Responding to the launch of the Oren Cass-led project American Compass, which hopes to reorient conservative economic policy away from “free-market fundamentalism” (whatever that means), Henry Olsen writes in the Washington Post:

[Martin] Luther and the other reformers sought to return Christianity to its purer roots. Cass and his merry band of brothers and sisters seek to do the same for American conservatism, and other essays on the site show how the roots of American conservatism go much further back in time than William F. Buckley Jr.’s founding of National Review. Wells King’s essay, for example, finds them in the ideas of Alexander Hamilton, Clay and Abraham Lincoln, and one could also find them in the principles of men of more recent vintage such as Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan.
American Compass aspires to be the tool with which future conservative leaders can guide the American ship of state. Those men and women ignore it at their peril.

Perhaps it is uncharitable to interpret this as a barb against National Review. Let us hope so. For this website and magazine have published a wide range of views on economic questions, with contributions from many authors. Henry Olsen is one of them. And so is Oren Cass, as recently as . . . today.

I am relieved that National Review has already managed to avoid the peril of which Olsen warns.