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Margaret Thatcher once said, “Any woman who understands the problems of running a home will be nearer to understanding the problems of running a country.” She was right. American policymakers, however, who “run the country,” seem largely ignorant of the many problems of running a home—or the importance of supporting those who do so. For Read more…

Conservatives of every ideological stripe agree: The key to a healthy, well-functioning society is strong families. Families are where children are born, raised, and formed into the adults they will become. The family is the institution that, at its best, teaches the values of hard work, independence, resilience, and responsibility, and when it breaks down, Read more…

Many of social media’s core features, from public display of private information to algorithmic targeting to easily available harmful content, are especially dangerous for children. Widespread and public image-sharing enables the social comparison pressures that drive so much of social media’s mental health harms, while creating a permanent and public record that exposes children to Read more…

Americans are beginning to reach a vital consensus that social media is harming children. Children who use social media are more likely to suffer from anxiety, depression, and self-harm, and are more vulnerable to exploitation and exposure to harmful material. Even concerned and involved parents find themselves unable to protect their children from a ubiquitous Read more…

American entitlement programs are designed to support workers and provide only limited coverage for spouses who are not full-time workers themselves. For instance, stay-at-home parents do not receive credits toward a work history, leaving them with a lower “spousal” benefit at retirement or “widow(er)” benefit if the spouse with a work history dies. When retiring Read more…

Making ends meet has become much harder for American families. Decades of stagnating wages have left the typical worker unable to attain middle-class security. Nearly half of parenting-age Americans report having fewer children than they want, with affordability cited as the top obstacle. The economic challenge is compounded by a biological one: Parents must start Read more…

Strengthening the institutions that allow markets to deliver on their promise Americans are more than just economic actors, trading goods and services, constantly seeking their own financial advantage. They live and work within communities, as part of a social fabric. These interlocking communities—including families, neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, labor unions, and churches—shape and support individuals, creating Read more…

One of the central economic and social challenges of our time is widening inequality over the past generation between superstar cities and their surrounding areas on one hand and smaller cities and rural areas on the other. Geographic inequality has serious consequences: It concentrates economic growth and opportunities in a small number of places, while Read more…

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 half-century, conservatives have instead borrowed a radical free-market economic strategy from the libertarian movement that pursues and has delivered the opposite. Libertarianism is not conservatism, Read more…

With the demise of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, countries around the world began to open their markets to foreign investment, and the U.S. dollar emerged as the reserve currency of choice. Today, two-thirds of all foreign reserves and nearly 90% of foreign exchange trades are denominated in U.S. dollars—a phenomenon known as “dollarization.” Read more…

The National Environmental Policy Act of 1970 (NEPA) is infamous for imposing red tape on energy and infrastructure projects and triggering environmental reviews for other projects that require federal permitting or federal funds. These reviews can take years and, rather than concluding the matter, once completed provide an invitation for environmental groups to launch lawsuits Read more…

Around the world, the United States has helped to establish development banks and fund large infrastructure and industrial projects. Dozens of national development banks worldwide have successfully deployed trillions of dollars that enable local industries to flourish. The European Investment Bank (EIB) and its “Juncker Plan” achieved a 15:1 ratio of private to public capital Read more…

The United States has lost its position of global leadership in advanced manufacturing and innovation, surpassed in fields like semiconductors, aerospace, and telecommunications by other nations that have pursued global competitiveness through large and heavily subsidized national champions. In addressing this challenge, government and academia can lead the way in basic research, but they lack Read more…

For decades, policymakers and Wall Street promoted the idea that goods should be made wherever is cheapest, regardless of the effect on our national industrial base. Low-cost imports, made artificially cheap by foreign subsidies, reduced demand for domestic products, while offshoring of industrial capacity in pursuit of lower costs diminished America’s ability to compete or Read more…

Financialization is a blight on capitalism. In that system, the corporate sector is supposed to provide the large-scale capital investment that drives economic growth. Financialization inverts the corporate sector’s role, diverting resources away from capital intensive projects and toward financial assets instead. And it empowers agents outside of corporations, whether Wall Street financial managers or Read more…

The run on Silicon Valley Bank in March 2023 was a shock to both policymakers and business leaders, revealing previously unknown fragilities within the banking system. But the significance of this episode goes beyond questions surrounding the insurance and regulation of midsize banks; in many ways, it illustrates the larger imbalances facing the U.S. economy Read more…

Traditional capitalism, in which firms raise capital from investors and use it to grow their businesses, while returning some share of the profits as dividends, works brilliantly to deliver economic growth and prosperity. But it is no longer working in America. Firms are now disgorging capital much faster than they raise it and, in many Read more…

Healthy financial markets allocate capital to vital, long-term value creation; unhealthy ones foster unproductive speculation and market churn. Good financial regulation and tax policy can tell the difference. Unfortunately, in the United States, productive business investment has been in long-term decline and the financial industry now specializes in trading assets around in circles. A prime Read more…

The $5 trillion in assets controlled by state and local pension systems play a prominent role in U.S. financial markets, for instance as the largest source of capital for private equity firms and hedge funds. Routinely underfunded by politicians and thus under pressure to deliver implausibly high returns, these pension funds turn to risky and Read more…