Proposing an Alternative Economics

Here's my own contribution to @ISI @ModAgeJournal's Humane Economy symposium. "Good luck spotting the difference in well-being between a society of modest, boxy televisions and one of wall-spanning panel displays." https://t.co/9g1JjZDkzF

— Oren Cass (@oren_cass) July 19, 2021

An Example of Why American Compass Should Be Irrelevant for American "Conservatism"

No discussion of a policy that would acknowledge the reality of collapse and seek to replace industry dependent upon cheap fossil fuel energy with an economy using appropriate technology, in accordance with the human scale, and oriented to the good of the local pol. community.

"It would be a tragic mistake to use opening of the 'Overton window' to craft an industrial policy focused on goals other than restoring U.S. global economic, technological and manufacturing leadership," writes @RobAtkinsonITIF https://t.co/Y6Bptl4ehc

— American Compass (@AmerCompass) November 25, 2020

"Conservatives" Hustling

My appearance last night on Shannon Bream's TV show to discuss the polarization of the country and the future of the major political parties.https://t.co/6U8TnJwY0K

— Robert P. George (@McCormickProf) November 5, 2020

The Trumpian GOP, elites claimed, was doomed to become a regional rump party, whose electoral prospects were tied to a shrinking share of bitter, downscale whites.

But Latinos and a surprising share of young black men disagreed at the ballot box!https://t.co/QKM49aSR3w

— Sohrab Ahmari (@SohrabAhmari) November 5, 2020

An excellent essay by @oren_cass on the future of conservatism. @AmerCompass and @AmericanAffrs are fleshing out an economic agenda that will reshore American jobs and rebuild our communities and families. @wellscking @JuliusKrein @gjpappin https://t.co/LUEsHV9wTA

— Tyler Fagan 🇺🇸 (@tylerafagan) November 5, 2020

What some "conservatives" are really advocating is for the (R)s to fully become the Big Daddy party, or the Alpha Party, while the (D)s continue their transformation into the Big Mommy Party. However, even DJT is a true believer in feminism; he's likely the best the GOP can get. Unless we get a Caesar who actually acts like Caesar to use the power of the national government to protect local autonomy, no GOP Chief Executive will be able to counter the cultural revolution, and feminism in particular, even if he were willing. Professional "conservatives" can continue their advocacy of broadening the base of the (R)s by espousing a civic nationalism combined with economic populism - "Hey (R)s, just listen to this, we know the path to future electoral success"; it's just a form of intellectual AMOG. But what we really need are men exercising leadership at the local level, not necessarily through mass politics, but definitely in their tribe and the broader local community. That is the only way forward as collapse proceeds.

Find your tribe and build it up.

Meanwhile, the GOP remains ineffectual even with the difficulties facing its supposed standard-bearer.

Translation: the GOP wants Trump and, more importantly, the America First mandate gone, and is looking forward to compromising with Biden.

There is no reason to vote Republican. Burn this party to the ground. https://t.co/Oo5IbNDa4g

— Pedro L. Gonzalez (@emeriticus) November 5, 2020

Oren Cass on Ezra Klein's Show

.@oren_cass's on The @ezraklein Show: "Increases in consumption when it's the size of your television probably don't correlate to individual, family, or community well-being, or their ability to pass that health on to their children" @voxdotcom https://t.co/oIxo0ZiV6c

— American Compass (@AmerCompass) July 24, 2020

Corporations

At @AmerCompass, @PatrickDeneen and @AndyPuzder kick off their debate on the nature of corporate obligations to workers, families, communities, and the nation.https://t.co/wqFps8B1uX

— Oren Cass (@oren_cass) July 9, 2020

Edit.
See also:

Deneen's article is one of the best things I have read in a long time. https://t.co/tImfzTxXxJ

— 𝔓𝔢𝔡𝔯𝔬 𝔏. 𝔊𝔬𝔫𝔷𝔞𝔩𝔢𝔷 (@emeriticus) July 10, 2020

The "Market" Is an Impersonal Abstraction

What matters is who dominates and makes rules for the market: the oligarchs, including corporations.

With Remaking One Nation, my new book, now on sale in the US I’ve written for the great @oren_cass and @amercompass. The cause of our crises is ideological liberalism, and conservatives must reject it. https://t.co/Q9DnaOLAGJ

— Nick Timothy (@NJ_Timothy) June 19, 2020

American Compass Launch

Congratulations to @AmerCompass for an impressive launch this evening, including an essay series with bylines from @marcorubio, @SenTomCotton, @wellscking, and morehttps://t.co/zTB85JDk4W

— James Hitchcock (@JamesHitchcock) May 4, 2020

A host of questionable associations -- will this project be anything more than a "make-work" opportunity. Will it be successful in persuading the oligarchy and the Republican Party that factories have to be brought back to the US? Economic nationalism might be the first necessary step, but it's not the ultimate step since even economic nationalism, given resource limits, is unsustainable. But that's not a message the oligarchy would want to hear. Professional pundits, intellectuals, and think tank workers generally should be ignored. Taleb isn't a professional intellectual (except with his writing about risk and statistics) so he has a bit more credibility, as his livelihood doesn't depend upon him giving his opinion.

NRO is advertising its launch? More reason to suspect it already.

Recovering the American Tradition of Economic Policy | https://t.co/XccZ5S92Bi via @wellscking, @JuliusKrein, & @oren_cass pic.twitter.com/lLzYldcSju

— National Review (@NRO) May 6, 2020

Cass was an advisor for Romney, so this endorsement should be no surprise. What has Romney done to return manufacturing to the US?

.@AmerCompass is helping conservatives rethink how we apply our principles to the problems of today. I welcome their contribution to our national policy debates. https://t.co/iHdOxi59zl

— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) May 4, 2020

Congrats to @oren_cass and @wellscking on the formal launch of American Compass! Can't wait to dive in to some of the content on the site. https://t.co/UdwDG0hbj1

— J.D. Vance (@JDVance1) May 5, 2020

This new think tank wants to reform conservatism. Republicans ignore it at their peril, @henryolsenEPPC writes https://t.co/Itfn7uDu0a

— Washington Post Opinions (@PostOpinions) May 5, 2020

Definitely read this and pay attention to what @oren_cass and @AmerCompass are doing. It’s brand new, smart, & important. https://t.co/loJwsXep1x

— Chris Buskirk (@thechrisbuskirk) May 5, 2020

For our launch, we are featuring an essay series on Rebooting the American System, with forewords by @marcorubio and @SenTomCotton. The series makes the comprehensive, conservative case for a return to robust national economic policy. https://t.co/zMR2VLjsyf

— American Compass (@AmerCompass) May 4, 2020

At The Commons, Michael Lind: "From Protecting Essential Workers to Upgrading Essential Industries"

"...the next step is to develop programs for using technology to upgrade essential industries that are low-wage, low-tech and low-productivity..."https://t.co/wDpS84VmNf

— American Compass (@AmerCompass) May 5, 2020

First on The Commons, @PatrickDeneen:

Our economy "is not merely a 'given preference' that arose from purely market forces, but the culmination of... left and right liberal policies designed to shape our identities into creatures above all that consume." https://t.co/fISDVmkmXN

— American Compass (@AmerCompass) May 5, 2020

The Once and Future Worker by Oren Cass

The Once and Future Worker

Oren Cass' New Conservatism

AmConMag: Seven Questions for Oren Cass on the New Conservatism by Arthur Bloom
American Compass, a new organization dedicated to rethinking right-of-center economic orthodoxy, launches tonight.

AB: Let’s make that more concrete. For instance, today it does look like some consensus is developing that we should bring certain vital industries back to the United States, drug manufacturing for instance. If that were to happen, it seems to me we might see a big argument about where to put them, with libertarian conservatives wanting maybe Utah or Arizona, and populists wanting them to go to union states in the rust belt. How should we be thinking about these sorts of problems?

OC: This is a great example. Bringing back industries doesn’t have to mean a government program that picks which states to build factories in. The right way to think about economic policy generally, and in this instance industrial policy, is to step back and recognize that markets generate outcomes in response to the conditions they are operating in. This isn’t about the market being free or unfree. It’s about how we choose to educate, how we choose to regulate, how we choose to invest in research, how we manage trading relationships with countries whose own markets are decidedly unfree, and so on.

So if we want vital supply chains to return to the U.S., we should start by asking why did they leave, and under what different conditions would they have stayed, or be likely to return? And then we should try to create those conditions. Just as a hypothetical example, in the drug manufacturing context, what if we said that drug patents expire sooner if used for manufacturing outside the country? Or what if we said that Medicare pays a higher reimbursement rate for drugs manufactured inside the country? Or created a bank that made zero-interest loans for the construction of new manufacturing facilities of all kinds? Or created a fast-track permitting system that ensured site review and approval within one year and allowed no further legal challenges?

Every one of those ideas has pros and cons, and there are plenty of other approaches too. In fact, next month American Compass is hosting an online symposium where leading experts will each lay out the case for a different approach to encourage reshoring of supply chains. That’s the kind of policy development we need, that existing institutions have really failed to facilitate. But the point is, none of them entails bureaucrats choosing which state to put a factory in. They require policymakers to have a goal in mind—we have to be willing to say, “yes, we care where these things get made” instead of just “wherever the market wants to make them is best.” They require the crafting of policies in pursuit of that goal, which will surely be imperfect in many ways. But there’s no question that policy could help create conditions in which drug manufacturers would be more likely to construct plants in the United States.

Another think-tank to try to influence public policy. How's that going to work out against the oligarchy, especially when time may be running out? Does Cass get the urgency of our current problems? Yes, some form of economic nationalism that would bring manufacturing back to the United States is an important step; can American Compass get something done about that at least? I don't count on American Compass to do anything to further relocalization and anti-fragility.

AB: Of course, there are also a lot of bets against you. When Donald Trump leaves office, either in 2021 or 2025, a lot of people in Washington expect, and perhaps even hope, that conservative politics will return to its previous melange of casino capitalism and permanent war. It isn’t obvious to me that this “national conservative” moment or whatever you want to call it is more than a flash in the pan yet. Tell us why that’s wrong.

OC: Well, what you’ve described is exactly the impetus for American Compass. If you look out across the right-of-center at individuals, you see this incredible intellectual energy and creativity and eagerness to return to first principles and formulate a conservatism that is responsive to the challenges of a modern economy. And then you adjust the setting on your binoculars so that you’re looking at institutions, and it all disappears. Within just about every institution, from Heritage and AEI to the Wall Street Journal and National Review to name your Senate office or agency, you find people excited by the idea that conservatism means more than just tax cuts, and in fact doesn’t really have anything to do with tax cuts. But the institutions themselves are, by and large, creatures of inertia.

I don’t think it should be surprising that even years into this enormous disruption within right-of-center politics, the institutions aren’t especially interested in reform, rather they’re putting their heads down and hoping that Trump too shall pass. And if this were about Trump, maybe that would be right. But it’s not about Trump. I think he has probably accelerated the process, but the fusionist coalition of economic libertarians, social conservatives, and defense hawks that carried the right-of-center through the Cold War is way past its expiration date. And this is something that the people you see leading these efforts now were already talking about long before Trump descended down the Trump Tower escalator.

Go look at what Senator Hawley was writing in National Affairs eight years ago. Or the way Senator Rubio was talking about fighting poverty. Or, for that matter, my essays in National Review, calling for confronting China on trade and challenging conservatives to take inequality seriously. Go back to 2008 and look at what Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat wrote in Grand New Party. The right-of-center was overdue for change, and a lot of the same forces that drove Trump’s success—things like the hollowing out of American industry, the deaths of despair—were also going to catalyze a firm rejection by conservatives of libertarian pieties and a reevaluation of what conservatism should stand for. 

So I understand why the institutions want to go back to how things used to be, and have perhaps even convinced themselves that there’s a chance of that, but in reality there’s not. Their ideas and their coalition just do not hold together any more. The question is what comes next. And to advance that debate, there have to be institutions on the other side of it. And the goal of American Compass is to be such an institution.

Does Cass think that rebuilding the blue-collar middle class will resolve the problem of identity politics? And what does it mean if instruments of the oligarchy are so supportive of an invention of  "new conservatism"? Creating  a controlled opposition in replacing globalism/neoliberalism with a more restricted form of neoliberalism, economic nationalism?