Introduction

Welcome to the Future of Liberty, a project of Liberty Fund hosted by Mitch Daniels.

Mitch Daniels (00:17):

Greetings, I’m Mitch Daniels and on behalf of everyone at the Liberty Fund, welcome to the latest installment of our podcast, the Future of Liberty. We could not have conceived of a more appropriate or informative guest than our guest today. He is a leader of both thought and action. On behalf of freedom, its defense at home and abroad, he is Senator Todd Young. Senator Young. Thanks for making time.

Todd Young (00:43):

Thanks for having me, Mitch.

Mitch Daniels (00:44):

I want to ask first of all about your day job. Congress, some people think, is a less pleasant place to be, a less fulfilling role than it used to be. We’ve seen some people of real talent throw up their hands and leave on both sides of the aisle. You’re still there. We’re glad you are, but can we count on you to stay and how is it working in Congress these days?

Todd Young (01:08):

Well, I have to tell you, I plan on staying. I actually love the job. I find that stimulating intellectually. I think it’s a more important time than ever to serve and to hopefully instill some measure of trust in our federal government when it’s at this low ebb. And I love my colleagues and constituents, so there are tough days. It’s certainly hard to get things done. We hear that consistently from people who leave and there’s a lot of countervailing forces for people to serve these days, but I’m privileged to do it.

Mitch Daniels (01:48):

You are a great counterexample to the contention that people can’t get anything done. We’ll come to that and in a few minutes, you have gotten some big things done even in this environment. But before we move on to some of those, I just want to ask, when you’re together with your colleagues in the party caucus or in bipartisan settings, how often does the word liberty, the word freedom or concerns about its status come up?

Todd Young (02:16):

It comes up periodically, but not enough. I frequently lament that we don’t return to first principles enough, which is why the Liberty Fund is so important. Now you’re dedicated to exposing people to the thought behind our first principles. What I think we need to do is return to defining these key terms, these foundational terms. And when you think of liberty, to me it’s about having the freedom, having ability to go out and pursue whatever ends one pleases, but of course subject to certain limitations and there’s a positive dimension to liberty, a negative dimension. I tend to gravitate more towards this negative view of liberty, which is we want to be free from external interference, but like everything that has to be tempered with sort of reality and real world needs of constituents,

Mitch Daniels (03:19):

Well, reality has begun to make itself plain as it does over and over through human history. America had a, I’ll call it a pleasant holiday from worrying about foreign threats, but that’s over now. Several are very plain, and so I want to ask you some questions about that. You are as credible on this as anyone we could ever host here. You’re a Naval Academy grad, a Marine Corps veteran, and you’ve worked on these issues now during your federal service. When you array the various threats, and I think threats plural is probably accurate, the way to ask it, which do you rank the most serious and the most immediate?

Todd Young (04:07):

Well, I mean there’s a structural threat to our liberty right now, and by that I mean we live by a series of rules domestically. Those rules are enshrined in our laws, our statutes, our court decisions, and the norms that we’ve established, norms of acceptable behavior, and we frown on when those are violated. And sometimes we develop rules because those norms are no longer being followed. We have a similar sort of, yes, they’re bodies of law, but also these norms of behavior internationally that protect our economic freedom so that we can trade, prevent people from stealing our intellectual property and ultimately they prevent bad actors, bad leaders of countries from stealing territory and threatening the freedoms of our friends and ourselves. And that whole body of rules and norms is being upset by a couple of malevolent countries. But the numbers are growing. China, communist China, of course, Russia, its invasion of Ukraine, throw Venezuela and Iran into the mix, and you have what Anne Applebaum, the writer for the Atlantic, has characterized as autocracy incorporated. There’s now cooperation among those who really don’t share particular beliefs ideologically other than they want to remain in power. And the law, the jungle seems to be overtaking this rules-based order that once existed, but is eroded.

Mitch Daniels (05:53):

One thing they agree on is they don’t care much for us and our institutions.

Todd Young (05:57):

That’s right. That’s right. They don’t care much for us or the premises on which we developed our institutions, these sort of enlightenment values that so much of the world subscribes to the free world, so to speak, but even that term is becoming challenged right now.

Mitch Daniels (06:17):

Let me ask you a China specific question. I’ll probably have a couple more before we’re done, but there have been different schools have thought about China. They were going to liberalize as they became wealthier. That didn’t happen, but now it seems there are those who believe they are to be feared and guarded against as a primary threat. Others who think that they have within them the seeds of their own undoing containment worked in the case of the Soviet Union, we never thank goodness had a shooting war or anything like it with them. Is it possible that that works here too as their internal contradictions, as the Marxists call ’em, become more and more evident?

Todd Young (07:04):

No, I don’t think that’s going to work. Certainly not as neatly as we tried to execute it during the Cold War. Our economy still remains deeply tied to China. More importantly, the economy is so many of our large economy friends and allies is also integrated fairly deeply with China. And I’ve sort of tested this idea that we could have a hard decoupling, as some would call it from China. I traveled around to Asia Pacific and visited Japan, visited Taiwan, India, so many other countries and time and again, I heard no, we will continue to trade with China and trade extensively into the future. Well, if that’s the case, if we’re insisting that American firms leave, then other countries will just steal market share. So to the extent we do decouple, we’ll have to do that collectively with our friends and allies. But I think more realistically is we need to continue to, on a number of fronts, fight for our basic values and undermine the ability of the Chinese and some other malevolent actors to acquire the technology and other means to challenge our ability to defend our way of life. I’d be happy to unpack that a bit more if you like.

Mitch Daniels (08:40):

People generally agree, I think that we’ve allowed our national defense apparatus, our resources to dwindle to the point that they may not be adequate to fend off or deter the various threats that we’re facing. Talk about that and the cost in a time of big deficits for addressing it satisfactorily.

Todd Young (09:10):

So I am among those who thinks we need to invest more in our military, more in some discrete areas. For example, we need more ships. There’s an old adage that quantity has its own quality, so we need more ships to cover more surface area around the world if we want to continue to defend, to defend sea lines of communication, our trade routes and ultimately our values. That’s one example of an area where we need to invest more, but I’m also of a mind that there are areas where we need to disinvest

(09:50):

Perhaps geographic areas, I think that needs to be fully vetted.– I don’t believe it has – technology areas. We need to rethink the nature, I think first and foremost about our naval warfare. Should we still be investing in aircraft carriers at a time of long range hypersonic weaponry? So there are ways we can spend a lot more effectively in addition to spending more. The one department of government that I’m highly apprehensive about cutting is DOD [Department of Defense] without some real clear sense of why you’re cutting it. I don’t believe we do that well in Congress because oftentimes there’s a certain hero status given to anyone wearing stars on their shoulder, and I find that sometimes healthy in our democracy, but oftentimes it can be very destructive among policymakers.

Mitch Daniels (10:50):

Since you mentioned geographic retrenchment or at least reexamination, you better say where you’re thinking because otherwise our audience may fill in the blank with an inaccurate supposition.

Todd Young (11:05):

I believe in the idea that we need to persuade our allies and partners to invest more in their own military capabilities. I credit President Trump in particular for having catalyzed however messy the process may have been to catalyze more investment by our European partners in particular, but we’ve also seen similar action from the South Koreans, from the Japanese and others.

Todd Young (11:32):

So to the extent we withdraw, others should be filling in certain investment responsibilities, and we’re seeing that happen not quickly enough, and whomever our next president is working with members of Congress like myself needs to really emphasize to our friends and partners that we just cannot bear every burden globally anymore. We don’t have sufficient resources, and frankly, the American people are exhausted after a couple of decades of war and continued prophecy in a number of levels.

Mitch Daniels (12:07):

One of our most respected retired generals, national security experts just a few years ago when asked in Congress, I think it was to define the number one threat he saw to our national security. He said, our national debt.

Todd Young (12:22):

Yes

Mitch Daniels (12:22):

I think meaning that we’ve put ourselves in a corner where it’ll be difficult to make the investments necessary to level up the competition.

Todd Young (12:32):

Yes, this is something that to you — you creditably have spoken about for a long period of time and which with much authority, I’ll certainly embrace the spirit of everything you’ve said. We need to get our finances under control. We need to figure out how to eke out some additional growth, which I don’t think is something we discuss frequently enough. The whole debt to GDP that the denominator is also something we need to emphasize, but if we lose this exorbitant privilege as the French ones characterize it, of having the reserve currency, it will have both geopolitical and economic implications. It’ll cost us a lot more to borrow money. It will make us less resilient, whether it’s currency crises or just international disputes. And so I don’t think most people, understandably, most people don’t appreciate just the benefit we get from having this currency and it’s something we inherited and we have an obligation to pass it on to our children.

Mitch Daniels (13:49):

Your point about growth is very fundamental and yet another problem that some of us see in the accumulation of our debt, now we’re paying interest at something more like historically normal rates as opposed to artificially suppressed rates. It is leaning against growth by soaking up so much of the available capital that could otherwise be going to build a new factory or invent a new product somewhere.

Todd Young (14:20):

It’s absolutely the case. Most of this is unseen. We fail to appreciate the potential benefits of things that would otherwise be invested in research and development skills for our workers so they can become more productive and earn a higher wage. But there’s also collective losses that we experience at the governmental level. At some point, we see a crowding out of collective investments. Sometimes that’s in R and D or military, necessary military hardware that we need to invest in those decisions as they become harder. There are some things left on the cutting room floor that are really necessary to defend our way of life.

Mitch Daniels (15:14):

You’ve been a leader. You just mentioned R and D, the determinative role of science in national success these days, and you’ve done something about it. Here’s an example of that. Congress can act at least when the right people take leadership so that the legislation the world knows as the CHIPS Act was as much your conception and achievement as anybody’s. I know you had partners of course, but I’d like you to talk about this first of all, from the standpoint of what you think it can accomplish in making us, if not independent, less dependent on fragile sources and why semiconductors are so important in the first place.

Todd Young (16:03):

Sure. Well, there are two pieces to the Chips and Science Act. If I were to highly oversimplify, the science piece is investment in emerging technology, looking at the benefit to cost ratio of investment in university and DOE lab lab-based research over the years, and you’ve seen this through your previous leadership role at Purdue University, perhaps most closely, but we as a proportion of our economy over the years invested in less of that in the physical sciences and certain areas of applied research irrespective of our own economic history, particularly the space race that showed we reaped enormous benefits in terms of our national security from those space race era investments. And then economically, I mean even today we enjoy the fruits of an aerospace industry that would not have been possible without those federal investments. That’s the science piece. The semiconductor piece is more what you see is what you get. We’ll unpack the details, but we saw in the midst of a global pandemic that we had auto assembly plants here in the state of Indiana that had to idle multiple times. Heck, if you went to Walmart and tried to buy a toaster, you’d find that the shelves were empty. Almost everything in a digitally enabled society, which is increasingly what we’re moving towards, is dependent on semiconductors. This is the critical input in what some call a fourth industrial revolution, this digital revolution we’re in, and perhaps most importantly, even in our weapons platforms, radars, jets, nuclear weapons, they have semiconductors. We need to be able to trust the fidelity of these semiconductors. Will they work when we need them to work? Do they have the sort of resistance that are needed, et cetera? Moreover, there’s a broader term here that is often used I think too liberally. It’s called economic security. I think there’s a very powerful dimension to national security that

(18:25):

we’re now thinking about, which is the resilience of your economy. The mantra for those of us who believe in the beauty and the elegance of a free market for decades has been let’s allow individual economic actors and businesses to chase where they get the highest return on investment seeking efficiency. Well, when that is done at the expense of the broader resiliency of an economy, it has spill over negative effects on all kinds of Americans. The CHIPS Act was designed to give our economy more resiliency by reshoring much of that semiconductor production here in the United States. The approach we took was some tax incentives and other things, but mostly it was subsidies to those businesses that manufacture semiconductors in order as a governor would in order to compete against other countries that offered similar subsidies.

Mitch Daniels (19:31):

The approach that was taken is generally described as industrial policy and it has its fans, and obviously you had to work with many of them in order to make this thing happen at all. But many of those you worked with are eager to and have in fact advanced it in other sectors very remote from semiconductors. Was this, in your judgment, a unique exception or was the approach taken of heavy public investments despite what the market might be saying?

Todd Young (20:02):

This is a unique approach. I’m going to anticipate the end of that question with respect. I have leveled criticisms at the extension of this intervention, this adjustment to how we think about markets to other areas in which I regard it as inappropriate. One, for example, would be green energy. If we really want to catalyze a revolution in green energy and drive down the cost and increase the effect of green energy, we invest in where the science portion of chips and science did innovation, we didn’t take that approach for mostly political reasons, I think, or politicized economics. So I’m open to other cases where we need to take risks out of our supply chain, and I will accept those just as I did with in the semiconductor context. I would criticize many on the right, including some of our most well-read publications for not changing the model as reality suggested they should. But on the left, this gratuitous extension of this exception to all kinds of cases I think is very dangerous and will increase prices on our economy at a very time we’re trying to reduce them.

Mitch Daniels (21:28):

I’m glad you anticipated the question. I anticipated the answer and that’s why I asked the question.

Todd Young (21:32):

Thank you.

Mitch Daniels (21:33):

It’s an important answer.

Todd Young (21:34):

Yes.

Mitch Daniels (21:35):

But let me ask you about one last dimension of that. Even the act that you brought into being seems to me has been politicized in a couple of ways as it’s been implemented. All sorts of ideological conditions have been placed on the money that I don’t think were part of the statutory design and we’ll some believe dilute its effect. And I guess I’m curious to know how you react to that, whether you anticipated that and whether it can be reigned in.

Todd Young (22:19):

I’ve been following this, as you might expect very closely, legislating is not a fire and forget exercise we’d say in the Marine Corps, right? So in terms of implementation, there really been three areas. I’ll be very quick on this, that and which I feel like there has been some politicization. I actually think they’re fairly limited. We’ve seen an unlocking of about $250 billion of capital since passage of the act with very little of the money having actually flown. That said, the three areas are environmental permitting.

(22:55):

We haven’t gotten environmental permitting reform done for any areas of our economy. So I think those critiques are in the main unfair, and I did negotiate an environmental permitting piece of bill made it out of the US Senate, couldn’t pass the house as fellow Republicans push for more. With respect to childcare is another one. The insistence that anyone hired into a semiconductor fab fabrication facility offer childcare for their workers. Frankly, in a very tight labor market, which is what we’ve had most employers at the wage levels that are being offered at these fabs, we’re already going to offer childcare. So this was a political public relations misstep by the administration. It certainly gave the CHIPS act some bad PR for a short period of time. And then labor policy, the construction of fabs with union labor was a piece of the Chips and Science Act. There’s no way you could get this through a Democrat controlled Senate absent that provision. But those are the three areas I just wanted to bring a little clarity to them. Some of the critiques are fair, others less fair, but on balance, it’s been a big success and we’ve taken a lot of risk out of the supply chain.

Mitch Daniels (24:21):

One, our Taiwanese friend says it’s not going to make that much difference. And because it costs four to five times as much to build the fabs here, this isn’t helping reduce that ratio.

Todd Young (24:33):

It’s not helping to reduce the ratio. He’s right, obviously in terms of his bean counting, but the idea was just not to get to complete parity with other countries, but to narrow that gap. And we’ve done that. We’ve taken a lot of risk out of the supply chain, and we will continue to watch this closely.

Mitch Daniels (24:56):

And the forecast I’ve seen suggests that even with these barnacles attached, we are headed for maybe 30% share over the next few years. And that’s a big improvement.

Todd Young (25:05):

That’s right. And I think what some of the most vociferous critics fear is number one, that this will be a slippery slope. That’s often a fallacy I think in Congress is the over application of slippery slope fears to things because it’s easier to say no and what have you. But that’s to some extent a valid fear. And the other piece of it is just they’re trying to remind, and I think it’s a healthy reminder, remind people of something I felt like I’ve already internalized, which is there’s a reason we don’t do a lot of industrial policy. Right. It’s very hard to pull off it’s planning things. And I am by my nature, very skeptical of that. But I have to say we’ve done fairly well so far. Yeah.

Mitch Daniels (26:00):

Well, I don’t think you’re in any danger of giving industrial policy a good name. Even if there’s one success, there’s enough casualties back down the trail that That’s right. One last suggestion maybe for your oversight on the science side, there’s been a politicization, some of us have seen there too, the violation really of the principles of scientific merit, genuine peer review, the requirement that science be done a certain way or by certain people as opposed to that which most provably advances knowledge. And I hope somebody’s keeping an eye on the spending agencies and hoping to see that reigned in.

Todd Young (26:46):

It’s unfortunate that sometimes even the scientific method is being politicized, sort of masquerading social policy masquerading as the scientific method. We can’t allow that to happen. I agree. It’s an area to be more vigilant.

Mitch Daniels (27:05):

Talk about the topic du jour AI in the national security context. A few people have as much insight into this as you do. We’ve seen to at least to we amateurs, a more rapid move into autonomous weaponry, low cost, high quantity drones and so forth. What implications are there here for the kind of military we have and have typically built? And for us, our vulnerability to those who wish us Ill may not have the same resources but may not need them as much anymore.

Todd Young (27:55):

Well, this is one of these outsized opportunities for our country will begin with the opportunity, but risk as with any change if we don’t seize the opportunity and someone else does more effectively or more quickly than we do. But with the convergence of large data sets and this digital revolution and computing power and some software programming breakthroughs, the United States of America finds itself in the lead in terms of developing these AI algorithms, these technologies and their decision making algorithms. And they can make decisions if programmed effectively, autonomously. And so what we’re seeing in Ukraine, we’re seeing the deployment of many of these systems in swarms of what

(28:50):

Are called triable autonomous systems. So whether it’s beneath the ocean or in the air, there are some on the ground and they will, if we empower them to do so, they’ll have the ability to make life and death decisions potentially independently of their operators. This is not without controversy of course. I think it would be irresponsible for us to foreclose ever doing that if we learn that our adversaries are prepared to empower their systems to do the same. But there’s going to have to be standards developed and enforced. And we are in the early stages of trying to come up with these rules of the game so that we can defend our way of life, but consistent with our in the process.

Mitch Daniels (29:43):

Sounds good. But there are many who have said, seeing this coming from, even from a distance who said there’ll be an irresistible tendency. And there are those people you talked about ’em before, who don’t see the world through the same value lens that

Todd Young (29:57):

That’s right.

Mitch Daniels (29:57):

That we do. And that many of them would say, there won’t be an option that truly autonomous weapons will be used against us. We’re going to have to be in a position not just to resist them, but to reply in kind. What do you think?

Todd Young (30:17):

I think we should be in that position. And I think one of the things I’ve learned throughout my lifetime is the importance of deterring adversaries from doing bad things. And so there are interesting conversations that and important conversations to be had about whether or not once counterparties are rational as we would define it. But I think most people want to continue to live. And in the end, our ability to deter adversaries with that ultimate threat in mind empowers our diplomats to help us avoid war, which is our ultimate objective.

Mitch Daniels (31:00):

Well, you say most people, and unfortunately we see on almost daily basis, there are those who think that forfeiting their own life is not only acceptable, but a passport to better things, I guess.

Todd Young (31:12):

That’s right. That’s right. But we think about how we’ve tried to defend against terrorism in the past. And for me that broadly can be captured under the heading of terrorism. That’s a different form of warfare and deterrence. Deterrence theory does not work for those individuals.

Mitch Daniels (31:37):

One last question about,

Todd Young (31:39):

But when you think about our largest adversaries, the Chinese, the Russians, even the Iranians or Venezuelan, I think our assessments are that these countries are led by rational people. Yes.

Mitch Daniels (31:52):

One last question about what some would see as another form of electronic warfare. Was the debate about, is the debate about TikTok for instance?

Todd Young (32:04):

Yes.

Mitch Daniels (32:04):

Or TikTok specifically. Is that a national security question or a freedom question?

Todd Young (32:11):

It’s both. It’s both. And it’s freedom not just to the United States, but it’s more generally our defending the ability of people in other countries to invest in this country. And so there’s a lot wrapped into that debate, but there are two vulnerabilities that make the TikTok situation different than other platforms. And it took me a while to get there because we named and shamed one company, and I’m not typically comfortable doing that in legislation. But this company was ultimately controlled by the Chinese Communist Party and it collected massive amounts of user data on our citizens. That’s a problem. Number two, this company had the ability to weaponize the information domain. It’s a key domain of modern warfare.

 (33:02):

And to manipulate elections, manipulate perceptions, heck we’ve even seen in Israel, which finds itself immersed in a war against the terrorist group. Hamas, we find a 50 to one pro Hamas versus Israel communication stream on TikTok today. So those are the two strands that caused me and my colleagues the greatest amount of concern. There were others who just jumped on board because of populistic impulses.

Mitch Daniels (33:30):

Right. I asked you a minute ago about administrative agencies maybe going beyond what their statutory authority permitted friends of freedom have been. Many of us have been encouraged by decisions in recent times from the Supreme Court that have circumscribed or appeared to the ability of administrative agencies to exceed the authority Congress gave them how positively should we view those decisions? How effective will they be? And then I have a follow-up question about what Congress does in their aftermath.

Todd Young (34:15):

Well, this is the kind of corrective that many of us have pushed for a number of decades that is that less deference be given to unelected unaccountable bureaucrats, which is a term that many members of Congress use on the campaign stump. But then we’ve gone to Washington and not done anything about it. I’ve actually introduced legislation years ago called the REINS Act, and what the REINS Act proposes we do is every very large or expense rule that goes through our government would have to come before Congress for an up or down vote that presumably would give members a Congress an incentive to get the details right before delegating broad swaths of authority to our rule makers in the executive agency to come up with the legal parameters of our statutes. The Supreme Court basically has done that work for us by saying our country will no longer give such deference to the unelectable unaccountable bureaucrats. But now this puts legislative responsibilities back in the lapse of members of Congress.

Mitch Daniels (35:33):

Some of your colleagues may want the present.

Todd Young (35:38):

Well, they may not. Many of them don’t seem to relish the opportunity of making hard decisions. Instead, they enjoy the limelight of being a member of Congress and so forth, but

Mitch Daniels (35:54):

Reclaiming some lofty goal.

Todd Young (35:57):

That’s right.

Mitch Daniels (35:57):

Without having to vote for the consequences or costs.

Todd Young (36:02):

But I think now that the incentive structure is as it should be, members of Congress will be looked to get the details right. And then if our system works as designed, the American people will be charged with holding to account those who really don’t get things done.

Mitch Daniels (36:19):

Well, you’ve been willing for a long time, but unfortunately I think haven’t had enough help until now. So

Todd Young (36:27):

Well, that’s kind of you.

Mitch Daniels (36:27):

Well, we’ll see. I asked you early on how often people worry about our liberties and freedoms in the meetings you attend and the settings you inhabit. Clearly, one side of our national debate is very, very comfortable with an ever-growing, ever more intrusive central government, that one that can dictate to states and one that can dictate to a large extent to us as individuals. On the other side, there have been those who have resisted that and tried to advocate for free markets and greater personal freedom generally. It’s said these days that that side of the debate is now somewhat fractured and that there are those who are sometimes described or self-described as populist who are more comfortable with interventions economically. And perhaps in terms of personal choices. What do you think?

Todd Young (37:42):

I have some extensive thoughts, which I’ll try and compress for the purposes of this. But we’ve seen a populism on the left and right around the world, but more narrowly here in this country in recent years on the left, we saw a number of supporters of Bernie Sanders when he ran for president, end up supporting Donald Trump for president. And I think those who are the strongest supporters of former President Trump would embrace the term populism as long as it from the outset, we don’t have it make it a term of disparagement. I think if we look at populism, why has it happened? It’s happened because some of our leaders have not lived up to the responsibility of adapting our policies, our decision-making to the changes in the world. We’ve made some unwise decisions in foreign policy. The American people aren’t particularly happy with the way Iraq and Afghanistan turned out.

(38:56):

And then economically, it’s as though this digital revolution hasn’t happened, globalization hasn’t happened with all its implications on economic inequality and upward and conversely downward mobility. Yet we’re dealing with a 40-year-old policy agenda from what some people characterize as more traditional Republicans. So had there been incremental adaptations to the changing world around us, I don’t think there would be such populism. Again, that’s a compressed explanation for the forces around us. So I think the challenge for those of us who don’t want to offer people superficial and unworkable solutions is to come up with some new solutions to achieve populistic, the outcomes that are desired by followers of populistic leaders. What are your answers for ensuring that my kids have more opportunity even though they grew up in an area that’s less dynamic and with lower socioeconomic sort of status? What are your answers to living in this increasingly multipolar world? How are we going to change our foreign policy? I mean, some pretty fundamental questions and I think we’ve gotten soft and sloppy.

Mitch Daniels (40:20):

So final question I like to ask each of our guests this, it’s 2050. Is America more free or less free than America of today?

Todd Young (40:31):

The America of 2050 is going to be more free than the America of today, lest anyone think that that’s just a politician ending on an upbeat note, which I suppose would be fair. If you just look at our history, I mean, the one defining quality of our history is adaptation innovation. Americans always find a way, and we always find a way because of liberty, because of freedom, because we’ve been empowered to find a way to adapt, improvise, and overcome. And I think that that will make us more free in the future, materially better. It will make us feel more secure and it will reinstill a certain confidence in our basic institutions which are charged at helping us collectively work together to adapt.

Mitch Daniels (41:30):

I buy it. And one reason I buy it is I’ve spent this time talking to a cardinal example, really, that new solutions can be found that are responsive and that are sensitive to the very legitimate concerns of everyday people. And want to thank you, Senator Todd Young for these moments together, but much more so for your leadership, the example you’re setting in our legislative and national life. Go forth and multiply. Please. Thank you for coming. Thank you all for joining us.

Outro (42:09):

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