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 […]

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. Strange, because the antimonopoly school seeks to channel popular discontent with bipartisan neoliberalism, which puts too high […]

How are wages set in the United States? The standard neoclassical economic model asserts that the wage reflects the marginal revenue for the firm produced by the worker. In a defense of welfare payments that compensate for low wages for workers in The Week, James Pethokoukis invokes this theory: … [E]conomics won’t be ignored. If […]

In the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump’s share of the white vote shrank while his share of the nonwhite vote increased.  In Congressional and Senate elections, many Republican candidates benefited from increased support from nonwhite voters, particularly Latinos.  And the Republicans continued to pick up high-school-educated working class voters while losing more educated voters to […]

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. Helping as many individuals escape from working-class occupations as possible is the goal of both the conventional center-left and the conventional center-right.  […]

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 […]

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. The mistaken theory is the one held by most Americans who are involved in politics, policy and political commentary.  Call this the partisan purge theory of major […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]