National economics: Moving on from market fundamentalism
Conservative reformers have the most creative solutions to today's problems
The Western Star newsletter publishes a selection of policy and historical material through its ‘National economics’ round-up email alongside commentary on current affairs. If you want to contribute an article, have your work featured or recommend interesting reading from elsewhere, please contact us at theamsystem@substack.com. You can also follow us on Twitter at @TheAmSystem.
Changing policy
American Compass has released Rebuilding American Capitalism: A Handbook For Conservative Policymakers, setting out the range of policy solutions they have developed over the past three years. This handbook is essential reading for conservatives interested in bringing about an alternative model of political economy.
Conservative economics, unlike the fundamentalism that supplanted it for a time, begins with a confident assertion of what the market is for and then considers the public policies necessary for shaping markets toward that end. The conservative conception of the common good requires a free-market economy in which all people can choose their own life course and through their own efforts contribute productively to their communities, support their families, and raise children prepared for the same. This is a richer notion of freedom, attached to obligation, recognizing that with economic rights come economic responsibilities.
In this conception, the economy serves not only the family and community, but also the nation. Efforts to dissolve borders and construct a more efficient global market devalue the nation-state, weaken its sovereignty, and reduce the citizenry’s democratic control. And notwithstanding liberalism’s one-world ideals, leaders in many other countries remain firmly committed to operating on behalf of their own national interests. If America pursues global supply chains while China pursues national ones, the result will be Chinese supply chains.
The conservative vision thus requires that markets not only allocate capital to productive uses and serve consumers at the lowest possible price, but also create the range of secure and dignified jobs in which people of varying aptitudes, with varying interests, in varying places can build decent lives. Over time, the market must produce growth that is widely shared and sustainable—a term coopted by the environmental movement but applicable as well to other foundations of a free and prosperous nation that market forces will tend to erode. The industrial commons requires protection, to ensure that its capital base, talent pool, and centers of innovation fuel productivity gains and provide for the national defense. So does the labor market, to ensure that the nation’s workers are essential to economic success and prepared for contributing to it. So does the social fabric, to ensure a sense of place, caring relationships built on mutual obligation, and the solidarity to solve problems and counter threats.
You can also watch the American Compass Forum discussion about the handbook with Senators Tom Cotton, Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance, and Todd Young.
Reading history
Discover more about the age of Henry Clay in The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War by Michael F. Holt. This landmark piece of scholarship on nineteenth century history provides crucial insight into the emergence of the American System.
The political home of Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Horace Greeley, and the young Abraham Lincoln, the American Whig Party was involved at every level of American politics—local, state, and federal—in the years before the Civil War, and controlled the White House for eight of the twenty-two years that it existed. Now, in The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, Michael F. Holt gives us the only comprehensive history of the Whigs ever written—a monumental history covering in rich detail the American political landscape from the Age of Jackson to impending disunion.
In Michael Holt's hands, the history of the Whig Party becomes a political history of the United States during the tumultuous Antebellum period. He offers a panoramic account of a time when a welter of parties (Whig, Democratic, Anti-Mason, Know Nothing, Free Soil, Republican) and many extraordinary political statesmen (including Andrew Jackson, John C. Calhoun, William Seward, Daniel Webster, Martin Van Buren, and Henry Clay) struggled to control the national agenda as the U.S. inched towards secession. It was an era when Americans were passionately involved in politics, when local concerns drove national policy, and when momentous political events rocked the country, including the Nullification Controversy, the Panic of 1837, the Annexation of Texas, the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Holt captures all of this as he shows that, amid this contentious political activity, the Whig Party continuously strove to unite North and South, repeatedly trying to find a compromise position. Indeed, the Whig Party emerges as the nation's last great hope to prevent secession and civil war.
The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party is a magisterial work of history, one that has already been hailed by William Gienapp of Harvard as "one of the most important books on nineteenth-century politics ever written."
Great Americans
More from The American System
Why American Prosperity Depends on Economic Sovereignty by Casey J. Wheatland
The Post-Cold War Consensus Is Dead. What Will Take Its Place? by Senator Marco Rubio
An Opportunity Agenda to Replace ‘College for All’ by Bruno V. Manno
Conservatism’s Humanist Road Not Taken by Jeffery Tyler Syck