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Much financial engineering aims to convert the real economy’s activity into derivative products with risk-versus-return profiles that will appeal to particular investors. This has some value, when the result is to spread risk among parties who choose how they wish to participate. For instance, some investors may wish to hold a firm’s equity while others Read more…

Ban stock buybacks and repeal business interest deductibility

Channeling the pursuit of profit toward the nation’s liberty and prosperity A great benefit of the free market is the latitude it affords individuals to pursue their own self-interest however they may wish to define it. When that pursuit advances the common good as well, capitalism generates unparalleled prosperity. But the free market alone does Read more…

The implacable trade deficits run by the United States since the late 1970s have been, and continue to be, costly to the American economy. For decades, the implicit and explicit subsidies to manufacturers that have driven surpluses in countries like China and Germany have caused global manufacturing to migrate from deficit countries to surplus countries, and Read more…

Does anyone think our current immigration policies are working? Over the past two years, the Biden administration has released two million illegal immigrants into the United States, a total that exceeds the level of legal immigration over the same period. The total number of people who have entered the country illegally over that period is Read more…

Trade policy has failed American workers, their families, and their communities over much of the last 30 years. Until the changes made in the Trump administration, it led to the offshoring of American industry, the closure of thousands of factories, the loss of millions of jobs, the decay of many communities, stagnating wages, rising inequality, Read more…

The New Right should care deeply about preventing Chinese hegemony over Asia. The reason, though, is not necessarily obvious. After all, most conservatives are justly tired of the “forever war” interventionism of the old-guard GOP and rightly skeptical of the foreign policy “establishment” that still promotes the same approach. But the threat China poses is Read more…

The United States operates a range of temporary visa or guest worker programs, justified by claims of labor shortages and the trope of “jobs Americans won’t do.” The H-2A and H-2B programs, for temporary agricultural and other seasonal work, respectively, provide employers with an alternative to offering jobs to Americans at competitive wages in good Read more…

Capitalism works when capital in pursuit of profit must find ways to expand output with the labor present, and when it must share the rising proceeds with that labor. Lax immigration policy and enforcement have provided employers with a safety valve in the form of foreign workers who, especially at the low-wage end of the Read more…

As a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the United States is expected to extend permanent normal trade relations (PNTR) to all other WTO members, including those like China that routinely ignore their own obligations. China obstructs access to its market, ignores intellectual property rules, and coerces foreign firms, but the WTO has been Read more…

The Republican Party has changed. It is now home to more working-class (non-college) voters than the Democrats. In 2022, Republicans carried the nationwide working-class House vote by 13 points. In 2020, Trump carried the nationwide working-class presidential vote by four points. Modeled estimates by the States of Change project indicate that Trump carried the working-class Read more…

Republicans and conservatives rightly love liberty. That’s why so many have difficulty engaging with the new conservative economics and domestic policy propounded by American Compass and politicians including Senators Marco Rubio, Josh Hawley, and J.D. Vance. They believe, wrongly, that these policies contradict liberty. The opposite is, in fact, true. Conservative economics is not just Read more…

We’ve spent the past decade living in a working-class town in southwestern Ohio, initially on a short-term research project and then settling in as citizens, neighbors, and friends—so that is the vantage from which we understand America. For this memo we talked with 14 of our neighbors about the American Dream, their experiences in the Read more…

Defining success as achievement of the outcomes that people value most In recent decades, American politics has been driven by a devotion to “consumer welfare,” and policymakers narrowed their goal to increasing how much stuff everyone could buy. Whether families earned income through paychecks or relied upon government transfers, whether communities thrived or collapsed, whether Read more…

Defining success as achievement of the outcomes that people value most

In 2021, hedge fund manager Ray Dalio gave a forthright defense of his investments in China despite its horrifying human rights record and adversarial posture toward the United States. “I can’t be an expert in those types of things … I look to whatever the rules are. If the government has a policy that I Read more…

The Railway Safety Act has made concrete the ideological debate raging between conservatives and libertarians over the role of government regulation in the free market.

America’s enormous trade deficits are a double disaster for the nation. First, they represent a mortgaging of the future, as we pay for our consumption of goods and services produced abroad by sending back our assets: ownership of our corporations and real estate and bonds that promise future payments. Second, they represent a shortfall in Read more…