On Contributory Social Insurance and the Work Ethic

If there is one thing that libertarians, free-market conservatives, and even many center-left neoliberals agree on, it is the logic of paying for highways and other forms of infrastructure out of user fees rather than general taxes. This approach, they argue, is both fairer and more efficient: fair because it ensures those who use the […]

Forget American exceptionalism. Tiny social democratic Sweden is the country that embodies humanity’s future in the eyes of much of the global liberal left. A generation ago, the liberal economist Robert Heilbroner famously described his utopia as “a slightly idealized Sweden.” Now, the Niskanen Center’s Samuel Hammond has tried to draft Sweden for the libertarian […]

Large numbers of American workers are trapped in low-wage jobs in low-tech, low-profit industries in the nontraded domestic service sector, including leisure and hospitality, retail and child and elder care. To raise wages significantly, firms would have to increase their productivity by investing in innovative technology, but their profit margins are too small for them […]

DAILY CALLER—Michael Lind’s Home Building essay on family policy for the working class majority is adapted by the Daily Caller.

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 […]