What actually drives a strong economy—money, or production?
TJ sits down with economist and writer Brian Lantz to break down the concept of the “physical economy”—the real-world foundation of national strength built on manufacturing, infrastructure, energy, and skilled labor. Lantz explains why modern economics often misses the point by focusing too heavily on financial systems instead of production.
The conversation dives into the recent Supreme Court ruling on tariffs and why, despite headlines suggesting a setback, the broader strategy to rebuild American industry remains intact. Lantz outlines how existing trade laws still support tariffs and how policy shifts are driving massive
Joining us is Brian Lantz. He’s an economist and a writer focused on what’s called the physical economy. That’s kind of the real-world foundations of economic strength. Manufacturing, infrastructure, energy, labor, workforce development, that kind of stuff. He publishes a substack called Physical Economics. He analyzes policy, trade, and kind of the future of American production. He does a great job of putting that through the lens of the Trump administration as well. The work that he does from tariffs to infrastructure, it actually shapes factories being built, supply chains being recajiggered, long-term productivity. He also wrote a book called Rebuild the USA, the Trump Presidency and Beyond. You can find that on Amazon. Lays out a framework for how the American industry is being revitalized and restoring our productive economy. Today we’re going to talk a little bit about the Supreme Court ruling on tariffs. We all got sick a little bit, so it pushed our conversation a week or so. So we’re catching up a little bit, but he has great ideas on that kind of stuff. And I am super excited to have this conversation today. Brian, welcome to Above the Noise. Yeah, great to have you. Let’s start just with a little bit of defining the terms. So physical economy, I’m not an economist. I’m lucky I can balance my checkbook, to be honest with you. So physical economics and Hamiltonian economics, kind of give us a definition of what it is that you work on.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, sure. Well, it’s pretty clear cut. I think most people will understand it. It’s making the physical changes on nature for man. you know, uh, we’re called on to be fruitful, to multiply, to have dominion. Um, uh, that’s not to be taken lightly. Um, and, uh, and that’s the measure of progress. That’s the measure of whether we actually understand the universe or not, or understand it better. We’re always trying to understand it better. Um, and so, uh, we do that by, uh, building, by constructing, uh, by exploring. And, uh, So the money side is really superficial, and that’s what economics has come down to today, and it’s part of the reason we’re in the mess we’re in. You know, the fixation on money misses the point that, you know, it’s the real process of production that we’ve got to look at. Are we doing it right, I guess you could say. Hamilton, Alexander Hamilton, was the founder of the American system. of political economy. Capitalism didn’t get into a dictionary until the 1840s. There was no such term in the early days of the United States or in the world. We developed an approach which included tariffs. You mentioned tariffs. An approach including tariffs to protect our domestic industry. uh, treasury secretary Hamilton, who served, uh, for Washington. He was a close collaborator of Washington’s, uh, issued a series of reports, you know, on this, the report on manufacturing report on public credit, so forth that, um, that spelled out what I would say would also you could call a physical economic approach. He was not only thinking, he went out and did it. He was thinking in terms of how you build out the future economy of these United States. Let me stop there.
SPEAKER 02 :
All right, and we love strength. I think that’s one of the great things the leadership of the Trump administration brings. Folks, if you want to learn a little bit more about the Hamiltonian stuff, there’s a great paper on PrometheanAction.com. I think you click on Toolkit. It’s called What President Trump Can Do with the American System 2.0. And I had never really considered Hamiltonian economics. Like I said, I’m not a big economics wealth of knowledge or anything. But that paper kind of changed my point of view and showed me a lot of what President Trump has been talking about and working on in the media and things like that. I thought it was great. Where do you think we got off track? I know when I was high school-ish, there was a lot of talk about NAFTA, free trade, globalism, all that kind of stuff. So I guess what I’m asking is, how did we get here?
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, there was the promotion very, very… directly of the whole idea of a post-industrial society. This goes back to the 1960s and, you know, was picked up by the radical left. you know, on campus, SDS, et cetera, at the time. This whole idea that we were moving out of the manufacturing era, you know, all that dirty work and so forth. And we were moving into this softy post-industrial society where, you know, everybody will be able to do their own thing. But there was the core behind it, you know, there’s a report, well, actually a series of books, the 1980s project by the Council on Foreign Relations, in which was proposed the controlled disintegration of the U.S. economy. That is the reshaping, that was their term, the reshaping of the U.S. economy along these post-industrial lines. So that was instrumental. That was in the 1970s that that project was being put together and promoted and then became the policies of the Carter administration and so on. But, you know, a key moment was 1971 when the dollar went off the gold standard. That was, you know, the importance of that is not just the gold. I mean, that gets a little bit overplayed at times. But it was really the fact that here we were, we were starting to run a big deficit. And countries were saying, like France, well, hey, we don’t want to just keep collecting your dollars. We want gold instead of the dollars. And instead of saying, hold on a second, this is a wake-up call. We’ve got to go away from a service economy back to a producer economy. Instead, we said, oh, well, we’ll cut the dollar loose from gold. So we can keep doing what’s not working. And that’s what we did.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, we seem to do that a lot.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah. So that’s some of the background, if that’s helpful.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, very, very helpful. And, you know, we just kind of just came off of Davos, too. I think it was Jamison Greer talked a little bit more about Hamiltonian economics and just the focus on manufacturing at home. And, you know, we’ve all been on TAMU and paid for our $2 trinket that we lose in a week. I think it’s really heartening to hear that we’re going to be strong again. We’re going to make our own stuff here. It’s kind of like growing up in the 70s and 80s, that was the big thing, made in the USA. So it’s a point of pride as well. And with that globalized trade, it kind of seems like tariffs… Started going away at some point and our income tax started going up was there do you see a connection there? Is that are we paying more because we stopped? There’s such a big tariff deficit.
SPEAKER 01 :
Oh Sure, they’re very much correlated. Yeah You know tariff policies was you know was was you know a was apple pie, mom and apple pie to the United States historically. You know, going back to Alexander Hamilton, but, you know, Lincoln, you know, was a strong advocate and was a policy. McKinley, Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt never went away from the tariff policies. You know, Kennedy, one of the major pieces of tariff legislation we have on the books today is from the Kennedy era. So this is… This was understood that you’ve got to protect your domestic industry. You can’t just allow other countries’ companies from other parts of the world to dump cheap goods here, bankrupt us out. And, of course, that’s what happened. You know, we outsourced and all that. And it was a quick buck thing from the standpoint of Wall Street, the city of London in particular, Wall Street as well. You know, this was, hey, why spend all this money on hard capital investment, machinery, equipment? We can just design things and we’ll ship it somewhere else where they can build it for us. Cheap. You know the story. Yeah, right. So then we wake up one day. You know, as Marco Rubio said the other day, we wake up one day and we’ve lost all our capacity. You know, our national security is out the window. Supply chains and all that so well.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes, so I wonder what the motivation was for You know, I always look for deeper truth like who is motivated to keep us Small I guess because it seems like that’s mostly London Would be the biggest purveyor of us of staying small. What do you think that motive is?
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, it’s the policy of empire. You know, you can get biblical about it as well. Yeah, let’s do that. Right? I mean, empires, Roman Empire on up through has always been about preventing the development of mankind. Yeah. Preventing the fulfillment of what our responsibilities really are. in the larger scheme of things, but also to our children and our children’s children, to produce, to be productive. Empires, you know, to keep people down, to keep them, you know… Under a thumb, yeah. Yes. You don’t want them developing the confidence in their own
SPEAKER 02 :
um uh intellectual mental powers their ability to create to build yeah um and and so uh sure you want to keep them as slaves uh and serfs whatever form it takes what what’s really kind of mind-boggling too is the the propensity of the american media machine to tow that line for them because you know they’re american media companies so we talk about media bias a lot on on this show so um With tariffs, obviously the big news has been the SCOTUS decision. And I’ll admit, when I saw the headline pop up on my little rectangle that I keep in my pocket that said that they ruled against the Trump administration, my heart sank a little bit. but you have kind of a different approach to that. I talk to us about that. Trump’s response to the SCOTUS ruling, what that means for going forward. Does that just put a wrench in the whole thing? What’s the path forward there?
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, I’d say first of all, TJ, you know, Trump is, you know, just an extraordinary president. You know, he’s outspoken. He’s tough. Uh, But as I’ve said, rarely have we had a president that’s fought as hard as he for the nation. And so I just want to underline that point. Trump’s own, you know, when the Supreme Court decision came down, and it could have come down months ago, it was dragged out. I mean, there’s no reason for it to be postponed and postponed. But Trump, you know, immediately responded, okay, now we have certainty. And I think the country is going to be much stronger for this. Yeah. And because we have other means to impose rational tariffs to protect our domestic industry, to get investment inside the wall, on this side of the wall of tariffs, which Trump has been orchestrating. You know, some $18 trillion of investment from abroad is coming into the country already and over time will come in. Yeah. We have a lot of tariffs stay in place anyway. As you know, the press doesn’t want you to really understand what’s going on. But, you know, Section 122 of the Trade Act, I mean, you know, that keeps in place the – not to throw in too much gobbledygook at people, but the 50% ad valorem taxes on steel and aluminum, they remain in place. That hasn’t changed. That also includes copper and a 10%, 25% tariff on types of lumber and furniture. So all of that is right there in place. It hasn’t been changed by the Supreme Court decision. It simply said that under IEPA, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which Trump had originally used, that he could not charge a tariff. He could embargo a country, he could haul all trade with a country under it, but he couldn’t charge a dime. So it was a silly decision. I would really say unconstitutional, but that’s, you know, but Trump’s approach is to say, okay, we’ll move on. Well, we utilize Section 122 of the Trade Act of 74. We use Section 232 of the Expansion Act of 63 and so on. And we get the same thing.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, it really seems to have not really changed the plan at all. And it was great to see Scott Besant out handling the media so adeptly as he does. Any complaints on his response? And it sounds like that’s kind of what I heard him say directly following the decision. So yeah, I think Scott Besant’s responses were pretty spot on. And that kind of marries up to what I’ve heard you say as well. So that’s really reassuring. It gives us heart that that wasn’t the… I don’t know, the big lose that a lot of the media painted it as. And a lot of the media is, like I said earlier, they almost seem against America. Not almost. They seem totally against America. So it’s a little odd. We hear a lot… in the media about rare earths lately. And obviously we know that those are for traction batteries in cars and lithium ion batteries and all that cool stuff that we like that we want to produce here at home. So talk a little bit about that and have there been any developments in terms of alliances or anything like that with rare earths that President Trump’s been working on lately?
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, we’ve seen the collaboration between the federal government in partnership with private companies and with foreign governments. And this hasn’t occurred in this form before in the way that Trump has put it together. And I would say this goes beyond rare earths. It’s also the broader category of what’s termed critical minerals, which includes rare earths. But, you know, for example, you know, South Korea’s zinc. You know, you have a $6 billion plant going in in Tennessee. First zinc smelter in the United States in God knows how long. We’ve been totally importing it. But also, the Department of Defense investing in Vulcan elements. there in North Carolina. But then you’ve got over 550 million private equity coming in, private investors coming in. American investors. So you have these kinds of collaborations to build out this capacity. And you have the federal government again department of defense department of commerce taking equity in these companies like mp materials mountain pass california the rare earth facility there to actually build out the processing for yeah that’s critical rare earths are everywhere they’re not rare they’re they’re just as you know yeah They’re not in concentration. That’s why they’re rare. They’re just spread out everywhere, but very small amounts. And so it’s very unconventional to find large deposits. So, you know, you have the development of the Brook Mine in Wyoming, that’s Ramico Resources, because they located a massive deposit of rare earths. They usually come in You know, there’s some 17 rare earths, but they’re rarely found, no pun intended. But each by themselves, they’re mixed together. Oh, okay. And they have totally different qualities.
SPEAKER 02 :
Oh, okay.
SPEAKER 01 :
And so you have magnetic and electrical qualities. So, but anyway, Ramco Resources in Wyoming is developing a huge… capability there. So 60% of the rare earths that we use, like as you said, for magnets and largely for catalysts, the biggest use for rare earths is for catalysts to make chemical reactions occur faster. 60% of our rare earth needs can be rapidly provided from within the United States. It won’t happen overnight, but it can happen, and we’re making… I think you were referencing this. We’ve made trade agreements with Australia. We’re making trade agreements with other countries, actually encouraging U.S. investment in places like Australia to help, in the meantime, fill our requirements so we’re not dependent on China.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, that’s incredible. And you know what’s really, again, with the leadership of President Trump, it’s great to see him encouraging the other countries to do the same, because I think he needed to get in front of that selfish billionaire class nomenclature that the media has been using against him.
SPEAKER 01 :
Getting out from under a globalist system of really still the British Empire’s modern-day British Empire central banking network of globalist corporations and globalist finance and so forth. In making these direct trade agreements and investment agreements with countries like South Korea, Japan, Australia, countries in the Middle East, they’re acting they’re allowed to act as sovereign nations right right in collaboration with ourselves the united states as a sovereign nation and who wouldn’t want that right right right yeah as opposed to the markets the markets just said oh don’t produce minerals here outsources somewhere else and then we get cut off you know um so instead we’re saying and the same has been imposed on these other countries You know, their development has been suppressed. And so we’re unleashing a new set of relations among sovereign nation states that somebody like John Quincy Adams would fully endorse.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, that’s fantastic. One of the other facets of what your analysis does, you look at workforce development, labor participation, that kind of stuff. Let’s just take a minute or two and talk about how that plays into this entire globalist versus sovereign nation conversation.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, it’s become quite a topic now. A few years ago, it was causing a lot of hand-wringing. in different parts of the U.S. corporate world, I guess you could say, for example, in aerospace defense. Hey, we were losing our workforce. You know, the World War II generation retired. The baby boomer era generation is retiring. And we don’t have the workforce, the skilled workforce that we need to replace them. And that’s despite outsourcing. If you’re going to bring, as we rightly have to do, to reverse the trade deficit, reduce the federal deficit, bring industry jobs, tax base back to the United States itself, You need a workforce, a skilled workforce. So it’s right that this has been brought front and center. We don’t need people with degrees in sociology, frankly. We need people with degrees in hard sciences, yes. Engineering, yes. We need lots of skilled tradesmen, HVAC, welding, electrical, and so on and so forth. We need nurses. We need lots of nurses. Virtually any nurse can talk to you about the amount of overtime they put in. Absolutely. Yeah. So the Trump administration has stepped up. But around the country, state governments have also stepped up. Local community colleges have stepped up. And they’ve not just stepped up offering programs. In many cases, it’s been demanded of community colleges that they expand their trades programs, their cert programs, certification programs, and so forth in these areas because of the demand from students themselves. I mean, why go into debt in a four-year university in six-figure debt? when instead you can directly get the skills you need at a very low cost or no cost in many cases and go to work and have not only a job but have an opportunity, a future in front of you where you can grow in terms of your skills and trade and management and all the rest. So at the federal level, you have apprenticeship.gov. And I just encourage anybody to just go there, apprenticeship.gov, and just get a sense of what, you know, the Department of Commerce, Department of Labor, under Trump, the Trump administration, the cabinet are doing in this regard, promoting apprenticeships. in particular in this case. But also, as I said, this is widespread now. Communities all across the country want companies to come in. And to encourage them to come in, they’ve got to offer a workforce. And so in many cases, it becomes a collaboration. Okay, if you come, if you’re willing to come here, we’re willing to set up programs to make sure at the community college level trade schools and otherwise, that we train up the workforce you need. We’ll work with you side by side to get this done. You know, that’s become the new model. And of course, then it improves the tax base of the local communities. So this is a multifaceted, multilayered It’s the country working as it should, you know, on several different layers, local, state, federal, collaboration, private sector. And, of course, it overlaps with the universities and national labs and so forth that have, you know, special scientific and technological capabilities.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, that’s great. Parents, don’t let your kids grow up to get gender studies degrees and underwater basket weaving. Oh, man. Well, Brian, this has been absolutely great talking to you. We’re talking to Brian Lantz, author, thinker, economist. That last name is L-A-N-T-Z if you’re looking for him. Check him out at brianlance.substack.com. Subscribe to his newsletter. He’s got great think pieces in there. He’s got great analysis on all things economic. And definitely check out prometheanaction.com. Some folks there, just like Brian, are doing just wonderful work to analyze not only Trump’s policies. You can get kind of right into the program there and learn a little bit about what they’re doing. That’s prometheanaction.com. Brian, anything else before we close out today, sir?
SPEAKER 01 :
I think we covered a lot.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, I think we did too.
SPEAKER 01 :
Thanks for the interview. Thank you very much.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, no doubt. And we will hopefully get you back sometime in the near future. Let’s tell folks where they can get your book, Rebuild the USA, as well.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, Rebuild the USA, The Trump Presidency Beyond. uh went live on amazon the day of the election uh november 5th 2024 not the day after the election the day of the election that’s great um and so it’s available there on amazon um in book or kindle form uh you can also find it at uh promethean action um uh they have a a separate uh uh a tab for publications, and my two books are listed there, along with a lot of other work by historian Robert Ingram and others.
SPEAKER 02 :
Very good. Yeah, I definitely recommend folks check out Promethean Action, and definitely your sub stack, too. I’m a subscriber now. So, Brian, thanks so much for coming on. I enjoyed it. Thank you for your time. All right, hope you feel better. Got something out of it. For sure.
