You won’t find bigger fans of American Greatness than Freedom Conservatives.
We venerate the American founding. We celebrate the American experiment. We cherish the American family. We cheer American innovators in technology, business, and the arts. We champion American leadership.
Where we differ from National Conservatives and others on the nationalist-populist Right (and internationalist-progressive Left, for that matter) is that FreeCons believe America, for all its many challenges, is a great country right now.
No other power can yet match our economic dynamism, cultural influence, and military prowess. The American dollar remains the reserve currency of the world, just as America’s bounty of natural, human, and institutional resources continues to beckon the world’s huddled masses to our shores. (Indeed, one of our pressing challenges — one America’s governing class has obviously bungled — is how to properly manage that flow of immigrants to ensure public safety, the rule of law, and assimilation.)
American Greatness doesn’t need to be restored. It needs to be preserved, and expanded, and its benefits extended to a broader swath of Americans.
FreeCons don’t ignore the suffering of our fellow citizens. We agree that too many lack a meaningful opportunity to pursue the American dream. But unlike our rivals, we don‘t think these problems reflect an excess of free enterprise, or a design flaw built into America’s constitution by Founders too enamored with Lockean liberty.
Rather, FreeCons seek to apply America’s timeless principles creatively and consistently to today’s biggest problems. As we wrote in the Freedom Conservatism Statement of Principles: “More and more people on the left and right reject the distinctive creed that made America great: that individual liberty is essential to the moral and physical strength of the nation.”
Today, we feature FreeCons and allies who fight for American Greatness — and seek to preserve it for future generations.
For “growthmanship”
Samuel Gregg is the Friedrich Hayek Chair in Economics and Economic History at the American Institute for Economic Research. He is also a FreeCon signatory.
In a recent article in Civitas Outlook, the new journal of the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas, Gregg observed that recent statistics suggest the U.S. economy is doing better than its peers.
There remains an underlying problem, however. In the mid-1990s, America’s economy regularly exceeded 4% annual GDP growth. Since 2001, however, it has (barely) cracked 3% just three times.
Economic growth “is not the summit of human happiness,” Gregg continued. “Nor does it magically resolve everyone’s problems. Nonetheless, economic growth is indispensable for human well-being and, crucially, for upholding the promise of America.”
He noted that populist rhetoric and nationalist policy became increasingly common during the 2010s, with deleterious consequences. “Whether they are on the left or right, growth is not a priority for the economic nationalists who have partially undermined the free market pro-growth consensus.”
Their focus is on “redistributing wealth via entitlement programs and industrial policy,” Gregg argued. Nationalists also seek to “shelter the US economy from foreign competition that, like all competition, incentivizes Americans to be more innovative and productive.”
He concluded with a call for “growthmanship,” writing that “America desperately needs more thinkers, policymakers, business executives, civil society leaders, and politicians capable of articulating a compelling case for more significant growth that includes but goes beyond the economic arguments.
“Indeed, that means explaining why we need to steadily deregulate the US economy, diminish the economic reach of an over-mighty federal government, and restore more comprehensive respect for the rule of law, property rights, and monetary stability.”
Markets optimistic
For his latest Manhattan Institute podcast, FreeCon signatory and City Journal economics editor Jordan McGillis interviewed Simon Rabinovitch, U.S. economics editor at The Economist.
For a recent edition of the magazine, Rabinovitch examined gross domestic product figures for the U.S., Japan, and Europe. America has gone from 40% of the total economy of the G7 in the early 1990s to 55% today.
“Comparing apples with apples,” he said, “America has done remarkably well, not just the last five years, but the last 35 years.”
Entrepreneurs, executives, and highly productive professionals find the United States a better place to work, invest, and start new ventures, Rabinovitch pointed out. And while Silicon Valley remains critically important, “tech sectors that have cropped up everywhere from North Carolina to Oregon,” as have other centers for innovation and job creation.
Still, not everyone enjoyed rising living standards, the inflation of the Biden years did great damage to the finances of the median American, and other factors could endanger the country’s future growth and limit economic opportunity.
“The markets have been very, very optimistic about Trump’s agenda,” Rabinovitch concluded. That optimism assumes “he’ll get far with deregulation, he’ll get far with tax cuts.”
Why others faltered
Douglas Carswell is president of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy and a FreeCon signatory.
In his latest for National Review, Carswell compared the economic systems of Japan, China, and Europe to that of America. He began with a trip down memory lane.
“Back in the 1980s, Japan was the coming country,” Carswell wrote. “Her exports where everywhere, and with inventions like the Sony Walkman, it looked as though Japan was the technological future” while “America looked like a power in decline.”
By the mid 1990s, Japan’s GDP was 71% that of the U.S. — and the gap looked to be closing. One ‘expert,” Herman Kahn, predicted that Japan would surpass America as the world’s largest economy by 2000.
“Today? Japan’s economy is a quarter the size of America’s,” Carswell reported.
The same predictions were made about China and Europe, but each reverted to a centrally controlled, heavily regulated economy. Japan’s well-connected conglomerates are shielded from internal competition and do not innovate; China’s economy is closely micromanaged by a bureaucratic elite; and Europe’s economy is controlled by the EU’s ruling class in Brussels.
“To flourish, the United States needs to stay true to the political and economic model envisaged by the Founders: limited government, lower taxes, and liberty,” he wrote.
In the mix
• At the economics Substack Liberty Lens, Cornell University professor and FreeCon signatory Rick Geddes called on the incoming Trump administration and Congress to reform the National Environmental Policy Act, which restricts American investment in growth-enhancing developments.
“NEPA is one reason why American infrastructure is the most expensive in the world,” wrote Geddes and his author, Stanford University’s Joshua Rauh. “NEPA now impacts the construction of roads, bridges, highways, airports, water systems, broadband, both conventional and renewable energy generation and distribution, and electricity transmission, among other infrastructure.”
• At The Daily Economy, FreeCon signatory Iain Murray used empirical evidence to rebut populist claims that a new round of tariffs can rejuvenate domestic manufacturing, facilitate tax reform, and pressure our trading partners to open their markets to American goods.
In reality, tariffs “are poor revenue raisers, they cause net harm to manufacturing, and they backfire as negotiating tools,” wrote Murray, vice president for strategy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. “These three objectives are mutually exclusive, and ineffective even when taken individually. A better policy would focus on reducing costs to the consumer.”
• In National Review, FreeCon signatory and American Habits editor Ray Nothstine called out Gavin Newsom and other Democratic governors for suddenly discovering the virtues of federalism — now that a Republican is returning to the White House.
“Any approach to federalism that seeks merely to wait out a particular president or to find state-driven strategies to impose California values on the entire nation completely misses the point,” wrote Nothstine, the Future of Freedom Fellow at State Policy Network.
“Using federalism simply as a tactic to engineer public opinion only to concentrate more power in Washington is another symptom of the problem that erodes our ability to govern ourselves and our communities.”
• On the Reaganism podcast, one of the leaders of the FreeCon project, Avik Roy, discussed the origins and potential of Freedom Conservatism. “Americans can rise up to overcome any challenge — if you let them,” Roy told host Roger Zakheim. “If you want America to be more successful in the future, the way to do that is to increase, not decrease, individual liberty.” You can watch the episode on YouTube or listen here.