One-sixth of all men of prime working age in America are not just unemployed, but have stopped looking for jobs altogether. Why?… The US stock market continues to set new records. Unemployment continues to go down. The United States is now at or near “full employment.” According to a Bloomberg headline last year, “The Jobless [...]
Trade has always existed, and rich merchants have always been a part of the economic and political picture, but merchants have not always been the rulers, as they are today… In a recent essay for The Imaginative Conservative, I claimed that capitalism had its origins in England. I had expected such a sweeping statement to raise [...]
There were pre-modern times when workers enjoyed broad prosperity and rights, thanks largely to the Church, which has long safeguarded and improved the state of workers and all society… In the quest for a golden age for workers, few would look beyond free markets in modern times. This position is backed up by economists using [...]
How do employee-owned companies fare in the wider economy? How do they compete in the dog-eat-dog world of business?… Many years ago, back in England and long before my conversion, I stumbled upon a book called The Man Who Gave His Company Away. It was a biography of Ernest Bader, a very successful entrepreneur in [...]
In their drive to provide abundance, mass markets suppress variety. Far from enriching a culture, mass markets can impoverish it… One of the benefits of modern mass markets is supposed to be the proliferation of choices. The modern consumer can choose from so many things available on a variety of platforms, be it off or [...]
Conservatives must turn to the Western Tradition in order to abandon their cynicism and regain a proper sense of pessimism, which they can then use to challenge the optimism of the liberal worldview… Why have modern American conservatives gained the reputation of being anti-intellectual? The answer to this question is surely multi-faceted and complex, but [...]
Capitalism offers us outstanding new ways to be good. As a civilization, we should concentrate on taking advantage of these remarkable opportunities rather than entertaining idle suggestions, born of intellectual confusion if not sloth and envy, that the great boon of capitalistic plenty is undesirable or an illusion… Around the year 1885, the American economy [...]
Did the Republicans centralize power in the federal government under Lincoln? No doubt. But perhaps the more important question is: Which policies did Lincoln tolerate in order to achieve his overarching goal? Among those who consider themselves "conservatives" and/or "libertarians," the issue of the role of government in a free society is one of the [...]
To recover our social traditions and the cultural knowledge undergirding them will be the job of generations. But we should work to reduce the harm visited on our society by universities increasingly dedicated to identity politics and to indoctrinating students into that politics… The problem with reforms is that they almost always are thinly-veiled programs [...]
Friedrich Hayek believed that the very institutions of liberalism and republicanism, when misused, can foster the totalitarianism of democracy… The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek (University of Chicago Press, 1944) Professor Friedrich August von Hayek (1899-1992) wrote The Road to Serfdom while a professor at the London School of Economics as the allied war [...]
The romanticized idea of a “gig economy” is something that should worry Americans. It is not the market economy at work. It is, rather, abuse of political power to undermine labor market forces for the benefit of a few very rich and powerful manipulators… Until relatively recently, most people hearing that someone had a “gig” [...]
To discover Honoré de Balzac is to discover a new world, one comparable to that envisioned by Shakespeare. If there is any lesson the collected works of this counter-revolutionary author hold for us, it is that the human comedy is best illuminated not by politics alone, but by the ineffable light of the divine… Love [...]
In addition to the brilliance of his thought, Friedrich Hayek left us the lesson of his example: to search using our imagination, but always to know that what we find we find in humility, thereby recognizing our limits as one life in the long life of man, one mind in the long line of minds… Hayek [...]
Does capitalism—in its need for efficient, low-paying, and universal labor—have a vested interest in family weakness?… Independent Institute Research Fellow Allan C. Carlson is probably America’s top intellectually-serious social conservative thinker, as he has demonstrated over the years as former President of the Howard Center for Family, Religion, and Society and author of books such as The [...]