Last week in an interview with the Daily Wire, Vice President JD Vance took on conservative icons Milton Friedman and even Margaret Thatcher for their belief in “laissez-faire” economics. Laissez-faire means limited government intervention in the economy.

Yikes! In the interview, Vance sounded to us much more like a Mitt Romney, big-government RINO than a Trump or Reagan.

Decide for yourself by watching the interview.

Here are some of Vice President Vance’s misguided views on economics and the future of the GOP:

• “Milton Friedman’s ideas made more sense in the 1980s because they were being advocated in a country that still had a very rich and powerful institutional Christianity.”
• “If you look at modern Britain and the result of Margaret Thatcher’s policies, you would say that her policies actually got Britain further away from that ideal and not closer to that ideal.”
• “I think that meritocracy can steal from us a sense of what really matters.”
• “When Donald Trump ran for president the first time, the idea of tariffs on imported goods was a heresy in the GOP. It is now the baseline position that virtually every Republican politician adopts.”
• Trump is right that he wants to “seize the equity of the AI companies.”
• “That Hamiltonian tradition… will dominate American conservative economic thinking for the future. Which is not laissez faire. It’s actually much more about building… a set of economic policies that make it easier for a person to raise a family, to earn a living wage, to give back to their community, to maybe go to church on Sunday or to actually spend some leisure time building the kind of life that matters.”
• “If you turn economic development (editor’s note: by which he means “growth”) into a sort of idol, then you end up sacrificing a lot of the things that matter most.”
• “What meritocracy has done is warped it into ambition for ambition’s sake.  Ambition not to build something beautiful, but to get ahead of other people. Ambition not to make an amazing product, but ambition to make a lot of money for money’s sake. And I think that we’ve allowed that basic human desire to achieve great and beautiful things to be warped into a vice of just being better than other people.”
• “American economic policy on the right is now much more Alexander Hamilton than it is Milton Friedman. I think that’s obviously a good thing.”

This is anti-free market, big government gobbledy gook. Here’s just one “laissez-faire economic truism” that JD should have learned from Milton Friedman: “Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own.”