free enterprise Archives - Ethics & Public Policy Center
Raise a Glass to American Craft Brewing, and the Values It Embodies!
The feast day of St. Arnold of Soissons, patron of brewers and hop-pickers, is the perfect time to celebrate the modern craft brew industry and its testament to two enduring American characteristics: entrepreneurship and consumer choice.
Conservatives’ Debate over Their Future Is Going to Be Bitter and Fierce
The blowback over Sen. Marco Rubio’s recent speech at Catholic University shows that debate over conservatism’s future is going to be bitter and fierce.
Conservative Elites Love to Defend Market Orthodoxy. Don’t Fall for It.
The New Deal’s intellectual core, that the federal government should vigorously act to correct market failures, remains at the center of what Americans expect from Washington. Donald Trump’s nomination and election proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that even a majority of Republicans agree.
The Free-Market Tradition
The market system is increasingly under attack not only from the left but from some smart social conservatives, populists, and nationalists on the right. To effectively defend democratic capitalism, its champions will need to understand the nature of these criticisms, to see where they have a point, and to think about how to make a case for markets that takes them seriously.
Don’t Ask Government For Love
Describing our troubles as the result of bad faith on the part of our leaders, or “worship” of capitalism, is infantilizing and manipulative.
Market Fundamentalism or Love of Country?
Treating economic action as a solely private preserve, any attempt to regulate or interfere in the terms of trade or the allocation of capital has been attacked by intellectual conservatism and its increasingly powerful libertarian allies. The fact that this has made ever more and more of industrial America a wasteland littered with closed factories, abandoned houses, and dollar stores doesn’t matter to these market fundamentalists.
The Populism Debates
Markets sometimes offer ways to solve problems from the bottom up and to allow for an edifying diversity of solutions to coexist at once, and so can be allied to the logic underlying a commitment to civil society. And yet, markets and a traditional moral order characterized by commitments to family, faith, community, and country can also be in very great tension with one another.
The New Republican Coalition
For conservatives, in particular, ceasing to imagine that we own the Republican coalition, and therefore ceasing to expect it to simply follow our lead, would be a spur to sharpen, strengthen, and modernize our ideas so that they are more attractive and a better fit to contemporary problems.
It’s Time for the Right to Get Serious about Tackling Cronyism
Conservatives should act to restore confidence in free markets.
