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The objectives of American conservatism are unchanging and necessary—strong, self-reliant families and a strong, self-reliant nation. The economic program of American conservatism should promote those goals. Tragically, for the past Read more…

The path to a more secure and generous American welfare state lies not in rejecting the work ethic and the distinction it makes between contributory social insurance and non-contributory social assistance, but rather in embracing it.

Wages are to workers’ output what user fees are to highways and toll bridges.

While it is true that Sweden adopted some neoliberal reforms after an economic crisis in the early 1990s, Sweden is not, and never has been, a free-market welfare state.

Large numbers of American workers are trapped in low-wage jobs in low-tech, low-profit industries in the nontraded domestic service sector, including leisure and hospitality, retail and child and elder care.

A pro-worker agenda must treat families, not individuals, as the basic units of public policy.

In 2020 Donald Trump won 40 percent of voters who live in a household with at least one member in a labor union, slightly fewer than the 42 percent of union households who voted for him in 2016.  With the exception of Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden won fewer union households than any recent Democratic presidential candidate. 

A strange development of recent years has been the revival on parts of the left and the right of the long-dormant ideology of antimonopolism, once associated with agrarian populists like William Jennings Bryan and progressives like Louis Brandeis.

How are wages set in the United States?

In the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump’s share of the white vote shrank while his share of the nonwhite vote increased.

Discussions about policies to help the multiracial American working class majority as a whole typically take a detour into the completely unrelated subject of how to help individuals escape from the working class.

In March 2016, as Donald Trump was headed toward securing the nomination of the Republican party for president at the Republican national convention in July, I published a piece in The National Interest about the collapse of the establishment Republican agenda.  Today, on the verge of the 2020 election, my essay is as relevant as ever:

There are two theories of how major policy changes happen in the United States of America.  One theory is popular, widely believed and mistaken.  The other is correct.

Although neoliberal globalists are often said to be opposed to industrial policy and strategic trade, that is not necessarily true.  Neoliberals of the kind who have dominated U.S. policy under the two Bushes, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are not orthodox anti-government libertarians.  They support a particular kind of industrial policy, whose emblem is not the American eagle but the Japanese goose.

Now that the Supreme Court is in the news, with President Donald Trump’s nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to succeed the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, it is worth reflecting on what kind of constitutional system is best for a national industrial strategy of the kind favored by a growing number of Americans on the left, right and center, in the aftermath of the catastrophic failure of a half century of neoliberal deregulation and globalization.

American labor law has become worse than useless: a lower share of the private-sector labor force is organized today than before the National Labor Relations Act was passed in 1935. The time has come for an entirely new model.

There are only two ways to establish the price of something, including a day’s wages for a worker—the market and the state. Impersonal market forces, beyond the control of either employers or employees, can be allowed to determine how much a worker is paid. If we do not want to allow a free labor market to set wages, then the only alternative is for the government to directly fix prices—in this case, the prices that employers are to pay workers for particular jobs—by means of a compulsory, rigid and universal government labor code.

Thanks to the near-criminal negligence of neoliberal globalist policymakers in both the Democratic and Republican parties, America’s national industrial base, the foundation of its global power, has eroded to the point of collapse.

At Law and Liberty, I took part in a symposium debating the libertarian scholar Richard Epstein’s comparison of labor unions to predatory monopolies, which he described as the “classical liberal” view.