Financialization and Regulation
Investor Protection, National Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law
As a candidate, Donald Trump promised to renegotiate—or else repudiate—the North American Free Trade Agreement (nafta), which liberalized trade and other economic activity between the United States, Canada, and Mexico. This fall, his administration began formal talks toward redrafting the Clinton-era trade deal, which is nearly a quarter century old. The nafta renegotiations have been…
A Proper Accounting of Glass-Steagall
Over the past two decades in the United States and Europe, elite decision-making has hit an extended rough patch. Fairly or not, a lot of important public policy decisions have turned out horribly for the best and brightest. Whether that involved running a stratospherically levered financial institution hurtling into the financial crisis; or the government…
The Future of Fannie and Freddie
In one of the fateful moments in the financial crisis, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were placed in conservatorship on September 6, 2008, one week before the earth-shattering collapse of Lehman. The panic that followed the Lehman bankruptcy overshadowed the crisis facing the two mortgage giants, but the idea that these two companies could both…
Henry George’s Land Value Tax: An Idea Whose Time Has Come?
A city is an agrarian-urban unit that exists to promote the well-being of individual persons over the course of a whole life and the city itself across multiple generations. Extended human well-being in any city requires that city to occupy its own land well, to protect its adjacent landscape, and to afford citizens opportunities to…
Debt and Taxes
The tax bill signed into law by President Trump in December 2017 brought to light a number of long-running debates in fiscal policy. Most of these debates are familiar to those who follow politics: Republicans expect the tax reforms to incentivize productive behavior, such as investment, that boosts economic growth, while Democrats see it as…
Regulation in Early America
America is in the midst of a potentially transformative moment with regard to regulation. After decades of rapid and steady expansion, the Trump administration promises to deliver an unprecedented retraction of red tape. Candidate Trump called regulation “a hidden tax on American consumers, and a massive lead weight on the American economy,” and he campaigned…
Paradoxes of Political Legitimacy
The “Surprise” of Authoritarian Resilience in China
Ever since the domino collapse of Communist regimes in the Soviet Bloc in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the world has been waiting for China to follow suit. Indeed, the fall of the Chinese Communist government would probably mean the real end of history given the size of the country. Yet nearly thirty years later, history hasn’t ended and the authoritarian government is still going strong. No one can be sure about how long the Chinese regime will last, but it shows no sign of collapsing anytime soon. China observers have changed their research topics from predicting when the country will democratize to understanding why it is resilient to…
Neoliberalism: The Movement That Dare Not Speak Its Name
Reactions against the use of the term neoliberalism have usually taken one of two forms: first, that “neoliberalism” is nothing more than a fevered delusion or a mirage perhaps shared with a few other addled persons, and thus best ignored; and second, that if such a thing does indeed exist, it is far too uneven and inconsistent to count as a serious analytical…
What Is Principled Conservatism?
In the future, to adapt a well-worn line, everyone will call himself a conservative for at least fifteen minutes. George W. Bush called himself a conservative, but so, for a time, did Barack Obama. Donald Trump has claimed to be conservative, as, perhaps more fervently, have his Republican foes. The conservative movement describes itself as…
Reforming Health Care
Health Care Reforms across the World
Most international comparative research focuses on the United States and other large industrialized nations in Europe and North America, and only exceptionally on smaller ones. Yet, outside China and India, the vast majority of the world’s…
The Singapore Solution
We are at a critical time—a unique juncture at which we can rethink our health care policy in a fundamental way. To do so, reform-minded conservatives should abandon or at least heavily qualify their resistance to state involvement in health care. The American government has been significantly involved in the provision and regulation of health…
Reviews: Liberalism and Millennials
Integration from Within
One of the central themes of Tocqueville’s thought is that a political movement, or (at a later stage) a political regime, may be undone by its very success. University of Notre Dame professor Patrick J. Deneen shows himself to be a worthy successor of Tocqueville…
Fascists and Revolutionaries
The first time I remember really fearing for my generation—not the abstract uneasiness aroused by depressing statistics but a gut-level dread, something dark and unnameable lurking just beyond articulation—came in the fall of 2012. Millennials…