Nobody Talks About Individual Economic Liberty Anymore
Nobody Talks About Individual Economic Liberty Anymore. Republicans used to talk about individual economic liberty with self confidence and assuredness, but no more.
I think one of the big problems we have is that we don’t have a good definition of terms. We hear about these things happening. We see these things happening, but if we ask ourselves what they mean. If we take a look at the election of Mamdani in New York, I’m supposed to be told that the reason that this communist got elected was because of affordability. But I’m not so sure that’s the case. But neither here nor there, I’m not so sure we understand what affordability actually means. And every time I hear Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes and groypers, I’m assuming half the people say, I don’t know what a groyper is, but I’m pretty sure if I take some kind of salve or penicillin, it will go away. The terms, the words have meaning. We got to know what they are in order to be able to understand what we’re dealing with. Noah Rothman joins me right now from National Review. That’s where you find his work, National Review.com. And you have been on these subjects right talking about affordability regarding the Mamdani election. So I want to start with affordability first, because this is the buzzword, and President Trump has been making the argument that the economy is better than people say, we’re just not talking about it enough. So, when you take a look at this affordability conversation, how Zohran Mamdani ran what his Republicans are now saying, what do you take from them?
Well, I kind of share your skepticism that the affordability argument is what won the election from Mamdani. He managed their majority of the vote in New York City, in which Democratic nominees for New York City may are typically romp. But that said, I think it would be folly to ignore, especially for Republicans conservatives, to ignore the salience of the affordability issue and the apparent popularity of his solutions to them, which amount to top-down government style entitlement programs an unfunded liabilities that we’re already drowning in.
But I wrote about this yesterday. There’s some YouGov polling, for example, that shows majorities even two thirds of voters support things like rent freezes and free childcare whatever that means, and government owned grocery stores and raising the minimum wage to thirty dollars an hour, as though these will have no macroeconomic consequences. The conservative argument. The Republican argument has typically been that whenever you hear this sort of stuff from socialists, they’re arguing for more vociferous efforts to solve the problems they created and using the same solutions that created the problems in the first place. And what we’re hearing, I don’t think what we’re hearing counter your impression that what we’re hearing from Donald Trump is an especially adroit political argument against the very salient fact that the cost of living in the United States is too high, and it has been growing over the course of Donald Trump’s presidency, his second term presidency, we’ve seen upwards of three, four, five six percent increases in the cost of food, home and renters, insurance, bedding, furniture, you name it. And the President’s response to this is to say, I don’t want to hear about affordability, he tells reporters, He tells Laura Ingraham, you know, it’s a con job by Democrats, the notion that the cost of living is too high. What he should be arguing, and what conservatives and Republicans have been arguing typically in the pre Trump era, is that when cost of living increase increases to an unsustainable level, it is exacerbated by efforts to remove from the economy your money, taking your income out of your pocket and shoveling it into really ineffective and inefficient government programs that do not deliver the services they’re supposed to deliver, and limit the macroeconomic benefit that we would have if you were allowed to patronize the firms that you wanted to, not because they’re the best connected, but because they’re the most efficient, effective, and maximize your happiness. That process, in the aggregate is what we call free market economics, and nobody talks about individual economic liberty anymore. Nobody talks about your ability to navigate your own environment to see the people in services that you think are doing the best and signal to the broader market. But because they’re doing the best, others in the competition in that space have to either change what they’re doing or fold that process of creative destruction is what generates economic growth and prosperity and wealth. And it’s the sort of thing that Republicans used to talk about with self-confidence and assuredness because those principles are time tested and true. They no longer do. But right now, what they’re offering is something like socialism light.
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