Vance a socialist? That is a serious charge. Here is the clip Shapiro played to support it.

“Does the socialism thing scare me? Yes,” Vance told Rogan. “Is it the wrong solution? Yes. But one thing I try to persuade my fellow Republicans of is socialism is the alternative if we don’t have a pathway to give people a sense that the system is not rigged and that the American dream is attainable. That’s like our job. That’s what we have to do.”

“It’s not going to be easy to undo some of these economic trends,” Vance continued. “But man, we ran the experiment. We ran the experiment of offshoring all of our industrial jobs, of becoming a services and finance economy and allowing Wall Street to come in and buy every asset of modern life and turn it into an investable, you know, line goes up asset. And what has that done? It’s created a generation of kids who kind of are attracted to socialism. We have to fix that problem.”

Contra Vance, Shapiro thinks everything is perfect in the economy and Vance is only helping Democrats by pointing out past policy mistakes.

“That America has offshored all of our jobs. Not true,” Shapiro claimed. “That America’s services economy is some sort of gigantic failure. Not true. That America’s economy is some sort of rigged system in which no one can get ahead. Not true.”

“When you keep giving credence to that and then you say we have to … we must … we the government … we must step in and convince people the system is not rigged, I don’t know how that sounds any different than Gavin Newsom frankly,” Shapiro continued.

Shapiro then played a clip of Gov. Gavin Newsom saying the American dream is “now out of reach for many, if not most, Americans.”

“Roughly ninety percent of baby boomers grew up to earn more than their parents, but only fifty percent of people born in the 1980s have done the same,” Newsom continued. “Meanwhile, the price of family necessities has increased dramatically. The median home price is roughly seven times what it was in 1940, adjusted for inflation, and per-person health care costs are roughly 800 percent greater now than they were in 1960. The numbers do not tell the whole story, but they tell a lot of it. Fewer than fifty percent of U.S. citizens believe their children will have a chance to achieve the American Dream.”

Sounds like Newsom does agree with Vance that the current American economy is not working for young people. 

Newsom then went on to blame laissez-faire policies for enabling “major American manufacturers to move their operations from the United States to countries with lower labor costs and workplace standards.”

“Policymakers could have countered this emergent trend by enacting legal penalties on outsourcing and offshoring, or by incentivizing domestic production through innovations in the tax code or federal financing,” Newsom continued. “Instead, they went along with academics who declared that deindustrialization is simply the natural outcome of successful economic development. Politicians like President George W. Bush openly celebrated the broader trend of globalization as a mark of political success, referring to it as the triumph of human liberty across national borders.”

Newsom’s critique of free-market policies did not end there. “In the past 25 years, American industrial output has stagnated, and American manufacturing employment, which had remained around 12 million for more than 50 years, has fallen by roughly a third to less than 8.5 million. Many working-class communities never recovered from the downturn,” Newsom noted.

“As our communities declined, foreign regimes, including the Chinese Communist Party, enriched themselves at America’s expense,” Newsom continued. “Tragically, financial speculators based in the United States did the same. Motivated by the shareholder primacy theory espoused by Milton Friedman and driven to maximize short-term gains, American businesses now invest more money in financial assets than capital development. Instead of improving assembly lines or building new manufacturing sites, they specialize in churning out stock buybacks or dividends to shareholders. They are encouraged to do so by the U.S. government, which privileges financial transactions in the tax code.”

“There are two problems with this,” Newsom explained. “First, Wall Street’s trillions would almost certainly be better spent on investments in innovation and fixed assets, the profits of which are distributed more equally among low-income and working-class citizens. Second, financial speculation is an incredibly risky industry. That risk forces a dramatic boom-and-bust cycle on the entire country. The Great Recession of 2008 is a perfect example of this.”

Shapiro is right: It does appear that Vance and Newsom are both singing from the same hymnal. They both believe something is fundamentally wrong with today’s economy and that the laissez-faire policies of Milton Friedman are at least partly to blame.

But wait. I’ve made a mistake. All of the quotes I attributed to Newsom were actually written by then-Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) in 2017. Turns out Rubio is every bit as guilty as Vance is of giving credence to young voters’ beliefs that the economy is rigged against them.

IGNORE THE LIBS AND GET MARRIED EARLY

Maybe Shapiro, who has never won an election in his life, is right. Maybe the economy is awesome, and Vance and Rubio should just tell young people who can’t afford to buy a home until they’re 40 to shut up and enjoy their cheap refrigerators and big-screen televisions.

Or maybe Shapiro is hopelessly out of touch with both economic and political reality, and no politician or voter should ever listen to him ever again.