Bryan Caplan doesn’t mince words: “Protectionists are just fools,” he said.
But the first protectionist whom the economist, who runs a widely read blog, ever knew was his own father. At 87, Caplan’s dad still runs a used car parts business and remembers the 1950s as America’s golden age.
“Anger is his muse,” Caplan said, describing how his father spends hours listening to talk radio, furious at foreigners “for selling us stuff.”
The elder Caplan’s nostalgia is familiar across the Rust Belt, where officials in President Donald Trump’s administration promise that tariffs and factories can revive lost prosperity. But the younger Caplan, one of the country’s most prominent libertarian economists, and also one of its loudest champions of housing deregulation, insists that’s the wrong lifeline.
The real path to millions of blue-collar jobs, he argues, is letting Americans build more homes. He thinks that housing deregulation is an “almost perfectly tailored fit” to address the plight of the non-college-educated male, a significant demographic in the Rust Belt states.
