Freedom Conservatives are fighting to conserve more than freedom.
Ours is a fusionist project, one devoted to the proposition that the health and wellbeing of any society requires a thick layer of civil society between individuals and the state. Flourishing families, thriving religious congregations, rigorous schools, and robust neighborhood associations, athletic leagues, and arts groups — without such character-forming and soul-nourishing institutions, neither human flourishing nor self-government is possible.
“We have no government, armed with power, capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and religion,” John Adams famously wrote, “Avarice, ambition, revenge and licentiousness would break the strongest cords of our Constitution, as a whale goes through a net.”
That does not mean, however, that Adams and other Founders discounted the importance of freedom. “Liberty must at all hazards be supported,” America’s second president wrote. “We have a right to it, derived from our Maker.”
Those who signed the Freedom Conservatism Statement of Principles affirm that liberty is a necessary condition for American Greatness, though obviously not a sufficient one. Threats to that liberty — from the progressive Left or the populist Right — deserve our condemnation and opposition.
Today we feature FreeCons who measure, study, and champion freedom in America and beyond.
Blessings of liberty
While economic freedom is declining across the world, the United States continues to outrank its major competitors — a competitive advantage that American policymakers should protect and build on, not abandon.
That’s one of the findings of the Fraser Institute‘s latest Economic Freedom of the World report. Among its authors are Robert Lawson of Southern Methodist University, Daniel J. Mitchell of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, and Matthew D. Mitchell of West Virginia University and the Mercatus Center, all FreeCon signatories.
Another signatory, the late James Gwatney of Florida State University, was instrumental in creating the index, the first such measure created for practical use by scholars and policymakers. Its combines data on government spending, taxes, regulation, trade barriers, legal and judicial systems, and monetary policy.
The U.S. ranks 5th in the latest report, behind only Hong Kong, Singapore, Switzerland, and New Zealand. Still, America’s economic-freedom score of 8.09 is down markedly from its modern peak of 8.43 in 2017.
There is a strong correlation between economic freedom and living standards, the authors point out. Those who live in the freest 25% of countries earn about eight times as much as those who live in the least-free quartile.
Life expectancy, infant mortality, literacy, environmental quality, social tolerance, political corruption, self-reported happiness — all are worse in unfree societies and better in free ones.
Mitchell is one of the co-authors of a related project, the Cato Institute‘s Human Freedom Index, which combines measures of personal liberty with those of economic freedom. “Human freedom deteriorated severely in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic,” they wrote, and has yet to recover.
Yet another index, Cato’s Freedom in the 50 States, is co-authored by FreeCon signatory Will Ruger, president of the American Institute for Economic Research.
Swampier capital
Merrill Matthews is a health policy expert and opinion contributor at The Hill. He also serves on the Texas Advisory Committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
A FreeCon signatory, Matthews is past president of the Health Economics Roundtable for the National Association for Business Economics and former medical ethicist for the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center’s Institutional Review Board for Human Experimentation
He co-authored On the Edge: America Faces the Entitlements Cliff and contributed chapters to several books. Matthews writes regularly for journals and newspapers, and serves as a political analyst for the USA Radio Network.
In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, Matthews argued that President Trump’s proposed new round of tariffs will foster rather than reduce political corruption in the nation’s capital as companies lobby to exempt their own imports or deflect tariffs toward their competitors.
“By directing government to impose levies on allies and adversaries alike,” he wrote, Trump will be “giving more strength to the swamp monsters he’s supposed to be defeating.”
As Trump’s tariff regime expanded during his first term, the number of companies deploying lobbyists in Washington tripled, Matthews observed. “Imagine how many more there will be if his second-term tariff program is as expansive as he’s promising.”
Adverse consequences
Donald Devine is senior scholar at The Fund for American Studies and a FreeCon signatory.
Ronald Reagan’s civil service director during the president’s first term in office, Devine taught government and politics at the University of Maryland and Western civilization at Bellevue University. He is also the author of 11 books.
In a recent column for The American Spectator, Devine challenged the notion that attempts to move federal agencies and employees out of Washington, D.C. will help shrink the size, scope, and behavior of government.
He pointed out that there are only 60,000 military civilians and 140,000 other federal workers in and around the nation’s capital, out of a total workforce of 2 million. This means 1.8 million are already living outside Washington.
“It is not clear how many employees would be transferred to small-population states,” Devine wrote, “but if a sizeable number moved, it could hinder the ability of Republicans to be elected in those states since most federal employees are Democrats.”
Moreover, “cutting ‘employees’ is a small part of the problem. There are two million employees but about 20 million contractors and grantees. That is where the big money is spent on employment in today’s administrative state.”
In the mix
• In The Washington Examiner, columnist and FreeCon signatory Tiana Lowe Doescher described recent debates about H-1B visas and pointed out that, whatever their merits, they represent only a tiny fraction of visas issued to legal immigrants — and are dwarfed by flows of illegal immigrants.
Republicans would be wise to focus on “criminal migrants among us” rather than professional workers, she argued, as well as on reforming an education system that fails to prepare young Americans for 21st-century jobs.
• In UnderstandingCongress.org, American Enterprise Institute senior fellow and FreeCon signatory Kevin Kosar observed that the country’s fiscal woes are a reflection of misplaced priorities and a flawed budget process. “Legislators rail over a few billion dollars spent on a failed government program,” Kosar argued, “while entitlement spending drives trillion-dollar deficits.”
“Representative democracy is a collective enterprise. We get the politicians we choose. Until we do our part, America’s budget will further erode until we have an economic crisis. And that would be an exceedingly stupid and costly course to follow.”
• Young Voices, led by FreeCon signatory Casey Given, has launched a new Substack to publish and curate work by the up-and-coming communicators the organization trains and coaches.
“What role do libertarians and Freedom Conservatives have to play in influencing policy to preserve what’s great about America while also acknowledging and fixing its problems?” Casey asked. That’s one of the questions Young Voices contributors will try to answer. Subscribe to Pivot here.