The Commons
Making Sense of Conservative Economics
Trump’s anti-bureaucracy energy should be directed at regulation as well as waste
It isn’t just about criminal punishments and presidential pardons
The old GOP dictated Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. His new coalition should shape its future.
Latest Episode
Oren speaks on a panel about economic policy in Trump’s second term and more with Jason Furman, Richard Burkhauser, and Kimberly Clausing.
Our Latest
American Compass research director Wells King explores the failures of the modern American labor movement and what workers really want from unions.
Not What They Bargained For, the American Compass survey of worker attitudes, highlights the ways that the labor movement’s focus on progressive politics has undermined its own popularity and alienated the lower and working classes. Workers similarly disdain “woke” employers.
In order to fulfill your dreams, you must aspire to be what you desire. That is the American Dream, to me. And I think some people don’t understand what fulfilling that American Dream can take.
In 1776, Adam Smith made perhaps the most famous statement linking monopoly power to labor. “Masters,” he wrote in The Wealth of Nations, “are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform, combination, not to raise the wages of labor above their actual rate.” Today, however, rather than taking Smith’s maxim as a warning, most lawyers and judges have come to treat it as a guidebook.
Americans want creative policymaking that better supports families, but always with the expectation that families receiving public support are also working to support themselves.
