Bramwell has written a smart critical take on the Mount Vernon Statement.

The unacknowledged though painfully obvious assumption of The Mount Vernon Statement is that the values we all share necessarily translate into the conservative movement’s policy agenda, as if no additional intellectual work were needed. (You’re not against “true” religious liberty are you?) Alas, however, the “the priceless principle of ordered liberty articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution” does not imply any particular agenda, at least not in any straightforward way. That’s why we still have political debate. Contrast the Sharon Statement, which 50 years ago launched Young Americans for Freedom and to which The Mount Vernon Statement pays conspicuous homage. Disagree with the Sharon Statement if you will, at least it shows evidence of underlying arguments. When government, it says, “takes from one man to bestow on another, it diminishes the incentive of the first, the integrity of the second, and the moral autonomy of both.” This is a wonderfully concise statement of the moral and economic case for the free market, made in the language of both economics and Lockean rights theory. That case may or may or not be compelling, but at least it is recognizable. The authors of the Sharon Statement were not content to appeal to some laudable but empty notion as “economic opportunity.” On the contrary, they felt compelled to define what they believed.

To be honest, I hadn’t really considered the MVS from this perspective (is it actually saying anything worth saying, or is it tiresome and tendentious?), and I think that Bramwell makes some excellent points.