It may take you a few more years to gain a fuller perspective. There is a disconnect in Vance’s thinking and a naiveté that is not touching. Elucidating problems with one approach and ignoring the problems with the chosen counter approach is the ultimate in stupidity.
The best tool we have is the study of history. Whose policies brought economic prosperity to the greatest number of people in all strata of American life? Trump’s, there is no contest.
Was wage control responsible. No. Did tariffs to protect American industry, encourage the building of plants in the US, prevent predatory international trade practices suceed. In a word YES.
The simplistic siren song of mandated minimum wage has historically backfired and brought greater poverty in it’s wake. It takes a spectacularly myopic vision to ignore the recent California example.
This attempt by JD Vance to sound like a man with a compelling vision and a plan for prosperity tells us much about his intellect, his priorities (personal political chops rather than MAGA), his brashness and his willingness to gamble with American’s opportunities and economic priorities if such gambling advances his political star. In the past JD Vance has impressed me as a loose cannon and inconsistent. For a time he seemed to be becoming an asset to America. He has now clarified that he remains undependable to those who are committed to small government and individual opportunity and freedoms.
Anyway, your point applies most forcefully not to Vance but to the business establishment and political and financial elites who want cheap labor and are eager to get it through mass immigration from the Third World.
In America's emerging politics, traditional free market capitalism will likely be a political dead end because poor people from socialist countries will soon move American politics forcefully to the Left. A high minimum wage will be the least of our troubles.
And, bluntly put, if and when Third World mobs come for the rich who illegally invited them into the country, I will not be inclined to try to stand in their way. I just hope they direct their aim at Soros and son, the Obamas, the Clintons, the Bidens, the Arabella network, the Hamptons, and other wealthy Leftists in their enclaves first and are sated.