The American Economic Forum was not a betrayal of conservative principles, but an effort to apply those principles to the unique challenges of today.
The American Economic Forum was not a betrayal of conservative principles, but an effort to apply those principles to the unique challenges of today.
M y friend and fellow National Review youth-cadre member Dominic Pino wrote a thorough report on last week’s American Economic Forum, a two-day conference hosted by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI). (Disclaimer: I am currently an ISI fellow and was a panelist at the conference, as were NR’s Michael Brendan Dougherty and Andrew Stuttaford.) The event, whose list of speakers included Senator Rand Paul, former senator Rick Santorum, Congressman Jim Banks, former United States trade representative Robert Lighthizer, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, and a number of other important names in conservatism, was dedicated to divining “the best way for conservatives in 2022 to apply fundamental economic principles to our current crisis,” defined as “unprecedented inflation, a decreasing workforce, Big Tech, woke capital, a rising China, and a dwindling middle class.” Pino is broadly fair, but skeptical. “The message from many of the speakers amounted to an unreserved — and worrying — challenge to economic assumptions that have driven the Right for decades,” he writes. “With a few exceptions, their argument was that conservatives should be open to using the tools of government planning to achieve growth.”
The various examples of this that Pino cites include tariffs and trade restrictions, reduction in immigration rates, antitrust against Big Tech, and a broader hostility to Wall Street. As I see it, there are two central lines of criticism that one could make of any of these positions: wrong in principle, or wrong in practice. I’m sure that Pino, who I know to be an able economics writer, could have offered compelling counterpoints for why the policies on offer from conference speakers were bad for the country in practice. But the thrust of his criticism is one of principle: “Support for free markets has animated the conservative movement since at least 1955, when William F. Buckley Jr. wrote in NR’s mission statement that ‘the competitive price system is indispensable to liberty and material progress,’” he writes. “Some now claim that position is outdated, and conservatives must keep up with the times by supporting more government interventions in the market.” That claim, he argues, betrays core tenets of conservatism.
I think the historical record is far more complicated. Certainly, conservatives of all stripes have always shared a distaste for central planning and bloated public bureaucracy: Both libertarians and traditionalists “share a detestation of collectivism,” Russell Kirk wrote in 1981. “They set their faces against the totalist state and the heavy hand of bureaucracy.” But contrary to Pino’s assertion that the conference’s message amounted to “central planning with conservative characteristics” — “free markets, entrepreneurship, and, fundamentally, liberty are not top concerns,” he writes — the fundamental debate, as I see it, is not between free markets and central planning; it’s between those who believe that free markets should exist within the context of a nation-state, and those who counter that first principles compel conservatives to accept them as a transnational, globalized force. I’m reminded of a quote from the late, great Roger Scruton — who, I would wager, comes down on the opposite side of the issue vis-à-vis Pino:
At the heart of conservatism is this idea of belonging to a community, and, as it were, responding to that community with gratitude and a sense of membership and a sense of duty. . . . Although I’m very much in favor of the free market, I’m very suspicious of the globalized form of it, and the way in which it does not respond to the demands of local communities and local forms of value. So this is a problem for real conservatism — to develop an economic doctrine that does not menace the local communities on which we all depend.
That endeavor — “to develop an economic doctrine that does not menace the local communities on which we all depend” — was the central aim of the American Economic Forum. Of course, in all these debates, there are voices that go too far. (Lighthizer’s argument that we should raise prices to combat “consumerism,” for example, struck me as bonkers, as did Phillip Blond’s retort that it was not capitalism but Chinese communism “that has lifted more people out of poverty than any other”). But those comments were not what defined the ethos of the conference, and the vision of conservative economics that emerged from the two-day event is much less of a break with the Anglo-American conservative tradition than Pino claims. The ideal of the “open society,” which is hostile to even the most minimal of constraints on individual autonomy, is lauded by free-traders and classical liberals today. But it was not always viewed as an indisputable conservative principle. As I wrote back in April:
Buckley was profoundly skeptical of the “open society.” In a 1966 episode of Firing Line, titled “McCarthyism: Past, Present, Future,” Buckley was challenged by his interlocutor, Leo Cherne: “The open society,” Cherne said, “is an urgently necessary aspect of all that we both value.” Buckley wasn’t so sure: “I don’t agree,” he responded. “I don’t want the society to be open to certain ideas.” . . . It wasn’t just Buckley, either. Many of American conservatism’s most trenchant thinkers spoke in similar terms. In an essay-long critique of John Stuart Mill titled “The ‘Open Society’ and Its Fallacies,” Willmoore Kendall — Buckley’s mentor at Yale and the main intellectual inspiration for God and Man at Yale — wrote that there is no “surer prescription for arriving, willy nilly, in spite of ourselves, at the closed society, than is involved in current pleas for the open society.”
And later:
Today’s libertarians see statism lurking in the language of “order” and “virtue.” But this is the historic language of the American conservative tradition. It is not totalitarian. And it is not anti-capitalist, either. . . . Irving Kristol — the godfather of neoconservatism — famously authored a book titled Two Cheers for Capitalism . . . and he called for a “conservative welfare state.”
Even Adam Smith, whom Pino cites favorably, argued for liberal economics in the context of the national interest. Smith’s famous line about the “invisible hand” is often quoted without its preceding clause about a preference for domestic industry: “By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.” Smith’s point about the invisible hand was contingent on the capitalist’s “preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry.”
That’s a profoundly important caveat that is often glossed over in the deployment of Smith to argue for globalized free markets today: The concept of the individual hand, and thus of the virtue of free markets, was contingent on Smith’s idea that “every individual endeavours to employ his capital as near home as possible as he can, and consequently as much as he can in the support of domestic industry,” given that “he can know better the character and situation of the persons whom he trusts, and if he should happen to be deceived, he knows better the laws of the country from which he must seek redress.” But what is to be done in the event that powerful economic actors are untethered from the countries where they reside? That’s an urgent question for conservatives to confront. The answer does not require discarding Smith’s philosophy by any means, but it does necessitate understanding it in its totality, rather than abridging it.
Whether it’s the skepticism of the “open society” articulated by Buckley and Kendall, the endorsement of a “conservative welfare state” favored by Kristol, or the emphasis on the role of the national interest in Smith’s economic philosophy, conservatives have long recognized that a functional political economy necessarily recognizes some limits on the autonomy of the individual consumer. We can and should debate which choices should be subject to restriction, and how far said restrictions should go, but those are questions of how to put the principle into practice; they are not a refutation of the principle itself. So it’s confusing to read this paragraph from Pino: “The overarching message from most speakers was about saving Americans from their own choices. What are we going to do about Americans choosing to work in finance, Americans choosing to buy imported goods, Americans choosing to use products from Big Tech, Americans choosing to hire immigrants, etc.?”
Alternatively, what are we going to do about Americans choosing to use TikTok — an app that, as Jimmy Quinn has aptly chronicled, is essentially an extension of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)? What are we going to do about Americans who want to sell their farmland to the CCP, which has already bought up billions of dollars’ worth of farmland in the American heartland? As for “Americans choosing to hire immigrants,” of course there already are limitations in that regard, thanks to our immigration laws, however loosely enforced. But in recognizing some limitations on free movement across the border, or cracking down on the CCP’s effort to undermine America’s security interests, one is also recognizing some limitations on consumer choice.
None of this is an abandonment of the free market — it is merely a recognition that markets can only exist within a national context, and that the constraints of that national context limit the choices of individual consumers. Conservatives have long recognized this principle. (It was none other than Ronald Reagan who imposed a 100 percent tariff on Japanese electronic products, arguing: “The health and vitality of the U.S. semiconductor industry are essential to America’s future competitiveness. We cannot allow it to be jeopardized by unfair trading practices.”) Outlandish comments notwithstanding, the American Economic Forum was not a betrayal of conservative principles, but an effort to apply those principles to the unique challenges of today.