We can, and should, return to our nation’s economic ideals (Samuel Gregg, May 24, 2024, Washington Examiner)
Put simply: Key Founders believed that America’s future was to be one in which dynamic trade, entrepreneurial spiritedness and, commercial audacity would define society — not aristocratic priorities. The “republic” side of the equation was that these market freedoms would be grounded upon institutions and virtues derived from those same classical, religious, and Enlightenment sources: virtues that don’t just grease the wheels of commerce, but which, as Adam Smith wrote, are nothing less than “excellence, something uncommonly great and beautiful.”
Put another way: America isn’t meant to be a facsimile of Western European social democracy. America isn’t meant to be an outpost of Central European traditionalism. America isn’t meant to regard the federal government as its economic savior. America is meant to be something unique, something exceptional.
Today’s America is far removed from the civilization of ideas upon which it is built. Its polar opposites — populism, demagoguery — stalk the land. Our fiscal house is a shambles. Our economy is riddled with regulation, welfarism, bureaucracy, and cronyism. And those who Adam Smith called “men of system” have emerged across the political spectrum to demand even more power to direct that economy from the top-down. From left to right, interventionist hubris is in, and economic humility is out.
But we should not despair. Bad ideas are powerful, but good ideas are difficult to keep down.