Tag: free markets

Commentary: Free Markets are Necessary But Not Sufficient

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Family Prayer at Dinner

For most of our lifetimes, classically liberal economics so dominated the Right that nobody wondered if conservatives were abandoning free markets. In recent years, though, a new generation of conservative thinkers—more traditionalist, populist, or nationalist than libertarian—has challenged the utility and even the morality of laissez faire economic policy.

We welcome their questions and critiques, as they have compelled American conservatives to have a long overdue conversation about the market, the family, and the state. But the blunt truth is the movement cannot abandon free markets. The moral and practical case for free enterprise is as necessary today as it was when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher used it to rescue their nations’ economies and win the Cold War.

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Founder of Tea Party Nation Judson Phillips: 15 Years Later, the Tea Party Movement Was an ‘Abject Failure’

Kaitlin Housler
Judson Phillips

Judson Phillips, founder of Tea Party Nation, said 15 years after the Tax Day Tea Party, the movement’s effect on fiscal responsibility, limited government, and free markets in federal politics has been “an abject failure.”

“The Tea Party movement was an abject failure. There’s just no other way to put it. Look at where we are today. When the Tea Party movement started, it was triggered by Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package. Today, that’s a rounding error. The deficit was $10 billion when Obama took over in January 2009. Today, it’s $34 trillion. It’s going up by a trillion dollars every hundred days, and that rate is accelerating,” Phillips explained on Monday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.

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Commentary: With a Lack of Empathy, Disregard for Social Norms and Rules, and Aggressive Tendencies, Is the Democratic Party Sociopathic?

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Parties from principle, especially abstract speculative principle, are known only to modern times . . . what madness, what fury can beget such unhappy and such fatal divisions? . . . This principle, however frivolous it may appear, seems to have been the origin of all religious wars and divisions. As no party, in the present age, can well support itself without a philosophical or speculative system of principles annexed to its political or practical one, we accordingly find, that each of the factions into which this nation is divided has reared up a fabric of the former kind, in order to protect and cover that scheme of actions which it pursues.

That profound sentiment comes right from the lips of the father of the Scottish Enlightenment himself, David Hume, circa 1742. It is chock full of insight for our own times. And the practical reason of that era formed the background context for the American founding, much as Scotland itself was the origin of the modern era by inventing, law, economics, science, technology, medicine and unleashing the power of the market.  

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Commentary: The Absurdity of Keynesian Economics

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John Maynard Keynes

by Roger W. Garrison   The economics of John Maynard Keynes as taught to university sophomores for the last several decades is now nearly defunct in theory but not in practice. Keynes’s 1936 book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, portrayed the market as fundamentally unstable and touted government as the stabilizer. The stability that allegedly lay beyond the market’s reach was to be supplied by the federal government’s macroeconomic policymakers—the president (with guidance from his Council of Economic Advisers), the Congress, and the Federal Reserve. The acceptance in the economics profession of fundamentalist Keynesianism peaked in the 1960s. In recent decades, enthusiasm for Keynes has waxed and waned as proponents have tried to get new ideas from the General Theory or to read their own ideas into it. And although the federal government has long since become a net supplier of macroeconomic instability, the institutions and policy tools that were fashioned to conform to the Keynesian vision have become an integral part of our economic and political environment. A national income accounting system, devised with an eye to Keynesian theory, allowed statisticians to chart the changes in the macroeconomy. Dealing in terms of an economy-wide total, or aggregate, policy…

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