Central panning

Government meddling won’t boost our economy, FreeCons argue

While Freedom Conservatives challenge many ideas espoused by National Conservatives and others on the populist Right, the debate about how best to promote economic growth and opportunity is especially heated.

“The free market cannot be absolute,” wrote the NatCons in their statement of principles. “Globalized markets allow hostile foreign powers to despoil America and other countries of their manufacturing capacity, weakening them economically and dividing them internally.”

FreeCons reject the notion that when special-interest groups seek subsidy or protection, policymakers should abandon economic freedom and attempt central planning.

“The free enterprise system is the foundation of prosperity,” we wrote in our statement.

“Americans can only prosper in an economy in which they can afford the basics of everyday life: food, shelter, health care, and energy. A corrosive combination of government intervention and private cronyism is making these basics unaffordable to many Americans.”

This week, we feature some of Freedom Conservatism’s most eloquent defenders of economic freedom.

Veggie meat sandwich

David McIntosh is president of the Club for Growth and a FreeCon signatory.

McIntosh formerly represented Indiana’s 2nd Congressional District in the U.S. Congress and chaired the Subcommittee on Regulatory Relief.

During the Reagan administration, he served as special assistant to Attorney General Edwin Meese III and as special assistant to President Reagan for Domestic Affairs. During the first Bush administration, he directed the President’s Council on Competitiveness.

McIntosh is a co-founder of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy and serves on the board of directors. He also had stints at the Hudson Institute and as a professor of economics at Ball State School of Business.

Writing for The Hill, he criticized some “self-professed conservatives on Capitol Hill” such as Sen. Marco Rubio for advocating a government-directed industrial policy intended to boost manufacturing or other sectors.

“Economies work best without the heavy hand of government forcing its will on the people,” McIntosh wrote.

“A conservative argument for big government manufacturing policy is akin to a vegetarian’s argument for eating meat: It’s an oxymoron.”

Defying common sense

Julian Morris is a senior scholar at the International Center for Law & Economics, a former vice president of research at Reason Foundation, and a FreeCon signatory.

Morris previously served as executive director of International Policy Network, a London-based think tank which he co-founded. Before that, he ran the environment and technology program at the Institute of Economic Affairs.

Morris has also been a visiting professor in the Department of International Studies at the University of Buckingham. He is the author of dozens of scholarly articles on issues ranging from the morality of free trade to the regulation of the Internet.

In a recent RealClearMarkets essay coauthored with Todd Zywicki, he challenged a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau analysis blaming a “lack of competition” for boosting interest rates on credit cards issued by large banks.

“Measuring the degree of competition in the credit card industry solely by reference to median APR is nonsense,” they wrote. “Only about half of American households with credit cards revolve a balance.”

“Credit card companies compete for your business literally every time you make a purchase at the grocery store, restaurant, or online,” they added. “Characterizing this market as suffering a ‘lack of competition’ defies common sense and reality.”

Don’t squander labor

David McGarry is a policy analyst at the Taxpayers Protection Alliance and a FreeCon signatory.

A National Journalism Center graduate and Young Voices contributor, McGarry has written extensively on a wide range of topics related to technology, government accountability, and consumer choice.

He has reported on tech policy and telecommunications, particularly at the Federal Communications Commission and on Capitol Hill, for such publications as RealClearPolicy, Techdirt, Reason, and National Review.

In a recent essay for the American Institute for Economic Research, McGarry described the “dual regime of robust tariffs and domestic manufacturing subsidies” sought by many populists and their left-wing allies.

Most job losses in traditional manufacturing are the result of technological change or domestic competition, not trade, he pointed out. And in distressed communities where “civil society has atrophied,” no amount of “tariff or subsidy can resurrect a shuttered church or an abandoned bowling league. Their revival must include something more than economic reform.”

“Lawmakers can do much to help the American worker find well-paying, dignified, stable, and fulfilling work,” McGarry concluded. “But policies that squander human ingenuity and labor — the most valuable economic resource there is — will produce nothing good.”

In the mix

• In The Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove explained how President Biden’s insistence on campaigning for Kamala Harris is helpful to former President Trump.

Biden’s talks will “remind Americans why they’re grateful he stepped aside,” Rove argued. “It certainly won’t make them feel better about his handling of the economy, inflation, border security, or world events.”

And “in a pre-election farewell tour focused on his accomplishments, Mr. Biden won’t be able to control himself. He’ll vastly oversell his record — aggravating voters all over again.”

• Joe Lehman, president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, wrote in its publication Impact about the FreeCon Statement of Principles. “Freedom Conservatism is a response to the deepest fractures in the center-right political movement since at least the Cold War,” he wrote. “The principles of Freedom Conservatism answer the question, ‘What do we believe?’”

“You can count on the Mackinac Center to uphold and advance these principles in Michigan and beyond.”

• In the Washington Examiner, Quin Hillyer opined that Trump’s tariff threats could wreck the American economy.

The former president is “pushing an across-the-board import tariff of between 10% and 20% that would almost certainly cause immense price hikes domestically, goad other countries into retaliating, and perhaps set off an international trade war with consequences reminiscent of the Smoot-Hawley tariff that colossally exacerbated the 20th century’s Great Depression.”

• In National Review, Jack Butler cited the recent scandal surrounding Jay Varma’s hypocritical behavior during the height of COVID to reflect on what the pandemic era revealed about institutions, policymakers, and human nature.

“The 21st century has given us plenty of reasons to distrust our supposed betters,” Butler wrote. “But COVID-19 further demonstrated their contempt for those who entrusted them with power.” The pandemic also “showed in brutal fashion that human-to-human, face-to-face interaction is a necessity.”