend about$70 million building them with a continual infusion of cash once they inevitably don't make money.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_02: And maybe even we're going to give tax breaks to regular privately owned grocery stores when they inevitably lose business to the state-owned grocery stores.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm sitting here like, if we're going to spend taxpayer money to help poor New Yorkers afford food, which I think is a legitimate thing for the government to do, I am not anti-welfare state as such.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_02: It's way more effective to like write grants to food banks or find some kind of city-administered way of doing something like Snap, right?
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_02: Like Snap has a lot of problems with the fundamental idea of like you're too poor to be able to afford enough food.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_02: Let's give you money to buy food with.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_02: Like that is so much more effective than just spending millions upon millions of dollars to build these stores that anybody like it just the inefficiency is part of what drives me crazy here.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I think these ideas, and uh, you know, kind of we're talking about why younger people are buying into these ideas.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_01: I think that it just sounds good.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_01: Do you agree with that?
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_01: That that's just that politically, you know, the free market ideas of if you let the market do and respond to what consumers want, it will do that.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_01: Sounds less appealing, perhaps, than I live in New York City.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_01: I have a lot of student debt, which is another problem.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_01: We can maybe have you back on another day to talk about that.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_01: So these are all, as you say, they're real problems we've experienced.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_01: Inflation recently, which is related to central banking policy.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_01: So it's not as if, you know, we've had a regime of free markets, um, unadulterated free markets, and, you know, they've just kind of failed us.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_01: But rather, we have a lot of interventionism.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, I think one part of what you're talking about is we don't even have a clear picture of what the free market delivers.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_01: But then the second part of this is just that people's perception is that the government can just come in and change things.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_01: As you're saying, it's going to be able to engineer prices in New York City with these government-run grocery stores, but you're pointing out this is impossible to do, and even on a small scale, not workable.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: So how do you think we do a better job?
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I always say to my students, there's no free lunch.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_01: It seems like that's appropriate in a grocery store conversation for us to say that, right?
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_01: How do we get people to see that while it might sound attractive on paper to say the government's going to give you reduced cost groceries just through these interventions that we don't even force people to think about the way the interventions will work?
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: Is there a way to overcome some of that?
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you're in journalism, so I imagine that's kind of part of your job, right?
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: Is to help us think about this in salient and accessible terms.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's pretty tricky.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_02: The way that I try to respond to that is to make the trade-offs clear.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_02: I think one of the things that a lot of American socialists do is that they present these really huge welfare state programs, but they sort of hand wave who's going to pay for it.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_02: They sort of say, well, you know, if we just tax the rich, if we just tax billionaires, then we could pay for this.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_02: And the problem is the countries they often point to that have large welfare states, you know, sort of European-style welfare states, everybody pays for those programs.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_02: Like places like Norway, the Netherlands, Germany, whatever, they have much less progressive tax systems than we do.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_02: The middle class and the working class pay far higher taxes in Europe than they do in America.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, if if socialists were honest about this and they said, okay, you know, I wanna give you free health care, free child care, you know, I I wanna give you all of these programs, but everybody's gonna have to pitch in, right?
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_02: Like we're all gonna have to pay for this, we're all gonna have to do this together.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_02: The poor are gonna have to pay more, the middle class are gonna have to pay more, the rich are gonna have to pay more.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: I would be okay with that.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_02: It's like, okay, at least that's intellectually honest about what it is you're advocating for, but they never do that.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_02: They always say, you know, somebody else is gonna pay for it, so you're gonna get it for free, and you might even get a tax break from this.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_02: And it sort of shows that they're not intellectually serious because they don't expect that their ideas will ever be enacted, right?
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_02: Because if if you actually attempted to get through these proposals, it would quickly become clear how economically insolvent they are at the current taxation rates that we have.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_02: And so I think just making it clear like there are trade-offs here.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_02: And if you want this, everybody's gonna have to pay for it.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think that's so important.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, you know, in economics, we should, and I think we do, try to help students understand this idea that trade-offs are everywhere because we live in a world of scarcity, and those trade-offs have to be negotiated.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think it's Thomas Sowell who says the first law of economics is scarcity, and the first law of politics is to disregard the first law of economics, which is right, enter in all of these policy proposals that I think what you're saying is are actually gonna cause more harm than they create benefit.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's perhaps what we need to shine a light on, right?
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_01: To kind of help people understand that.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_02: And I don't think this is inherently a problem with young people.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_02: You know, there's the problem of total boomer luxury communism.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_02: As I've seen some people describe it on the internet, where politicians who know that older voters are are the most likely to vote say, okay, retirees, you shouldn't have to pay taxes on anything.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_02: You shouldn't have to pay property taxes because you're our noble, wonderful seniors, but also you should get infinite social security and even more government transfers.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_02: Like the median voter wants to pay no taxes and get infinite government services.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_02: And that's understandable.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_02: It'd be pretty great if I didn't have to pay taxes and I got infinite government services, but that is just not possible with the laws of physics.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_02: And unfortunately, the kind of politicians who are willing to abide by the laws of physics are not very likely to get elected.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_01: But one more thing I want to point out, which I thought was brilliant in your video, is you talk about the shelves are stocked because the producers are competing for us.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_01: So you you mentioned like there's 50 different types of rice or 50 different brands of rice or whatever.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think we look at that and we take it for granted, we're just like, look at all this rice.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_01: I'll just pick one based on what my preferences are, which is wonderful that we can do that.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_01: But I think a lot of times the narrative about capitalism is that capitalism is kind of producer against consumer in this kind of fight, right?
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_01: And you're pointing out that actually it's the producers that compete against each other for us.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think that that's something that we need to help people understand more?
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_01: Or, you know, it seemed like a little nugget in the video, but I thought, wow, we could spend a lot of time just trying to think about the mechanics of how, you know, what goes on behind the scenes before the food even gets to the shelves.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_02: It's such an obvious point to me.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_02: Like if you are, you know, Kellogg, you want people to buy your breakfast cereals.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_02: And you get people to buy your breakfast cereals by making stuff that they want to eat.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe they want to eat sugar breakfast cereal.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_02: You know, that's a preference a lot of people have, but there's also increasing preferences for healthier options.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_02: And so, you know, you're gonna have one of your companies make, you know, high fiber, low sugar breakfast cereals.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_02: And people who want healthier options are gonna buy that.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_02: Like they only make money if you buy their products.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that there's this sort of, I think it's philosophically satisfying to be like, yeah, man, like the companies just force us to buy their food because we're sheep.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_02: When in reality, like you have free will and you put the food in your grocery cart that you want because you like it and you want to eat it.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_02: It's just math.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_02: I find it so obvious it's almost hard to explain.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I I think part of it is just people tend to view the economy as a zero-sum game.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_01: And if you view the economy as a zero-sum game, your way to fix it is to say the government has to kind of adjudicate who's gonna get what, right?
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_01: But if you believe and understand the free market isn't, then you don't get as upset, perhaps, that there's 50 different types of breakfast cereal.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_02: I I think a huge problem is uh is that so many people have this fixed pie mentality.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_02: They believe that there is a fixed amount of wealth in our economy and that if one person has more than anybody else, it's because they have more than their fair share.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_02: And that's why we have to have this like government-forced egalitarianism when that's just not true.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_02: Like we can make more pie.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_02: That's why Americans are so much richer than they used to be.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_02: And I think once you get out of the fixed pie mentality, everything makes more sense.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_02: Like there have been a couple different people on the internet who've sort of spoofed my video and Wall Street Journal videos, and there was one video, and it was just sort of a series of sort of ad hominem insults, you know.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_02: But something, one of the sort of parody example Wall Street Journal videos that one of these people had come up with was, you know, the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_02: Here's why I like that.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_02: And like, no, you're wrong.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_02: The rich are getting richer, but the poor are also getting richer.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_02: That's great.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_02: Like, I personally would rather live in a world in which the wealthiest Americans get wealthier and the poorest Americans get wealthier, maybe at a at a lower rate than the richest Americans are getting richer, but still are at an absolute level better off than a world in which everyone else is poorer.
• 27:35
  unknown: Yeah.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_02: And I think a lot of socialists hate the poor or they they hate the rich more than they love the poor.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_02: And I want the poor to be better off more than I want to like take the rich down a peg.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_01: Well, sure.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_01: And the idea here is that, you know, it's kind of one of the things I talk about in my classroom is that, you know, Amazon, just to provide one example, or Walmart, right?
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_01: Walmart's the world's largest grocer, I believe.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, Walmart gets richer because it is successful at its mission, which I think their mission statement is something like, you know, save money, live better, or something.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_01: So it's like they're getting richer because they are providing choices to consumers at a price people are willing to pay.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_01: And those voluntary choices of the consumers are making them better off.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_02: No, absolutely.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_02: If if you evenly divided every dollar in the world, there would immediately people would become unequal because someone would start a lemonade stand and someone would gladly part with one of their dollars in exchange for some lemonade.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_02: And that is not, you know, me, the lemonade stand proprietess taking advantage of them.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_02: That's both of us getting what we want.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_02: Like, I get money, you get lemonade.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_02: And this it feels so simple to explain.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_02: Like, I've had some people sort of criticize me for like, oh, why is she making these videos like she's talking to teenagers or something?
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, it's because so many people do not accept such basic economic concepts.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_02: I feel it is my moral duty to try to explain in an accessible, understandable way.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_02: Like, here's an econ 101 concept.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't always have these sort of free market views.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_02: I, you know, would probably have been sort of a progressive floating missocialism at times type kind of teenager and college student.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_02: And it's when I became acquainted with econ 101 level reality that I was like, oh, okay, the facts of economics are like the laws of physics.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_02: Like the supply and demand graft is as true as the fact that if I like dropped this cup of water on the like if I let go of this cup of water, it would drop to the floor.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_02: And our attempts to make it not so only lead to disaster.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_02: And like our economic policy has to start from the fact that like supply and demand is real.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_02: And we have to work around that.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_02: But the way that you do that is primarily by increasing the supply to lower prices.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_02: It's very simple.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_01: And as Friedman and others said, you know, capitalism is about profit and loss.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I think what we need to help people understand is that the pursuit of profit is governed by consumer choices.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_01: And so ultimately, and that's why I bring up the Amazon story or the Walmart example, right?
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's just if consumers' choices are being satisfied with higher quality and lower prices, then that is what capitalism is able to do, as you mentioned at the outset, better than any other system.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_02: And what I like about kind of free markets is that they channel people's innate sense of self-interest for the greater good.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_02: Like you earn profit.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_02: People like it when they have money, right?
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_02: That is a very human impulse to want to have a lot of something.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_02: It sort of channels the like human desire for greed and to have a lot of wealth and money to providing services that people want, right?
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_02: It to ultimate, ultimately making the world better than it would have been.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_02: Whereas socialism and communism takes that human desire for greed and having more than other people and channels it into this like government bureaucracy where you're trying to get ahead of someone by and look, there's still I mean, crony capitalism isn't capitalism.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_02: Like I don't want to make America out to be this free market utopia.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_02: There is a lot of you know companies taking advantage of government programs to sort of be chosen as winners and losers by the state.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that's bad.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_02: But socialism only works if everyone is an angel.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_02: And capitalism works with humans being imperfect.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_01: And having the right incentives, right?
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, to your point earlier, people like to have a lot of choices.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_01: I it's interesting because in the two week span of me seeing your video, I saw also on social a very short interview clip of Marco Rubio being asked about Maha and how RFK eats and all the stuff, and he eats like meat and sauerkraut and all this kind of stuff.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_01: And the interviewer said, So do you support Maha?
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_01: And he's like, I like the idea of it.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_01: And then his wife was in the interview and chimed in and she said, You know what he eats?
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_01: Pop tarts.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought that was kind of very funny, right?
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_01: Because it's like, we might not think it's a good idea for people to eat Pop Tarts every day of the week.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_01: But people like Pop Tarts.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_01: And it's amazing to me.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if you saw this when you were at the grocery store of how many flavors there are of that.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_01: My son has celiac disease, and now they've come out with gluten-free Pop Tarts, you know, a version.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's not by the same brand.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_01: But I think that's what people are after.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's like you can eat sauerkraut and steak all day if that's your choice.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_01: You can, as you do, choose a vegan diet, or you can have Pop Tarts.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, we have to kind of pay the price for what we eat health-wise, but it's, I think consumers just really want to be able to decide for themselves.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_01: And the market seems to be the best to give them those choices.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_02: If the government is going to be picking and choosing like which food companies like win, it's not going to be like the healthy, organic, unprocessed food producers.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_02: It's 100% going to be like pre-existing, super large companies who know how to lobby the government and already know how to get government favors through contracts.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_02: Like, I mean, I think about how part of how we had, and this is a little bit different.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_02: I don't want to equate baby formula to process food, but I think about how part of why we had the baby formula shortage is that if you are buying baby formula with Snap, you can only buy one company's baby formula because the government has decided we're going to pick one baby formula producer as, you know, in this state, as, you know, our winner.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_02: And so if you're on Snap, you can only buy this brand of baby formula, you can't buy another brand of baby formula.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_02: And so when one of the main baby formula producers had to shut down, because I think it was bacterial contamination, that led to that, like the one baby formula brand that you could buy, you can't buy anymore.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_02: And that's like a huge supply shock.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_02: And then not to mention tariffs on foreign imports of baby formula that meant that domestically produced baby formula didn't have to compete with European formula, which in many ways, European formula is better than American baby formula.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_02: You know, there was my old workplace, Reason Magazine, had a podcast about this, and they, one of my colleagues interviewed a woman whose son had a dairy allergy, and she had to illegally import goat's milk formula from Europe for him because the American baby formula market was so regulated that there were no domestic producers of the specific formula that her son needed.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_02: And like that's a huge problem.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_02: But again, that isn't capitalism.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_02: That's government overreach.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_01: So we need to be careful when it's a good idea.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_02: And I get very worked up about this.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, no, you as you should, as you should.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Emma, I just have one last question for you today.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_01: You were a Novak journalism fellow with TFAS last year.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I, you know, you mentioned, you know, kind of your your intellectual trajectory over your life from high school to college and beyond.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_01: And so I'm just wondering if you could maybe talk about how that experience as a Novak fellow, did it influence the way you approach your work in both your writing, but now also kind of short-form videos?
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_02: I basically used my fellowship to write my book.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_02: So I already had my book deal when I got my fellowship.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_02: And what the financial support did is it gave me the peace of mind to take a three-month unpaid book leave.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_02: I would not have been able to do that if I did not have the Novak Fellowship.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I could have, but it would have gobbled up a significant portion of my advance.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_02: And having the ability to have that fellowship just pay for taking a significant time off work to devote to writing my book was so liberating.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_02: It was fantastic.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_02: And so I am eternally grateful for that.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_01: Wonderful.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_01: Well, thank you for your time today.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for what you're doing in the world.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_01: I think that you're reaching an audience that needs it and you're doing it in a very optimistic, hopeful, and compelling way.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_01: So thanks for being with us today, Emma.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, thank you for having me.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_00: If you have a comment or question, please drop us an email at podcast at tfas.org.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_00: And be sure to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app and leave a five star review.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_00: Liberty and Leadership is produced at Podville Media.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Roger Reim, and until next time, show courage in things large and small.