America Is Not for Economic Planning or Cowards

Many conservatives are increasingly concerned that the free market economy might not be all it’s cracked up to be. Social conservatives now wonder if their fusing with market-centric libertarians in the 1980s was a Faustian bargain. It’s hardly news that a conservative backlash against fusionism has been underway for some time.

Oren Cass of American Compass is at the prow of this ongoing backlash. He and others in the National Conservatism movement argue that the free market system is failing to produce a truly good life for the majority of Americans. The most frequently mentioned shortcoming is the insufficient number of good jobs for those in the middle class. This makes families too difficult to support, which induces young adults to question the wisdom of getting married.

More broadly, post fusionist conservatives (PFCs) are pushing back against what they consider to be excessive focus on economic performance. “Market fundamentalism” is their shorthand for their belief that fusionism has become too hierarchical because the imperative to support the free market economy now supersedes preserving our culture and institutions. PFCs complain that the free market economy is, therefore, not taking us where we want to go.

There are legitimate reasons for concern. Over the last half century, our free market economy has produced rapid economic growth. Meanwhile, home prices have far outstripped this rise in real income for the working class.  

 [https://www.visualcapitalist.com/median-house-prices-vs-income-us/]

When home prices rise significantly faster than household incomes, a sense of futility inevitably discourages the formation of families. Most conservatives believe this will almost certainly undermine American social, political, and economic stability in the long run. 

It is natural to wonder whether the free market economy results in too much emphasis on materialism and status and too little emphasis on devotion to family, community, and religion. This concern is at least as old as Plato, who warned us in The Republic of the dangers of the pursuit of wealth becoming an end in itself.

In the late 19^th century, progressivism arose from similar concerns caused by the painful transition from a mostly agrarian society to an industrial one. Unfortunately, our small group genes have no reason to be up to the task of addressing the kind of social problems that arise in large and complex free market societies. But progressives believed that government policies and programs, fueled by the latest scientific thinking, were.  

PFCs are now convinced that since it was naïve progressive policy activism that unmoored American society from its cultural and institutional foundation, it will be conservative policy activism that will restore it. But even if it is obvious that progressive policies that harmed important things like the family should be eliminated, it is not obvious that this also calls for profamily policies such as American Compass’s Family Income Supplemental Credit (FISC), a per-child benefit paid to families by the federal government.

The Changing Face of Central Planning

The locution central planning is normally used to contrast with decentralized planning facilitated by market pricing. But it is also an apt description of using government to address social problems in ways that displace solutions that would have otherwise emerged in a decentralized fashion. Less than a century ago, Tocquevillian mediating institutions were still doing most of civil society's work in a decentralized fashion.  

When policies are federal in nature, they do not reflect the diversity of thinking across states and communities. Therefore, they cannot allow us to see how competing policy models perform.

Over the last half century, the increasing proportion of the GDP being mediated by the federal government has undermined the degree to which decentralized planning through market prices mediates resource flows in society. This has led to the explosion of think tanks and non-profits. Many young adults are now employed in normative policy analysis. They design and advocate for policies to address all manner of social problems. They don’t think of themselves as central planners, but that is what they are. We live in the age of central planning policy wonks.

This used to be mostly the province of the left. But now many conservatives are policy wonks, too. They watched traditional conservatives get burned repeatedly by talking too much about the virtues of limited government and the genius of Western Civilization.

So now the savvy ones prefer to focus on policy, which seems more scientific. It has an air of intellectual respectability and practical seriousness. PFCs now view the great struggle between the left and the right as being fought on the battlefield of policy.

 Unfortunately, they do not understand that by engaging in their own brand of policy activism, they come perilously close to smothering the very process that produced the America they wish to preserve.

The Changing Face of Utopianism

In one of the most brilliant observations ever made in the field of political economy, Robert Nozick explained in his seminal book Anarchy, State, and Utopia that if we want to work toward a particular utopian vision for society, we can do that, but we must recognize that we’ll have to give up on freedom. Too many cats going in too many directions makes achieving a utopian plan impossible.

This also means that if we want to have a free society, we’ll have to give up on achieving utopia. For that to work in a democracy, we’ll have to have faith in the free society normally evolving in ways that take us where we want to go even though we cannot presently imagine what that might be.

After 1800, America began enjoying the fruits of exceptional scientific, artistic, industrial, and entrepreneurial achievements. This produced extraordinary excitement and caused great upheaval. America was the land of opportunity, but it could also swallow people and their families whole. Small wonder that over the 1800s, farmers and factory workers increasingly demanded more stability. They wanted someone or something to exert more control over the evolution of American society.  

All humans value control because controlling our environment increases our chances of survival. A preoccupation with being in control is baked in our genetic cake. Competition with rival groups and our extraordinary capacity for imagination inevitably led us to think hard about how to best control our physical and social environments. This is the first step toward utopian thinking. A feature of all utopian plans is that things are not out of control. Our universal desire for control helps explain why utopianism is ubiquitous across human societies.

This is not to say that utopianism is all bad. Utopian communities are an important part of the story of America. Our exceptional level of freedom induced those seeking to create utopian communities to come to America where they could realize their dreams. But having such communities is very different from having a utopian society.

In a free society, people are free to leave utopian communities, which are, therefore, in competition with one another. In a utopian society, such competition does not exist. To remain true to the utopian vision of that society, power is exercised to ensure that everyone’s behavior comports with the utopian plan.

Thinking of America as a collection of utopias will remind many readers of Robert Nozick’s idea of a utopia of utopias. He viewed this as consistent with the constitutional republican form of government, within which most governing occurs at the state level. He also discussed how things might differ across states and how this might produce a sense of the best possible means of governing at the national level.

Societal Evolution

The US Constitution is sometimes thought of as a utopian plan, but it is more accurately viewed as a formula for government that protects the freedom of its citizens. This is why many important features of the Constitution, like the separation of powers inspired by Locke and Montesquieu, are about process, not outcomes. Through the Constitution, the founders provided a blueprint for how government would work to protect liberty, not a plan for what America was to become. Because of this, America is more like a roller coaster that never ends, simultaneously joyful and terrifying, than a perfect and therefore unchanging Garden of Eden.

One is tempted to offer the cheeky observation that this is why America is not for cowards. But history has many lessons that show that those who fear completely unbridled evolution are not fools.

Luckily, the choice between a utopian plan and allowing society to evolve in a completely unbridled fashion is a false one. One does not have to prescribe a specific utopia to preclude horror. “Evolution” is not the same as “completely unbridled evolution.”

In what follows, I will use the word “bridled” not to describe the kind of rule that precisely scripts behavior, saying something like, “You can only paint with this particular formulation of red.” I will use the word “bridled” to describe the kind of rule that precisely forbids specific forms of behavior by saying something like “you cannot paint with this particular formulation of blue.”

The first kind of rule defines a bounded set for behavior going forward, while the second defines an unbounded set. This distinction is very important, and it will become clearer below.

More effectively than any other country, America has resisted this false dichotomy between having a utopian plan or allowing society to evolve in completely unbridled fashion. So how did this work in America? A national consensus emerged about which things clearly crossed lines one should never cross derived from the bedrock ideas, beliefs, principles, and values of Western Civilization. Such lines effectively redacted a number of specific ways forward. It also provides a precise meaning to the claim that while we endorsed the unscripted evolution of society, this was not to be a completely unbridled form of evolution.

As long as such lines weren’t crossed, individuals, civic organizations, firms, and governments were free to march boldly forward into the future, writing their own scripts for their own journeys. In conjunction with the self-directed journeys of others, this produces the incomprehensively complex evolution of society itself. This is a very different thing from the naïve idea of America working toward a specific definition of utopia inspired by the bedrock ideas, beliefs, principles, and values of Western Civilization.

America’s unscripted form of societal evolution is profoundly important when thinking about how truly free societies change over time. Unlike using policy to guide societal change according to a plan, which defines only one way forward, redacting a finite number of ways forward leaves the set of possible ways forward unbounded (subtracting a finite number from infinity leaves infinity). In America, therefore, there were infinite ways to exercise creativity, freedom, and rationality.

At the same time, more than anywhere else, American culture viewed market competition as morally legitimate as long as it is within ethical bounds and the rule of law. This ensured that when experiments proved to be failures, the course would be changed as quickly as possible, but when they proved to be successes they would be built upon. This unleashing of creativity and rationality made possible by allowing change to evolve of its own accord was the key to how America became what it is today.

If we don’t script the course of change, knowing where society will go is impossible. This unpredictability causes anxiety from fear of the unknown. But using government policies to guide the course of social change carries risks, too. One-size-fits-all policies put in place by national governments eliminate competing approaches. This can take societies very far down foolish paths before government policies change course.

In short, America’s problem isn’t that the federal government is a poor central planner or that progressive ideas drive its central planning. Were that the case, it would make sense to simply work to change the direction that central planning is taking us. The real problem is that the federal government’s central planning thwarts the evolutionary process that made America.

The Lesson

PFCs who hope to devise and implement federal economic policies to achieve specific social outcomes should understand that they are engaging in their own kind of utopianism. But America is, above all else, an ongoing experiment in liberty, not an ever perfecting utopia.

The key to building a better life is not getting central plans right and executing them well. The key is for individuals, government, and everything in between to be well prepared to adapt to a world that no one can accurately envision beforehand. America has done this not by suppressing evolution to stick to a plan, but by bridling evolution to protect us from each other and from the society that we are in the never ending process of building for ourselves.

A predetermined vision of the good life is antithetical to America. America never stops discovering itself and Americans never stop discovering what it means to be American and to live a good life. No other society is even close to being like this.

Oren Cass is, however, quite right about the need to recognize the virtues of work and family.

Contrary to traditional economic dogma, work is more than a necessary evil for getting money to buy things. Whether inside or outside the home, people need to work. Our genes predispose us to want to be valued by those around us. Being valued by the groups to which we belong is most meaningful when we create value for those groups by cooperating with others in those groups. As long as it is within obvious ethical constraints, this is what we are doing when we work.

At the same time, the family is valuable because it creates value. The problem has been policies advanced by progressives that have diminished the family’s ability to create value. The means by which families create value have been undermined by foolish economic policies and changes to our culture cultivated by those who are more concerned that children are raised to be useful subjects rather than free-thinking citizens. But the solution to that problem is eliminating such policies, not promulgating new policies to promote the family.

Oren Cass is to be commended. He has boldly directed attention to areas in desperate need of attention. But he should reconsider using government power to promote work and family. Work doesn’t just keep us busy and well-fed. It also makes us feel valuable. But to do so, that value must be genuine. Our free market system naturally induces decision-making to follow courses that produce the most social value and, in so doing, the most meaning.

Progressives have been busy using government policy to push our society in directions that better fulfill their various conceptions of utopia. Abandoning the utopian project requires unwinding those policies. Helping America regain her footing will also require reminding ourselves of the true genius of America. In our system the only whisp of utopianism comes from having an ideal process, not an ideal plan. That process produces outcomes that will amaze us even if, along the way, the ride will often frighten us. America is indeed not for cowards.

Dave Rose is a Senior Research Fellow at AIER, an Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, and a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.