Dave Brat tells Glenn Beck why he’s voting no on fast-track trade authority for the president

“In economics, there’s a guy named Hayek, who is one of the fathers of free-market economics.  And there’s a book he wrote called ‘The Fatal Conceit.’ And the fatal conceit is to think I’m smart enough to walk in a room and read 400 pages of legalese and leave it knowing  everything that’s in a trade bill that’s 400 pages long and digest it with everything that can go wrong. That’s one of the good things about our two-party system is that you can debate and you learn from each other. That’s what needs to happen in this process. We need to debate and duke it out and see what’s good in this thing and what’s a bunch of junk…

“To be accurate to both sides of a good debate, the reason these trade agreements have some degree of secrecy is because you’re debating prices, tariff rates (which are basically prices) and every price has a good side and a bad side. If you’re a producer, you like a high price, and if you’re a consumer, you like a low price. So if you throw all those prices out in public, you’ll have a food fight. And so to give the benefit of the doubt to the other side on that kind of an issue, you want secrecy on the prices. But on the process, when you’ve got a thing called a Trans Pacific Partnership COMMISSION – I want to know the power that’s been given that commission. And that part should surely be debatable. There’s no reason we can’t debate the process issues out in public without mentioning all the prices.”

Listen to the interview.