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How should businesses balance shareholder interests with obligations to their workers, communities, and nation?

How should businesses balance shareholder interests with obligations to their workers, communities, and nation?

Patrick Deneen and Andy Puzder debate the obligations of business.

How should businesses balance shareholder interests with obligations to their workers, communities, and nation?

Washington Post columnist George Will has added his voice to that of Brad Thompson in decrying the rise of an un-American conservative authoritarianism, represented, among others, by such thinkers as Adrian Vermeule, Sohrab Ahmari, and yours truly. Will and Thompson invoke the American Constitutional tradition as the cure for this “anti-American” threat from the Right. The tradition they seek to defend, according to Thompson, is the “classical liberalism of the founding era [that] assumed individual rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness” and that “government must be impartial in adjudicating rival conceptions of the good life.” Similarly, Will argues that the Constitution reflects a belief in “limited government respectful of society’s cumulative intelligence and preferences collaboratively revealed through market transactions.” The Constitution, according to Will (echoing Thompson) establishes “a regime respectful of individuals’ diverse notions of the life worth living.” In other words, America was founded as a libertarian nation.

American Compass proposes that conservatives revisit the question of whether a nation can afford an economic order without a “compass,” a guide that can provide a sense of direction national policy and shared intention. The question is essential, and the answers on offer on this site portend a new course for the American political order.