Beware âSocial Insuranceâ Salesmen
Redistribution is a vital topic for conservatives as we question stale orthodoxies and reexamine how first principles can help to address modern challenges. In this respect I agree entirely with Read more…
Redistribution is a vital topic for conservatives as we question stale orthodoxies and reexamine how first principles can help to address modern challenges. In this respect I agree entirely with Read more…
A 2020 presidential contender unveiled a 700 billion dollar âBuy Americanâ plan today to rebuild Americaâs manufacturing sector devastated by the coronavirus.
In a recent essay for The American Conservative, Oren Cass criticizes a viewpoint, which he attributes to the Niskanen Center, among others on the center-right, that places a central emphasis on free markets and economic growth even when doing so ânecessitate[s] a much larger safety net, widespread government dependence, and the loss of a baseline expectation that people everywhere can become productive contributors to their communities and form stable families capable of self-reliance.â
Repatriating supply chains to home shores has become an increasingly fashionable topic in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Part of the rationale is to ensure that adequate redundancy and resiliency are built into our economies, even at the cost of âjust in timeâ inventory accumulation practices (which have prioritized short term profitability at a cost of the kinds of supply shocks we are experiencing today).
Last week, I joined Steve Deaceâs BlazeTV podcast to discuss the astonishing success of Fox News host Tucker Carlson, and the forward-looking implications of that success for both conservative media and American conservatism itself.
“We are conservatives, and conservatives believe in supporting families directly.”
One of the few times when I have found myself in agreement with Paul Krugman is when he famously wrote, âProductivity isnât everything, but in the long run it is almost everything.â Yet, today, this statement is not only passĂŠ, but downright suspect, at least among many U.S. elites. For in a world characterized by neo-Luddite fear of new technologies and outlandish claims that technology will destroy most of our jobs, public and elite opinion has shifted to a view that âproductivity is almost nothing, especially if any worker loses their job from it.â
The Wall Street Journalâs defense of private equity (âPopulists Donât Know Much About Private Equityâ) is an impressionist masterpiece of market fundamentalism, relying on the unexamined assumption that fees paid to private-equity partners represent “social value.” One can simply step back and gawk in amazement, but true appreciation requires poring over each brushstroke.
Since the neoliberal era began in the 1970s, many public policy thinkers have assumed that America’s employment-based benefit system of welfare capitalism is doomed to extinction by the growth in freelance or gig workers. To replace employer benefits, the left tends to support welfare statism and the right tends to support welfare individualism, in the form of portable, individualized tax credits or savings accounts.
As we tend to do with momentous occasions, I clearly remember where I was and what I was doing when I heard the first lines of Lin-Manuel Mirandaâs Hamilton. It Read more…
There are many reasons to be pessimistic about the future of this country at the moment, and most of them are hard to ignore. But there are also new glimmers of hope appearing in important areas, even if they donât get much media attention.
Just a few years ago, it was possible for nationalist Americans to warn foreign enemies like North Korea that the US was a “hyperpower.” A few decades ago, however, the label was a term of abuse.
Analysts and commentators talk about todayâs âprecariate.â The term plays on the Marxist notion of the proletariat, recasting it to describe gig workers, college grads whose income is swallowed by student loan debt, and wage-earners who canât stay ahead of heath costs, childcare costs, car repair bills, and credit card debt.
The opinion pages of both the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal have featured calls for industrial policy in the past week, an encouraging trend toward realism about the necessary role for government in a free-market economy.
ITIF recently released a report about how “innovation mercantilist” policies were instrumental in enabling China to dominate the global telecom equipment industry, and how that rise came at the expense Read more…
Recently, I suggested that the United States would do well to emulate some aspects of Chinaâs economic development model, largely on the grounds that this still constituted the optimal route to reindustrialization. If done correctly, reindustrialization can provide a key means of generating high quality jobs in the U.S. and a corresponding break from todayâs prevailing market fundamentalist model characterized by precarious employment prospects, wage stagnation and the loss of many of the attributes long associated with a prosperous and stable middle class.
In March as Ohio began to shut down, Emilyâa thirtysomething mom who asked that I not use her real nameâworried about her family, her neighbors, and especially the elderly. She posted on her townâs Facebook page offering to grocery shop for those unable to go to the store, or to share a meal with anyone who might be hungry, saying that sheâd feed them whatever she could out of her own kitchen.
American Compass’s Oren Cass describes the parameters of the fight on the right and makes the case for a Post-Trump conservatism.
Robert Atkinson of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation has just written a very compelling analysis of Chinaâs national industrial policy, especially in relation to the exponential growth of its telecommunications industry. Some of the key findings of the paper, âHow Chinaâs Mercantilist Policies Have Undermined Global Innovation in the Telecom Equipment Industryâ are as follows:
American Compass’s Wells King outlines the proposals from the “Moving the Chains” reshoring policy symposium.
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