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Among modern institutions, one stands out for the breadth of conservative priorities it could advance: generating widespread prosperity, limiting government intervention, preserving families and ways of life, revitalizing communities and fostering solidarity. That institution is the labor union.
“Conservative labor” might sound like an oxymoron, but America’s dysfunctional labor unions, creatures of Great Depression-era legislation and decades of political polarization, are neither inevitable nor typical of their counterparts elsewhere.
Concern for worker power and representation is as old as the discipline of economics. “Upon all ordinary occasions,” warned Adam Smith, employers “have the advantage in the dispute, and force [workmen] into a compliance with their terms.” John Stuart Mill, a favorite of modern libertarians, lamented that without sufficient union strength, “the laborer in an isolated condition, unable to hold out even against a single employer…will, as a rule, find his wages kept down.” He condemned those who did not “wish that the laborers may prevail, and that the highest limit [for wages], whatever it be, may be attained.”
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Is Trump About to Invite In the Biggest Predator in the World?
“If you look at my old speeches when I was young, very handsome,” President Trump said while announcing his “Liberation Day” tariffs last year, “I’d be on a television show. I’d be talking about how we were being ripped off.”
Josh Hawley Sees AI as a Binary Choice for the GOP
Hawley’s audience was roughly 500 people who filed into the National Building Museum in D.C. for a black-tie gala hosted by American Compass, a populist, new right think tank with deep ties to Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Scott Bessent becomes chief salesman for Trump’s economic security pitch
Oren Cass, the founder and chief economist of American Compass, told the Washington Examiner that Bessent’s strength is communicating why “market policy people” should get on board with Trump’s platform, even though they’re effectively behind the exact economic norms the administration is trying to reverse.
