The Commons

Of the many foolish arguments for President Biden’s decision to give $400 billion to people who borrowed to attend college, one stood out for its inanity: “Women owe over two-thirds of student debt,” tweeted Senator Elizabeth Warren. “Canceling student debt would help give millions of women a fair shot at starting a business, saving for […]

I spoke earlier this week at a private event for a fervently free-market group. Bringing new ways of thinking to such audiences is a favorite pastime of mine, and one of American Compass’s reasons for being. Partly, of course, this presents an opportunity to persuade. As important, I get to hear the questions and counterarguments […]

Today, Senator Tom Cotton introduced the American Workforce Act (AWA), a landmark bill to create a robust alternative to college rooted in on-the-job experience and employer-led training, funded by a transfer of resources away from traditional higher education. The AWA is modeled on American Compass’s Workforce Training Grant, which we proposed earlier this year as […]

Social media’s unseemly interest in children, and legislators’ hesitance to confront it, resembles nothing quite so much as the dynamic surrounding the child labor practices of the 19th century. In the late 1800s, new technology emerging from the Industrial Revolution offered commercial interests a new opportunity to monetize childhood—and those commercial interests took it. At […]

Congress finally appears poised to make progress on a competitiveness bill that focuses squarely on an especially pressing need: support for the domestic semiconductor industry. The case for doing this has been well made in numerous forums, from American Compass’s own Guide to the Semiconductor Industry and analysis at National Review to the recent Wall […]

In this week’s Compass Point, Pursuing the Reunification of Home and Work, Erika Bachiochi throws a fascinating curveball into the modern debate over home economics. That debate, to oversimplify, pits the mid-20th-century model of breadwinner-plus-homemaker against the late-20th-century model of the dual-income household.

Silicon Valley’s techno-optimists insist loudly on two contradictory points. On one hand, they celebrate the Internet and its associated innovations with phrases like “paradigm shift” and “creative destruction,” and celebrate themselves as the visionaries leading humanity into (unironically) a Brave New World. On the other, they reject the need for new public regulation, insisting that […]

What role should experts play in our politics? Of course, they have their own freedom of speech, and are welcome to hawk their wares in the marketplace of ideas. But when election day arrives, their votes count no more or less than others, and they are far fewer in number. Democracy relies upon non-experts to […]

Our latest Compass Point is by James M. Roberts, long-time research fellow at the Heritage Foundation and co-editor of their Index of Economic Freedom, reflecting on his experience in the conservative establishment and the perils of a political movement running on autopilot. “Conservatives are fond of warning that a government program, once established, never dies,” […]

The rebuttal delivered by Jon Lovitz’s Michael Dukakis, in his debate with Dana Carvey’s George H. W. Bush, is one of Saturday Night Live’s most famous political punchlines: “I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy.” The New York City audience went nuts—neither could they believe Dukakis was losing to Bush. But, of course, the […]

It is hard, nay impossible, to find a more sophisticated conservative critique of globalization than that articulated by Oren Cass. Perhaps because Cass was once a card-carrying member of the economic establishment himself, he has an exceptionally clear sense of some of the problematic assumptions that have underpinned that establishment’s high level of support for […]

On March 3, 2018, The Economist declared that the free world had “made the wrong bet” in trying to make China “a responsible stakeholder in the rules based, liberal global order.” Last week, major hedge fund manager and long-time globalization champion Larry Fink declared that “globalization is over.” When the former high priests of globalization […]