And then we have the MAGA types, who take delight in insisting that traditional conservatives worship the market as a god. By this, of course, they intend to leave the impression that Reagan-style Republicans, with their libertarian-inflected assumption that it’s better to be rich than poor, don’t care much about ordinary people. The reason is obvious, or should be: Greed.
The idea that markets exploit the weak and release corrosive social forces has always been popular on the left. In 1998, Robert Kuttner blamed “the utopian worship of free markets” for a host of cultural and economic ills. The embrace of this view by the right is a more recent development. The postliberal political theorist Patrick Deneen has described “free market orthodoxies and mantras” as a “broadly Protestant belief system.”
The lawyer Oren Cass is perhaps the foremost practitioner of the market-as-religion smear technique. The American right’s “blind faith” in free markets stands as a political impediment to his dream of a revived industrial economy that is planned and directed by enlightened tinkerers for the common good. Vice President JD Vance’s rapid rise in conservative politics was driven in part by his hearty embrace of the dirigiste economics of Messrs. Cass and Deneen.
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The market isn’t a proper noun, and it also isn’t a tool. The market simply is. Nobody controls it. Nobody worships it, but only a fool ignores it.
Long before recorded history, long before people settled in cities and started building fruit stands, before Adam Smith, before Wall Street, before dating apps, before crypto—before all that there was trade: I give you this, you give me that. Simple exchange is what makes a market. Not faith, not mantras, not brick and mortar. Wherever people come together to trade is a market.
The where doesn’t matter so much as the what. Markets harness supply and demand to coordinate economic transactions between people and firms. They facilitate the free exchange of goods and services. They are mechanisms for shared prosperity based on freedom from coercion. They don’t enslave us, they liberate us.
The direct cost of President Donald Trump’s trade war will be borne by American consumers and businesses—of that, there should no longer be much debate.
But trade wars also come with indirect costs and unforeseen consequences. Some of those show up on balance sheets in the form of lower profits, losses in the stock market, or stagnating wages. Some are best counted under the Christmas tree, where higher prices might mean fewer toys (as the president now admits) and other goodies that make life a little more joyful, as tariffs squeeze wallets and reduce discretionary income.
Others are trickier to sum up, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
“The administration’s trade policy sends a message to the world: America is an unreliable ally that sees you only as a source of wealth; and if you don’t have wealth, you’ll pay for it,” writes Iain Murray, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, in an essay recently published in The Daily Economy, a blog run by the American Institute for Economic Research.
Allison Schrager warns Americans – ‘progressives’ and MAGA-types – against policies that would make the American economy more like the sclerotic one that is Europe’s. (HT Arnold Kling) A slice:
The New Right may be the future of conservatism, but sometimes it seems like they’re just left-wingers trying to remake the American economy into… well, Europe. People like JD Vance and Josh Hawley and their ilk like to complain about Europe and even bully them from time to time (sometimes for valid reasons), but if you look at the policies of the New Right—and sometimes the President—it seems like they really want us to be Europe. Maybe that’s why JD is so obsessed with talking about them, and why at times it seems we’ve left policymaking to a left-wing college student one month into their junior year abroad.
Think about it. They want us to consume less and buy more high-quality domestic goods. They want a bigger welfare state that covers the middle class. They want antitrust to take down big tech. And they want a smaller, slower-growing economy to benefit a small group of people who represent the past. All so European! Even MAHA feels a little Euro with their obsession with artificial food. What’s next? Tethered bottle caps?
I hope they’re prepared to accept lower growth in exchange.
Aiden Grogan wonders at the nostalgia for dark Satanic mills. A slice:
The dark, satanic mills were engines of economic progress, but wistful longing for manual labor in factories overlooks how these economic conditions undermined traditional social structures and uprooted men and women from an environment conducive to child-rearing. For whatever growing pains the American heartland must suffer during the transition from manufacturing to services, the emergent “knowledge economy” offers tremendous opportunities to restore the bonds of kith and kin stifled by the industrial and sexual revolutions.
By emphasizing automation, education, and expanded telework, the industrial economy may at last complete a full circle and empower men and women to remain where they are—in the home, the nucleus of pre-industrial economic life. The twenty-first century’s digital economy may ironically enable a true “return to tradition” that conservatives, in particular, should welcome.
But such an epochal transformation necessitates the cultivation of a new post-populist elite—one with a more refined, conservative outlook, a renewed embrace of free markets, and a willingness to set and maintain a high moral standard.
GMU Econ alum Paul Mueller continues to expose DEI as the con that it is.
“A little price theory goes a long way.”
Ramesh Ponnuru is right that Trump is right that “those student loans need to be repaid.” A slice:
Forgiving much or all of the debt, an idea popular among progressives and the borrowers themselves, is an alternative to reviving loan payments. But the extended pause on student loans has already cost taxpayers more than $238 billion. That number would rise even more if the government forgave more of the debt — and though progressives say that collecting on loans amounts to “punishing the working poor,” the best evidence suggests that student loan forgiveness tends to benefit people who are doing better than other Americans.
