David Bahnsen is Founder and CEO of the Bahnsen Group. He oversees the management of over $5.7 billion in client assets.

Prior to launching The Bahnsen Group, he spent eight years as a Managing Director at Morgan Stanley and six years as a Vice President at UBS. He is consistently named one of the top financial advisors in America by Barron’s, Forbes, and the Financial Times.

He is a frequent guest on CNBC, Bloomberg, Fox News, and Fox Business, and is a regular contributor to National Review. He hosts the popular weekly podcast, Capital Record, dedicated to a defense of free enterprise and capital markets. He is a regular lecturer for the Acton Institute and the Center for Cultural Leadership and writes daily investment commentary at www.thedctoday.com and weekly macro commentary at dividendcafe.com.

David is a founding Trustee for Pacifica Christian High School of Orange County and serves on the Board of Directors for the Acton Institute.

He’s my dear, long-time friend. I asked him about J. D. Vance’s VP acceptance speech at the GOP National Convention.

1. David, you and I have heard a number of GOP VP acceptance speeches, none of whose content remotely resembles Vance’s. How did the Republican Party arrive at the point that such a speech could become acceptable, even expected?

Look, there was much of the speech I enjoyed a lot.  The anecdotes about his grandmother and the celebration of his mother’s decade of sobriety were touching, well done, and hopeful.  But the grievance content indicating that the state of certain communities in America is entirely the fault of the government, or Wall Street, or elites, or China, or what have you, is not just a terribly disappointing shift for the Republican Party – it is a terribly disappointing shift from JD Vance’s own book, less than ten years ago!  That book captured a message of missing individual responsibility and conduct necessary to thrive economically.  The crisis of responsibility has become a bipartisan affair.

2. As a highly successful wealth manager, what do you believe about Vance’s targeting Wall Street that makes it most economically dangerous?

The pot shots, insults, and catnip of class warfare don’t bother me – they are easy and routine.  What bothers me is any pretense of advocacy for working class conditions, middle class standard of living, or general economic prosperity, that pretends that can or will happen without capital markets.  Advocates of free enterprise must celebrate financial markets, or they will rue the day.

3. What are the likely economic consequences of Vance’s economic vision if that vision becomes successful?

Here one has to separate the policy planks that are pipe dreams and rhetorical excesses versus what could become more serious.  The most dangerous is, certainly, tariffs.  The Trump era has allowed people to naively believe that tariffs are paid by the country whose products they are levied against rather than the U.S. based importer of such products, and their very customers.  Tariffs either drive prices higher (inflation, anyone?) or they damage competitiveness, or both.  And as they are always met with retaliation, it snowballs into something much worse.  And it is all done under the rhetorical niceties that we are “looking out for workers” or “seeking fair trade deals.”  If a deal is unfair, the party in the trade will likely be most qualified to act on its unfairness by, well, not doing it.  These “protective” endeavors are like almost all government “protection” – someone may be helped, but only by hurting someone else.  It becomes a crony tool to reward one economic actor or participant for political purposes while damaging others.

I cannot believe Congress would ever dare act on Vance’s fondness of higher federal minimum wage laws or higher corporate tax rates, and candidly, I don’t believe President Trump would ever support what Vance has said here. But where I would identify the biggest risk in Vance’s plank as being the grievance instinct – the “us vs. them” sort of “new right wing critical theory.” The cultural Marxism that calls for society to be viewed through the lens of oppressed vs. oppressor does not become more valid when someone on the right does it, and the oppressed are made out to be working class white men and the oppressors made out to be “elites” or other poorly defined bogeymen. It is that mentality I hope Vance will abandon in the months, and perhaps years, ahead.