Thread by @yhazony

.@jonahnro, in this essay you express surprise over the fact that conservatives are asking hard questions about the free-market purism of the 1990s. You say you want to know "what the hell is going on." | Will the Right Defend Economic Liberty? nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/…

It's seems to me that what's going on is pretty straightforward. The purist free-trade ideals of the 1990s appear to have played a significant role in establishing China as a major threat to the US, even as it seriously damaged America's industrial base.

Most conservatives are empiricists. They are open to experience. And the experience of the last generation *seems to* point to rigid free-market purism as an unrealistic and dangerous policy.

I say "seems to" because I'm not myself ready to draw sweeping conclusions yet. But I know for sure that I'm not interested in hearing yet again the "deductive" arguments from first principles about freedom that you recite from Locke, Mises, Rand, Nozick, and Friedman.

I grew up reading these writers and was mostly sympathetic. But deductive arguments won't help us understand what's gone wrong over the last 25 years. So like many conservatives I know, I'm reading books that emphasize an empirical approach to national economies.

For example, I've been reading Dani Rodrik:
amazon.com/Globalization-…

And Oren Cass:
amazon.com/Once-Future-Wo…

And Ian Fletcher:
amazon.com/Free-Trade-Doe…

And so are a lot of other conservatives. Some of this material is compelling and some of it is not. But what these books have in common is that they try to understand from experience--not deductively--what actually works to strengthen a national economy and what doesn't.

I don't see it as surprising that conservatives want to learn in response to policies that have gone badly wrong. What is surprising to me is that market deductivists such as yourself are not responding to the arguments in these and similar books.

If the economic nationalists are wrong, then why not cite their arguments directly and then challenge them head on? I believe that many conservatives right now are open to hearing powerful, empirically based refutations of the economic-nationalist case. I know I am.

But just reciting dogma drawn from Locke, Mises, Rand, and Nozick is pointless. It just makes it seem as though you're not actually familiar with the historical-empiricist economic critique of market purism that's winning over many conservatives right now. That's what's going on.