High inflation allows job gains and recessions to coexist. If the prices of outputs are rising faster than the prices of inputs, it makes sense to buy more inputs. To businesses, the increases in consumer prices are increases in the prices of outputs. Wages, the cost of labor, are an input cost. With wages growing slower than consumer prices are rising, then, you shouldn’t be surprised that businesses are continuing to expand their payrolls.
The major reason that specifics cannot be offered as to how the political sphere is to force virtue upon a society that allows for market freedom in transactions is because the political sphere can do no such thing. Indeed, as a basic tautology, virtue is not compulsory, and while a tight legal order to punish criminal behavior is vital for a functioning society, economists, theorists, and our own founders have always been aware of the limitations of a coercive state. No amount of state power in the marketplace can foster love and gratitude. The unwillingness to accept this basic reality of moral philosophy — that doing good is not good when it is forced; that acts of charity are only charitable when they are voluntary — sticks to Reno’s arguments throughout. In many ways he wants what I want — a common good, a religious society, a well-ordered life aimed at human flourishing.
But Rusty Reno and the cabal of new-right market skeptics are stuck with the age-old problem identified by the Founders, and yes, by 20th-century giants such as Friedman and Hayek: We have no option to be ruled by angels. The doctrine of the Fall does not merely inform our understanding of the original sin plaguing individuals and families, but also and especially the state itself. That an individual left unchecked and free of moral enlightenment may suffer in weak discipline and low taste is both true and tragic. But that a civil magistrate granted the power Reno envisions for it represents a more potent and damaging fruit of original sin is, indeed, the testimony of history. On this point there can be no refutation. I prefer that the low-brow permeation of social-media obsession die a holy death, yet inviting the ghosts of 20th-century past to regulate consumer preferences strikes me as a ghastly trade-off.