Phil Magness’s new essay on the origins of the vague and derogatory term “neoliberalism” is superb. A slice:
While most versions of the neoliberal label still come from the academic left today, the term has come back into favor within a certain, curious strand of the right. Conservative writers such as Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, Gladden Pappin, and Sohrab Ahmari pepper their works with complaints about “neoliberalism,” which they blame for a long list of economic and cultural grievances. In doing so, they tapped a growing discontent with the economic wing of the American right, particularly among religious and social conservatives. Rebranding themselves as “Postliberals” in the early 2020s, these thinkers espouse an ultra-traditional and collectivist form of conservatism that explicitly aims to purge free-market thought from the American right on the grounds that it allegedly subverts traditional values and morality with economic consumerism.
There’s not much in the way of sophistication to Postliberal economic theory beyond a visceral distaste for modernity. They aim to resurrect long-discredited economic doctrines such as 18th- and 19th-century tariff protectionism, and map it onto the Trump administration’s own tariff and industrial policy agendas. But that fact itself has given the Postliberals an outsized presence in the political arena. J.D. Vance, for example, considers himself a follower, and has joined in the rhetoric of blaming America’s economic faults on the neoliberal bogeyman.
In an April 2020 essay, Vance bemoaned an alleged donor class on the right who had “gotten rich” off of “neoliberalism and globalization.” Adopting the same conspiracist style that dominates left-wing deployment of the term, he attacked the Covid-era anti-lockdown movement by calling it a political distraction, a sideshow to divert attention from our economic precarity, benefiting those who wanted to keep the “globalization gravy train” flowing. Vance concluded the piece with a call to “thrust more daggers into [the] heart” of the “neoliberal consensus that has dominated the American Right.”
Despite a few passing nods to conservative social issues, Vance’s message was indistinguishable from the incoherent anticapitalist screeds of the academic left that we surveyed in Neoliberal Abstracts. It is difficult not to see history rhyming with itself in this horseshoe-like convergence, a return to the origins of the term as part of a joint assault on economic individualism from the illiberal left and right. And just like its 1920s precursor, today’s attacks on neoliberalism obscure the vacuity of their term of choice by making it a universal scapegoat for everything about the world that they happen to dislike.
Walter Olson is right: “In Minnesota, ICE is assaulting the constitutional rights of citizens.”
BlueBadger2600 tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome):
Positions ICE has taken:
– We can enter your home without a warrant
– You must carry your papers at all times
– But we can ignore them and only our scanner matters
– We can detain you anywhere, no matter your age, situation or status
– Indefinitely with no access to a lawyer
– And basically no right to a day in court
– We can send you to a third world prison if we choose
– But we can’t bring you back if we made a mistake
– And if you interfere with any of this we can shoot you because you are a terroristHow is this not a recipe for totalitarianism?
While the proximate cause of the ongoing staff exodus is a video Roberts recorded in October defending Tucker Carlson’s decision to amplify the white-nationalist influencer Nick Fuentes, the turmoil at Heritage has been brewing for far longer. In fact, Reason has learned, Heritage leadership has been directing employees to read Roberts’ 2024 book, which agitates for a “Second American Revolution,” and to leave if they can’t agree with the positions therein.
Scores of board members, employees, and visiting fellows have opted to depart, variously citing antisemitism, misogyny, retaliation against employees who dare to speak up, and an institutional pivot away from free market principles. In conversations with more than a dozen current and former staffers, I repeatedly heard that Roberts’ belief that he alone should get to determine all of the think tank’s stances has provoked resentment among his own subject matter experts.
“The issue is you have the president of an organization committing everybody in it to his position unilaterally,” one senior staff member told me in November. “Because Heritage has a one-voice policy, when the president goes out and says Heritage Foundation has this position” — be it support for tariffs or support for Tucker Carlson —”he implicates everybody down the chain, and he makes everybody stand for that.”
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In theory, free enterprise and limited government are core Heritage principles, and the think tank was historically a staunch defender of free trade. Roberts’ book, on the other hand, comes out swinging against globalization, in which “US firms sought to make profits all over the world by expanding into new markets, sending factories overseas, running money through international tax havens, developing global supply chains, and employing other new strategies,” and calls for using “the immense powers of our federal and state governments” for protectionist ends. It also asserts more than once that President Donald Trump “won” the trade war during his first term.
Roberts is equally hostile to the modern financialized “sham economy,” which he says is guilty of “funneling money to the parasitical enemies of the American way of life.” In his view, the goal of the conservative movement should be to return to an economic system that would allow more men to support families on a single income, and he hopes to “restore the proper use of the government” to bring about his favored outcomes. He’s comfortable with trade barriers, industrial policy, and the aggressive use of antitrust regulations “to rein in globalist corporatism,” he writes. “Especially when it comes to Big Tech and big banks, we need to consider the nuclear option.”
The book acknowledges that all of this would require “short-tem sacrifices, including higher prices for some consumer goods,” but insists the pain will be worth it.
Even setting aside valuation, the Greenland proposal fails a more basic test: symmetry. If historical ties, strategic relevance, and latent economic value were sufficient grounds for territorial acquisition, then several European powers could assert claims to US territory with equal legitimacy.
Spain governed Florida, Texas, and much of the American Southwest for centuries. France once controlled the Louisiana territory, sold under geopolitical pressure in 1803, which now represents tens of trillions of dollars in economic value. Britain administered the original colonies and left behind enduring legal and institutional frameworks. Russia sold Alaska in 1867 for a sum that dramatically undervalued its eventual strategic and resource significance, particularly in today’s Arctic context.
Yet no serious policymaker treats these historical facts as grounds for modern claims. The reason is economic as much as legal. Once sovereignty becomes contingent on strategic usefulness or newly discovered resource value, borders lose durability. Risk premia rise. Long-term investment becomes fragile everywhere. The modern economic order depends on the expectation that territorial arrangements are not perpetually renegotiable under pressure.
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Finally, Greenland is not some unoccupied resource cache. It is home to a population with political institutions, cultural identity, and stated preferences. Treating territory as a tradable asset abstracts away governance and consent, precisely the factors that determine whether resource wealth becomes long-run prosperity or stagnation.
The Institute of Economic Affairs’s David Frost identifies “three problems with industrial policy.” A slice:
First, how do Kyle or Burnham know what industries Manchester or Britain actually need? They may think they know – but in truth they are just looking at industries that are already successful elsewhere in the country or the world and saying “we want some of that”. It’s not a basis for economic policy. Suppose Manchester industrialists 200 years [ago] had said “British transport depends on horses and canals. What we need is strategic support for a stagecoach and barge industry.” Would anyone have bothered developing the first railway line in the world then? The truth is the industries of the future are not known to politicians: the knowledge is decentralised in the economy, in the entrepreneurs and experimenters. The best thing is to get out of the way and let them find what works.
The second problem is the famous “What is seen and what is not seen” problem first described by the French economist Bastiat in the mid-1800s. Yes, politicians can build a shiny new factory with public money. Everyone says “Great. Look at all the activity and all the jobs created.” That’s what’s seen. But no one thinks about what could have been done if the money had not been paid over in taxes but left in the hands of the people who earned it. That’s what’s not seen. Maybe, left to their own devices, they’d have done better. And at least if they hadn’t, it would only have been their own money they lost. We wouldn’t all be paying for it – as we do when the politicians get things wrong.
