supply-side-economics

Making Sense of the New American Right

Keeping track of the Jacksonians, Reformicons, Paleos, and Post-liberals.

I like to start my classes on conservative intellectual history by distinguishing between three groups. There is the Republican party, with its millions of adherents and spectrum of opinion from very conservative, somewhat conservative, moderate, and yes, liberal. There is the conservative movement, the constellation of single-issue nonprofits that sprung up in the 1970s —

gun rights,

pro-life,

taxpayer,

right to work

— and continue to influence elected officials. Finally, there is the conservative intellectual movement: writers, scholars, and wonks whose journalistic and political work deals mainly with ideas and, if we’re lucky, their translation into public policy.

It’s a common mistake to conflate these groups. The Republican party is a vast coalition that both predates and possibly will post-date the conservative movement. That movement has had mixed success in moving the party to the right, partly because of cynicism and corruption but also because politicians must, at the end of the day, take into account the shifting and often contradictory views of their constituents. The conservative intellectual movement exercises the least power of all. You could fit its members into a convention hall or, more likely, a cruise ship.

Ideas matter. But the relation of ideas to political action is difficult to measure and often haphazard. The line between shaping a politician’s rhetoric and decisions and merely reflecting them is awfully fuzzy. The conservative intellectual movement, in addition to generating excellent writing, has had seven real-world applications since its formation after the Second World War:

originalism and

supply side economics in the 1970s;

welfare reform and

crime policy in the 1980s and ’90s;

educational choice and reform over the last two decades;

James Burnham’s anti-Communist strategies that found expression in the Reagan Doctrine; and the

counterinsurgency plan known as the “surge” that prevented the defeat of American forces in the second Iraq war.

There have been other successes, for sure, but also plenty of setbacks. What’s important to remember is that liberals as well as Republicans, conservative activists, and conservative intellectuals contested every single one of these policies.

The story goes that, for many years, American conservatives adhered to a consensus known as “fusionism.” Economic and social conservatives put aside their differences. Freedom, they decided, was necessary for the exercise of virtue. The struggle against and ultimate defeat of the Soviet Union was more important than domestic politics or intramural disagreements. Conservative intellectuals eager to privilege either freedom or virtue like to attack this consensus, which they often describe as “zombie Reaganism.” The truth is that the strength of fusionism always has been exaggerated. The conservative intellectual movement has been and continues to be fractious, contentious, combustible, and less of a force than most assume.

Episodes of division and strife are far more common than moments of unity and peace. The more you study the history of American conservatism, the less willing you are to describe it in monolithic terms. There isn’t one American right, there are multitudes, every one of them competing for the attention of politicians and policymakers. The most prominent and politically salient varieties, as expressed in

William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review,

Irving Kristol’s Public Interest,

Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary, and

William Kristol’s Weekly Standard,

have weakened or disappeared altogether. One of the reasons the intra-conservative argument has become so personal and acrimonious is that nothing has replaced them.

Indeed, the situation today is awfully similar to that which confronted conservatives in the 1970s. Then, the Buckley consensus had to find a modus vivendi with neoconservatives as well as with the Catholic integralists around Triumph magazine, against the background of a populist revolt that called out failing elites while relying on racial and ethnic appeals that sometimes crossed the border of decency.

The campaign and election of Donald Trump complicated this already cloudy picture. The debate over Trump’s character and fitness for office opened, or poured salt on, wounds that have not and will not heal. Moreover, the varying opinions of Donald Trump the person became hard to disentangle from divergent assessments of his program. Fights over his rhetoric and behavior morphed into struggles over his economic and foreign policies, then changed back again. It became all too easy to score points by associating one’s opponents with either Trump’s most radical supporters or his most vociferous detractors.

Trump’s victory seemed to favor one side over the other. But such vindication may turn out to be just as much a mirage as the “zombie Reaganism” straw man. It does Trump supporters no favors to ignore the facts: The president did not win a majority, captured a smaller percentage of the popular vote than Mitt Romney, and took the Electoral College thanks to 77,000 votes spread over three states. It is also the case that to date, President Trump has been most successful when he has adhered to the traditional Republican program of

tax cuts,

defense spending, and

judicial appointments.

The rise of Donald Trump, Brexit, and nation-state populism throughout the world certainly suggest that something has changed in global politics. American conservatism ought to investigate, recognize, and assimilate the empirical reality before it. The trouble is that no one has concluded definitively what that reality is.

Not for lack of trying. Beginning in 2016, intellectuals who favored Trump have been searching for a new touchstone for conservative thought and politics. These writers are often described as populists, but that label is hard to define. Broadly speaking, they have adopted the banner of nationalism. They believe the nation-state is the core unit of geopolitics and that national sovereignty and independence are more important than global flows of capital, labor, and commodities. They are all, in different ways, reacting to perceived failures, whether of Buckley conservatism, George W. Bush’s presidency, or the inability of the conservative movement to stop same-sex marriage and the growth of the administrative state. And they have turned away from libertarian arguments and economistic thinking. Not everything, these thinkers believe, can be reduced to gross domestic product.

This emphasis on the nation as not only an economic but a political entity is apparent in the title of the “National Conservatism” conference to be held by the Edmund Burke Foundation next month in Washington, D.C. It is best articulated in Christopher DeMuth’s essay in the Winter 2019 Claremont Review of Books, “Trumpism, Nationalism, and Conservatism.” The Claremont Institute and its affiliated publications, including the new website The American Mind, have taken the lead in attempting to develop a pro-Trump conservatism in line with the principles of the American Founding.

Like populism, however, nationalism is a capacious idea that encompasses many subsets of opinion. Claremont may be the main site of nationalist conservatism, but it is not alone. Within the nationalist camp, broadly defined, are four schools of thought. Each is associated with a young Republican senator. The lines between these persuasions blur — some of the senators I name could fit into different categories, and others might not accept the labels I am about to bestow on them — but the conservative terrain has become so difficult to navigate that it’s useful to have a map. Let me take you through this new territory.

The Jacksonians

Some conservatives — myself included — see Donald Trump through the lens of Jacksonian politics. They look to Walter Russell Mead’s landmark essay in the Winter 1999 / 2000 National Interest, “The Jacksonian Tradition in American Foreign Policy,” as not only a description of the swing vote that brought us Trump, but also as a possible guide to incorporating populism and conservatism.

The Jacksonians, Mead said, are

individualist,

suspicious of federal power,

distrustful of foreign entanglement,

opposed to taxation but supportive of government spending on the middle class,

devoted to the Second Amendment,

desire recognition,

valorize military service, and

believe in the hero who shapes his own destiny.

Jacksonians are anti-monopolistic.

They oppose special privileges and offices.
“There are no necessary evils in government,” Jackson wrote in his veto message in 1832. “Its evils exist only in its abuses.”

This is a deep strain in American culture and politics. Jacksonians are neither partisans nor ideologues. The sentiments they express are older than postwar conservatism and in some ways more intrinsically American. (They do not look toward Burke or Hayek or Strauss, for example.) The Jacksonians have been behind populist rebellions since the Founding. They are part of a tradition, for good and ill, that runs through

William Jennings Bryan,

Huey Long,

Joseph McCarthy,

George Wallace,

Ronald Reagan,

Pat Buchanan,

Ross Perot,

Jim Webb,

Sarah Palin,

the Tea Party, and

Donald Trump.

The Jacksonians believe in what their forebears called “The Democracy.” They are the people who remind us that America is not ruled from above but driven from below. Irving Kristol captured some of Jacksonianism’s contradictions when he described the movement as “an upsurge of revolt against the moneyed interests, an upsurge led by real estate speculators, investors, and mercantile adventurers, which spoke as the voice of the People while never getting much more than half the vote, and which gave a sharp momentum to the development of capitalism, urbanism, and industrialism while celebrating the glories of the backwoodsman.”

The Jacksonians have extended their conception of the in-group to include Americans of every ethnicity and race. The somewhat slippery distinction they make is between American and foreigner. I say slippery because sometimes it is hard to tell when Jacksonians decide to accept a legal immigrant as fully American. Jacksonians emphasize borders. They are happy to see the government direct benefits to the middle class. They don’t want to reform entitlements. They are willing to accept short-term sacrifice if it ends up benefiting the people. They are skeptical of preemptive war, but if a conflict arises, they want to finish the job quickly and ferociously. “The very faults of the persuasion as a guide to prudent statesmanship,” wrote historian Marvin Meyers, “may have been its strength as a call to justice. For a society inevitably committed to maximizing economic gains, this persuasion in its various forms has been the great effective force provoking men to ask what their nation ought to be.”

The Jacksonian in the Senate is Tom Cotton. He’s taken the lead on conservative immigration reform. A supporter of the president, he is also a national security hawk. He was perfectly Jacksonian when he said a conflict with Iran, should it erupt, would be swiftly concluded due to overwhelming American force. A native of rural Arkansas and an Army veteran, his new book Sacred Duty describes the Jacksonian code of honor and sacrifice. If you want to know where this key swing vote in American politics is headed, watch Cotton.

The Reformocons

Reform conservatism began toward the end of George W. Bush’s presidency, with the publication of Yuval Levin’s “Putting Parents First” in The Weekly Standard in 2006 and of Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam’s Grand New Party in 2008. In 2009, Levin founded National Affairs, a quarterly devoted to serious examinations of public policy and political philosophy. Its aim is to nudge the Republican party to adapt to changing social and economic conditions.

In 2014, working with the YG Network and with National Review senior editor Ramesh Ponnuru, Levin edited “Room to Grow: Conservative Reforms for a Limited Government and a Thriving Middle Class.” The report was the occasion for a lot of publicity, including a Sam Tanenhaus article in the New York Times Magazine asking, “Can the GOP Be a Party of Ideas?”

Trump both hindered and aided reform conservatism. He dealt it a setback not only because reform conservatives opposed him in the primary (and many in the general) and he knows how to keep a grudge. He also defeated the reform conservatives’ most promising champion, Marco Rubio. And he did it in part by emphasizing two issues, trade and immigration, that were missing from “Room to Grow.”

But that is not the end of the story. Trump also obliquely aided reform by smashing the status quo and proving the Douthat and Salam thesis that support from whites without college degrees is essential to Republican victory. After the election, Rubio kept advocating for democracy and human rights, but jettisoned supply side orthodoxy. He fought successfully to expand the child tax credit in the 2017 tax bill. He proposed a paid parental leave policy and criticized stock buybacks. In 2018 he delivered a speech arguing for a “new nationalism” based on “an economy built on the dignity of work,” the family as “the most central institution in society,” “working together in community,” and “the belief that every human being is endowed by God with an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Rubio has cited Oren Cass’s The Once and Future Worker (2018). It’s worth noting that Cass is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, where Salam recently became president. Meanwhile, Levin’s follow-up to his Fractured Republic (2016) is a call for rebuilding institutions crucial to the formation of character. Reform conservatism, in other words, is far from being a spent force.

The Paleos

Where the paleoconservatives distinguish themselves from the other camps is foreign policy. The paleos are noninterventionists who, all things being equal, would prefer that America radically reduce her overseas commitments. Though it’s probably not how he’d describe himself, the foremost paleo is Tucker Carlson, who offers a mix of traditional social values, suspicion of globalization, and noninterventionism every weekday on cable television.

Carlson touched off an important debate with his January 3 opening monologue on markets. “Culture and economics are inseparably intertwined,” Carlson said. “Certain economic systems allow families to thrive. Thriving families make market economies possible. You can’t separate the two.”

Carlson’s indictment of America’s “ruling class” and “the ugliest parts of our financial system” was remarkable for several reasons. First, he delivered it on a network whose opinion programs normally laud American capitalism and free enterprise. Second, the speech was wide-ranging, criticizing everyone from Mitt Romney to Sheryl Sandberg to parents who let their kids smoke weed. Third, Carlson offered a theory of the case. Social decline, he said, is related to the loss of manufacturing jobs. It happened in the inner cities. Now it’s happening in the Rust Belt and in rural America. When jobs disappear and low-skilled male wages decline, family formation breaks down.

While Carlson noted in passing that wage income is taxed at a higher rate than investment income, he did not make any specific proposals. “I’m not a policy guy, I’m a talk show host, but I sincerely believe that no problem is solved unless you have a clear image in your mind of what you want the result to be,” he told Michael Brendan Dougherty at the National Review Institute conference in March. Earlier this month, he welcomed John Burtka, the chairman of the paleo journal The American Conservative (TAC), on to his program. Burtka argued for treating the social media giants as monopolies. Carlson loved it.

In a separate piece for TAC, Burtka offered a defense of “economic nationalism.” He advocated a national industrial strategy, without providing many details, though presumably incorporating some mixture of tariffs and government-directed investment. This reluctance toward nuts-and-bolts legislative proposals is widespread. “We still need to figure out a lot of the details for how this vision of conservative politics, a pro-family, pro-worker, pro-American nation, conservatism actually looks in practice,” J. D. Vance told a recent TAC gala. We’re waiting!

Paleos have brought renewed attention to the condition of American communities. Tim Carney of the American Enterprise Institute and Washington Examiner devotes his new book, Alienated America, to the frayed bonds that barely connect working-class Americans to each other. Like Carlson, Mike Lee might not accept the paleo label, but he best represents this mixture of traditionalism, communitarianism, and nonintervention in the U.S. Senate. His social capital project is a major effort to assess the strengths and vulnerabilities of American society. He’s worked with Rubio on parental leave, though it should be said that unlike paleos he opposes Trump’s trade policies. Paleos might not have exact answers when it comes to domestic policy, but they are certain American foreign policy should be restrained, within constitutional bounds, and prioritize diplomacy over military force.

The Post-liberals

Here is a group that I did not see coming. The Trump era has coincided with the formation of a coterie of writers who say that liberal modernity has become (or perhaps always was) inimical to human flourishing. One way to tell if you are reading a post-liberal is to see what they say about John Locke. If Locke is treated as an important and positive influence on the American founding, then you are dealing with just another American conservative. If Locke is identified as the font of the trans movement and same-sex marriage, then you may have encountered a post-liberal.

The post-liberals say that freedom has become a destructive end-in-itself. Economic freedom has brought about a global system of trade and finance that has outsourced jobs, shifted resources to the metropolitan coasts, and obscured its self-seeking under the veneer of social justice. Personal freedom has ended up in the mainstreaming of pornography, alcohol, drug, and gambling addiction, abortion, single-parent families, and the repression of orthodox religious practice and conscience. “When an ideological liberalism seeks to dictate our foreign policy and dominate our religious and charitable institutions, tyranny is the result, at home and abroad,” wrote the signatories to “Against the Dead Consensus,” a post-liberal manifesto of sorts published in First Things in March.

“The ambition of neoliberalism,” wrote the editor of First Things in the spring of 2017, “is to weaken and eventually dissolve the strong elements of traditional society that impede the free flow of commerce (the focus of nineteenth-century liberalism), as well as identity and desire (the focus of postmodern liberalism). This may work well for the global elite, but ordinary people increasingly doubt it works for them.” The result, he said, has been populist calls for the “strong gods” of familial, national, and religious authority.

The post-liberals are mainly but not exclusively traditionalist Catholics. Their most prominent spokesman is Patrick J. Deneen, whose Why Liberalism Failed (2018) was recommended by that ultimate progressive, Barack Obama. Israeli philosopher Yoram Hazony’s Virtue of Nationalism(2018) is another important entry in the post-liberal canon. Hazony has contributed essays to both First Things (“Conservative Democracy”) and American Affairs (“What Is Conservatism?”) making the case for conservatism without Locke, Jefferson, and Paine.

The post-liberals have put forward two contradictory political strategies. The first, advanced by Rod Dreher, who is Eastern Orthodox, is the Benedict Option of turning away from the secular world and shielding, as best you can, spiritual life. The second, as put by Sohrab Ahmari also in First Things, is “to use these values [of civility and decency] to enforce our order and our orthodoxy, not pretend that they could ever be neutral.”

Another post-liberal, Gladden Pappin of American Affairs, says,

Rather than asking the question, ‘What should conservatives/progressives do?’ considerable advances can be made through certain purely practical considerations: ‘How can the integrity of the national political community be assured?’ ‘How can commercial activity and technological development continue to be turned toward the common good, and toward our own strategic advantage?’ ‘What can we do with the reins of power, that is, the state, to ensure the common good of our citizens?’

The closest the post-liberals have to a spokesman in the Senate is freshman Josh Hawley, who attends an evangelical Presbyterian church. Not six months into his term, Hawley has already established himself as a social conservative unafraid of government power. He has picked fights with the conservative legal establishment by criticizing two of President Trump’s judicial appointments. He has identified Silicon Valley as a threat to traditional values and proposed legislation to begin to rein in the tech industry. And in a little noticed commencement address to King’s College, he inveighed against the fact that

For decades now our politics and culture have been dominated by a particular philosophy of freedom. It is a philosophy of liberation from family and tradition; of escape from God and community; a philosophy of self-creation and unrestricted, unfettered free choice.

This “Pelagian vision” — Pelagius was a monk condemned by the Church fathers as a heretic – “celebrates the individual,” Hawley went on. But “it leads to hierarchy. Though it preaches merit, it produces elitism. Though it proclaims liberty, it destroys the life that makes liberty possible. Replacing it and repairing the profound harm it has caused is one of the great challenges of our day.”

The post-liberals say that the distinction between state and society is illusory. They argue that, even as conservatives defended the independence of civil society from state power, the left took over Hollywood, the academy, the media, and the courts. What the post-liberals seem to call for is the use of government to recapture society from the left. How precisely they intend to accomplish this has been left undefined. (Though the levy on large university endowments included in the 2017 tax bill is a start.)

Another question is whether the post-liberal project is sustainable in the first place. The post-liberals, like other nationalists, may have over-interpreted the results of the 2016 election. Trump is many things, but it is safe to say that he is not an integralist. Prominent online and in my Twitter feed, the post-liberals might also misjudge their overall numbers. Before they recapture the state, much less re-moralize a nation of 300 million and hundreds of sects and denominations, they must first convince their co-religionists.

Appeals to the common good are rhetorically powerful, but they often run up against the shoals of America’s constitutional structure and overwhelming emphasis on individual rights. That is one potential reason the post-liberals seem more interested in European philosophy and politics. It also could be why many of them are eager to abandon the term “conservatism.”

Which might be for the best. Fusionism’s critics say that it was historically contingent on the unique situation of the Cold War. But if you read the best expression of “fusionist” conservatism, the Sharon Statement of 1960, you see that its ideas of freedom and constitutionalism are deeply embedded in American intellectual traditions. “There is only one American political tradition,” wrote Irving Kristol, “and every political movement must obtain its sanction, invoking the same memories, the same names, the same archetypal images, even the very same quotations.” A conservatism that does not incorporate the ideas of freedom and civil and religious liberty that imprinted America at its birth not only would be unrecognizable to William F. Buckley, Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan, Americans themselves would find it alien and unappealing. And rightly so.

Ignorance Abounds About Supply-Side Economics

The movement’s main founder, Robert A. Mundell, wrote prolifically on the subject avant la lettre in top economics journals in the 1960s and 1970s. Mundell’s protégé at the University of Chicago, Arthur B. Laffer, did the same, then branched out to a consulting business where he put out some 50 papers per year that dilated on supply-side economics.

Archives? The Hoover Institution in California has hundreds of boxes of papers of the first journalistic supply-siders, Wall Street Journal editor Robert L. Bartley and his assistant Jude Wanniski. As for supply-side economics’ Congressional lodestar, Jack Kemp, there are more boxes on end at the Library of Congress.

I looked and looked at all this stuff, and a definition emerged clear as the sky. This was that supply-side economics favored a particular way of solving the kind of recessions we have been prone to since the founding of the Federal Reserve and the income tax, both in the year 1913. This is to stabilize the dollar and cut taxes.

This definition—stabilize money and cut taxes—was repeated so often, so uniformly, and over so much time by the original supply-siders that it became possible to identify a canonical statement, the Ur-document, the quintessential rendering of the supply-siders as to their philosophy.

This is it, from a paper Mundell wrote in 1971: “The correct policy mix is based on fiscal ease to get more production out of the economy, in combination with monetary restraint….The increased momentum of the economy provided by…a tax cut will cause a sufficient demand for credit to permit real monetary expansion at higher interest rates.”

As for details, to a one the supply-siders favored tax cuts of the marginal and capital-gains variety, and monetary stability in the form of a gold-anchored dollar.

Readers of this column can be forgiven for asking if I haven’t been repeating myself. Haven’t I availed of the above Mundell quotation in recent columns, keen to point out that supply-side economics is a policy mix of two things, stable money and marginal tax cuts?

Indeed I am repeating myself—for an all too appropriate reason.

Last week, for the umpteenth time, a major, credentialed economist wrote an article, one read far and wide, contending that supply-side economics has to do exclusively with tax cuts. There is probably no bigger economics blogger than Mark Thoma, and marginal-tax-cuts-equal-supply-side-economics is what he made his supposition in “Why the GOP Won’t Admit Supply-Side Econ Has Failed.”

You can click on the link to see Thoma go about all this, but the essential thing is as follows. There is no credible historical evidence ever produced by a scholar that has served to delink monetary issues from the core doctrine of supply-side economics. In fact, all primary evidence ever produced as to the central claims of supply-side economics has confirmed that supply-siders insisted that monetary restraint and progress toward a gold standard is as crucial as any kind of tax policy. To say otherwise is to speak in the absence of evidence.

But in current circumstances, you see how it can be so…tempting…to say that supply-side economics was only ever a policy of tax cuts. This is because the George W. Bush tax cuts—those things on the chopping block in this fiscal cliff drama—supervised a mere boomlet in the mid-2000s, and then the Great Recession after 2008. If you trash W.’s policy by calling it supply-side, then by association you can discredit the Reagan success too. Conservative economic policy: a comprehensive failure in its decades-long response to Keynes!

Go back to the record ten years ago and see if the supply-siders were unconcerned about monetary issues, as the Bush-era Fed made money as loose as it was in the 1970s. See if Robert Mundell quit on the idea of a unitary dollar-euro exchange rate and an anchor akin to gold. See if the second generation of supply-siders, the next round of journalists and Congressmen (such as Kemp trainee Rep. Paul Ryan) didn’t call out the money-printing 2000s as making the W. tax cuts nothing but a “small, ambiguous reprise” of the great tradition, as I would put it in the book, Econoclasts, which came out in 2009.

But “everyone knows” that supply-side economics’ main, if not exclusive concern was with tax cuts, and that’s good enough for Mark Thoma. Cui bono from burying the true history of the objectives of supply-side economics? Fiscal-cliff corner-cutters and their enablers, but certainly not sincere political economists trying to master our recent history for the purpose of getting our once-great economy back in good repair.

Reagan’s Supply-Side Warriors Blaze a Comeback Under Trump

Like perms, Members Only jackets and Duran Duran, their economic theories were big in the go-go 1980s. Now they’re back.

On a Tuesday evening earlier this month, several dozen Washingtonians gathered in a ballroom at the Trump International Hotel, ostensibly to enjoy an open bar and watch a new PBS documentary about money. In reality, the event also served as a rally for a small clique whose fierce devotion to supply-side economics made them influential figures in the 1980s, and has won them renewed clout and access under President Donald Trump.

Invitations listed the hosts as Stephen Moore, a habitué of conservative think tanks, and Art Laffer, the supply-side economist, who did not end up attending. Larry Kudlow, the director of Trump’s National Economic Council and one of the president’s closest advisers, showed up in a pinstriped suit. “Larry Kudlow is my best friend in the world,” gushed Moore in opening remarks, noting that Laffer and Kudlow served as co-best men at his wedding to his second wife, Anne, who sat in the front row. Taking the floor next, Kudlow gazed out at the room and offered a shoutout to Adele Malpass, a RealClearPolitics reporter and former chairwoman of the Manhattan Republican Party, whose husband, David, has just taken over as president of the World Bank on Trump’s say-so.

Those decades of free-market machinations are now paying off, as a quintet of Ronald Reagan administration alumni — Kudlow, Laffer, Forbes, Moore and David Malpass—united by undying affection for each other and for laissez-faire economics, have the run of Washington once more. Members of the tight-knit group have shaped Trump’s signature tax cut, helped install each other in posts with vast influence over the global economy, and are working to channel Trump’s mercantilist instincts into pro-trade policies. Blasted by their critics as charlatans and lauded by their acolytes as tireless champions of prosperity, there’s no denying that the quintet has had an enduring impact on decades of economic policy.

Most recently, in late March, and partly at Kudlow’s urging, Trump announced his intention to nominate Moore to one of two open seats on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, the body that sets the tempo of the global financial system.

The announcement prompted protests from economists across the ideological spectrum—George W. Bush’s top economist, Harvard’s Gregory Mankiw, said Moore lacked the “intellectual gravitas” for the job—who warned that appointing Moore, a think-tanker with no Ph.D., would politicize the Fed. Soon, it emerged that Moore had made a mistake on a 2014 tax return that led the IRS to place a disputed $75,000 lien against him, and CNN dug up scathing comments Moore had made about Trump during the presidential primary.

Whether Moore can survive the scrutiny and pass muster with the Senate will be a test of the supply-siders’ renewed cachet. They believe they can pull it off.

“I understand there are imperfections,” Kudlow told POLITICO. “I think it can be worked out.”

Moore described some of his recent conversations with Trump, which often turn to Fed Chairman Jerome Powell.

“I think his criticism of Powell is excessive and could be counterproductive,” Moore said, because it could actually provoke Powell to prove his independence by defying Trump’s wishes. Generally speaking, Trump wants Powell to keep interest rates low to decrease the chances of any economic slump before the president faces voters again next November.

Moore also recounted how he and Laffer, who began advising Trump in 2016, helped place Kudlow in his current posting.

Roughly a year into Trump’s term, as Trump’s first NEC director, Gary Cohn, prepared to depart the post, the duo sprang into action. Moore said that during this period, whenever he and Laffer engaged in their semiregular consultations with Trump, they would have some version of the following exchange:

“You know, Mr. President, you’re missing one thing,” Laffer or Moore would say.

“What is that?” Trump would ask.

“Larry Kudlow,” Laffer or Moore would tell him.

“We just drilled the message over and over,” Moore recalled. “‘Larry, Larry, Larry, Larry.’”

At the same time, Moore said, the pair worked the press. “We made a concerted effort to make it seem like a fait accompli that Larry would get the job.”

That included knifing a few of Kudlow’s rivals. “We had a campaign to say ‘this person’s completely unqualified,’” he said, though he declined to name their targets. “I think we took them down,” he added.

“It proves that in Washington, appearance is reality, sometimes,” Moore continued. “So that was highly effective.”

During that same period, following the 1974 midterms, Laffer first drewhis famous Laffer Curve — a representation of the idea that at a certain level of taxation, lowering taxes would theoretically spur enough growth that government revenue would actually rise—at a meeting near the White House with Wanniski, Dick Cheney, then an aide to President Gerald Ford, and Grace-Marie Arnett, another free marketeer active in Republican politics.

Reagan would go on to fully embrace supply-side theory, a shift from the party’s traditional emphasis on fiscal discipline, appointing Laffer to his Economic Policy Advisory Board.

Then as now, supply-side economics was criticized for favoring the rich and derided by critics as unrealistic “Voodoo Economics.” The critics got an early boost from a 1981 Atlantic cover story in which Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, aired his doubts that this novel theory was working in practice.

The piece ruined Stockman’s standing with Reagan—Laffer calls him “the traitor of all traitors”—but Stockman’s young aide, Kudlow, now 71, remained a loyal supply-sider and struck up a relationship with Laffer.

Reagan would go on to appoint Forbes as the head of the Board of International Broadcasting, which oversaw Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe, and Moore worked as the research director for Reagan’s privatization commission. Malpass, meanwhile, worked in Reagan’s Treasury department. Representatives for Forbes and Malpass said they were not available for interviews.

In the 1988 presidential primary, another supply-sider, the late New York congressman Jack Kemp, lost out to George H.W. Bush, curtailing the crew’s influence within the party.

But they stuck together. Moore, now 59, first became close with Laffer and Kudlow in 1991, after he recruited them to participate in an event celebrating the 10-year anniversary of Reagan’s first tax cuts for the libertarian Cato Institute.

In 1993, Kudlow and Forbes teamed up to craft a tax cut plan for New Jersey gubernatorial candidate Christine Todd Whitman, who went on to unseat incumbent Democrat James Florio.

Meanwhile, Kudlow hired Malpass to work for him at Bear Stearns, where he had been flying high as the investment bank’s chief economist.

The next year, Kudlow crashed to earth—he left the bank and entered rehab for alcohol and cocaine addiction. Laffer stuck by Kudlow, hiring the investment banker to work for his consulting firm in California when he emerged.

In 1996, Forbes, backed by Moore, entered the Republican primary and lost out to Bob Dole, but the group takes credit for getting Kemp picked for the bottom half of that year’s ticket, which lost to incumbent Bill Clinton.

At some point, Forbes, Kudlow, Moore and Laffer became inseparable in the eyes of their peers.

“You could call them the Four Musketeers of the supply-side movement,” said Avik Roy, an editor at Forbes involved in some of the group’s advocacy. Or you could call them the “the supply-side Beatles,” as Moore does—or “the four amigos,” as anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist does. “There’s a fourness to them,” observed Jack Fowler, vice president of the conservative National Review.

Malpass, 63, who has maintained a lower public profile over the years, qualifies as something of a fifth musketeer.

“They’re a little rat pack. There’s no doubt about that,” said one New York financial world player who keeps in touch with the group. “They’re all pretty straight guys. They’re not criminals. They don’t do anything weird, outwardly. You know what I’m saying? They like talking about supply-side economics. They get hard talking about tax cuts.”

Whatever you call them, there’s no denying their impact on American society. The group has argued that the best way to manage the economy is to make life easier for the producers of goods and services—by limiting taxes and regulations—so that producers are incentivized to supply more of these goods and services to the market, and that taming deficits is less important than spurring growth.

Before Reagan took office and empowered the supply-siders, the top marginal federal income tax rate in the U.S. had remained somewhere north of 60 percent since the Great Depression. Under their influence, Reagan briefly pushed the top rate below 30 percent, and it has not returned to anything near the pre-Reagan status quo since then.

Before Reagan, the national debt-to-GDP ratio had been declining since World War II, thanks in large part to the old Republican school of fiscal discipline. Since Reagan, the debt ratio has been climbing back toward its wartime peak. Trade and migration barriers have also come down. American society has become both wealthier in real GPD terms and more unequal. These trends have persisted thanks to a post-Cold War, bipartisan free market consensus, and to the bipartisan Keynesian response to the last financial crisis—but it was the supply-siders who really got the party started.

And they have not stopped partying since. Members of the group have continued to actively socialize with each other over the decades, with some spending New Year’s eves together. At one birthday party for Laffer in New York, they presented the aging economist with a signed poster of the Jedi master Yoda. “I’m short, a little bit fat. I’ve got big, green ears,” Laffer explained. “I look sort of like Yoda.”

In 2015, Forbes, Laffer, Kudlow and Moore created the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, a group intended in part to counter the emergence of the “Reformicons,” a rival gang of Republican eggheads who felt the party had gone too far in the direction of laissez-faire policies favoring the rich.

Among the other 29 committee members listed in a press release were both Malpasses, Kevin Hassett, now chairman of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers, and Andy Puzder, who was Trump’s initial pick for labor secretary until allegations of domestic abuse unearthed by POLITICO derailed his nomination.

The group sought, with considerable success, to vet Republican presidential candidates for their supply-side credentials and to influence their platforms, holding large private dinners at Manhattan venues such as the Four Seasons and the 21 Club, so that committee members and other notable invitees—like Rudy Giuliani and Roger Ailes—could feel out the candidates.

Before meeting with the larger group, candidates would huddle with the committee’s founders to receive economic tutorials. Or in the case of Ohio Governor John Kasich, to give one. “We were all sitting there, and he would talk for an hour,” Moore recalled. “We’re like, ‘No, we’re supposed to be talking to you,’ and he’s talking to us.” Moore called the episode “Classic John Kasich.”

Though the events were supposed to be off the record, journalists often attended, and an otherwise lackluster February 2015 dinner for Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker made headlines when Giuliani barged in, proclaimed he did not believe that President Barack Obama “loves America,” and insisted a POLITICO reporter could print the quote.

Almost every serious Republican candidate participated in the dinners—but when Trump’s campaign first came calling early in the mogul’s bid, Moore said the committee passed.

“It just seemed like a joke to me that he was even running. I was like, ‘No, we’re a serious organization,’” he recalled. In hindsight, Moore said, “That was stupid.”

Meanwhile, Trump defied the committee’s free market orthodoxy on issues like trade and immigration, drawing public criticism from both Moore and Kudlow, and feuded with the laissez-faire Club for Growth, which Moore had co-founded in the late ’90s.

At the same time, Kudlow—who spent two decades in media as a National Review editor and CNBC host—was also eyeing a 2016 Senate run in Connecticut, but he did not jump in.

As the voting started, it became clear that Trump was emerging as the likely nominee, but he continued to have trouble attracting experienced advisers. In March 2016, then-campaign manager Corey Lewandowski invited Kudlow and Moore to meet with Trump at the candidate’s midtown office. (Laffer—who moved from California to Tennessee in 2006 for tax reasons—had already met with Trump and begun advising the campaign on a tax plan.)

The duo hit it off with the apparent nominee, and Trump asked them to help refine his tax proposal, which he had first unveiled in September 2015. According to “Reagonomics,” Trump wanted the pair to make his plan “bigger and more beautiful” than Reagan’s tax cut, but he also needed to trim the projected cost of his original proposal, which was about $9 trillion. The populist Steve Bannon, the book says, pushed Trump to trim the cost by jacking up his original plan’s top income tax rate. The supply-siders fought back, making charts for Trump that showed when Reagan slashed taxes on the wealthy, the share of tax revenue paid by the top 1 percent actually went up. Ultimately, Trump’s new proposal reflected a compromise position between the two camps, with a top tax rate that was higher than the original plan’s, but lower than the current effective rate.

At the March meeting, Trump also mentioned he was planning a trip to Capitol Hill to confer with congressional Republicans. Moore had heard a similar recent meeting with lawmakers had gone badly—they complained Trump was “arrogant”—and suggested that he and Kudlow, who personally knew much of the caucus, accompany the candidate to help “break the ice.”

Apart from a confrontation between Trump and Arizona Senator Jeff Flake, Moore said the approach “worked like a charm.”

After Trump won, the trio continued to advise on the tax plan. Kudlow and Moore pushed the plan on Capitol Hill, drawing on the same relationships with Senate Republicans that they hope will ensure a smooth nomination process for Moore. Malpass, who had begun advising Trump during the campaign and then went into the Treasury Department, also helped craft the plan.

After the tax bill’s passage in December 2017, Laffer and Moore turned their attention to their campaign to install Kudlow in the White House, which succeeded last March. (Two other members of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, the grocery and real estate billionaires John and Margo Catsimatidis, were dining with Kudlow and his wife at the Italian restaurant Cipriani when Trump called to formally offer Kudlow the job.)

Once inside, Kudlow returned the favor, ensuring that Moore’s and Laffer’s writings regularly made their way to Trump’s desk.

The supply-siders began pushing Trump on trade, advising him to encourage a lowering of trade barriers on all sides, rather than raising them. Last June, Kudlow persuaded Trump to float the idea of the world governments eliminating all tariffs at a G-7 summit in Quebec.

Last month, Kudlow showed Trump an op-ed co-authored by Moore in the Wall Street Journal that criticized Powell. The op-ed reportedly pleased Trump so much that it prompted him to offer Moore the Fed job.

Kudlow also championed his former Bear Stearns protege’s World Bank ascension. “For Malpass, I worked very, very hard,” he said.

Moore has predicted that Malpass will gradually bring the supply-side gospel to the World Bank, which influences the economic policies of governments around the world.

To their friends, the prospect of the rat pack getting back at the economic levers is wonderful. “The economy is the best it’s been in a long time!” John Catsimatidis exclaimed.

But critics deride the group as intellectually inconsistent, water-carriers for the rich, and just plain wrong.

“At least Trump, [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell, and [House Minority Leader Kevin] McCarthy will have one less thing to have to worry about—whether their economists will be sufficiently supportive of what they decide the plan that holds their political coalition together will be,” wrote the University of California, Berkeley economist Brad DeLong, who served in Clinton’s Treasury Department, in an email.

DeLong described Moore as “execrable,” saying he has changed his tune on interest rates since the Obama administration to accommodate Trump’s agenda.

Critics also contend that supply-side is little more than a euphemism for “pro-rich” economics. “They all have the same line of thinking and they all support the same line of argument,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a veteran Democratic consultant in New York. “The end result has been the greatest level of toxic inequality since the Great Depression.”

And proof of the group’s core claim—that slashing taxes and regulations is the best path to growth—remains elusive.

The fund manager Doug Kass, president of Seabreeze Partners Management, has long been friends with Kudlow, who attended his son’s wedding. “I’m a great fan of Larry ‘Kuddles’ Kudlow,” said Kass, alluding to the former investment banker’s warm personality. But he is not impressed with the predictive power of the group’s ideas.

“The core foundation, the concept of supply-side economics, at least based upon the empirical evidence,” Kass said, “is something between no success and a disaster.”

Though the group has failed to win over most academics and practitioners, it has had far more luck with its constituency of one inside the Oval Office. Part of the group’s success stems from its tendency to play nice with all sides of the president’s fractious orbit.

Kudlow has butted heads with Peter Navarro, Trump’s director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, over Navarro’s anti-Wall Street rhetoric and hawkish approach to trade negotiations with China. But in general, the supply-siders get high marks for affability, even from those who believe their theories are baloney.

Laffer and Kudlow thank both Bannon and Ivanka Trump in the acknowledgement of “Reagonomics.” And though Bannon’s populist impulses clash with the musketeers’ pro-market views, Bannon’s public relations manager, Republican operative Alexandra Preate, has simultaneously been instrumental in running the Committee to Unleash Prosperity.

“I don’t do factions, man,” Kudlow explained. “We’re the faction that’s in favor of Trump’s policies. That’s the faction I identify with.”

Seven Fixes for American Capitalism

Ideas from the Right, the Left, and across the Atlantic to mend what’s broken in our economy.

Antitrust Pivot

Many of the U.S.’s biggest economic ills—rising inequality, stagnant wages, low productivity growth—stem in large measure from corporate consolidation and monopoly power run amok. That’s the message from a new breed of policy wonk urging a return to the trustbusting days of the early 20th century.

The movement—labeled the New Brandeis School by its proponents and derided as Hipster Antitrust by its critics—is looking to ditch the Chicago School approach that’s dominated antitrust enforcement since the late 1970s. The Chicago School hews to what’s known as the consumer-welfare standard, which finds mergers anticompetitive only if they raise prices.

The new model takes its inspiration from Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who emphasized the need to restrain big companies and the concentration of economic power. Lina Khan helped galvanize the movement with a 2017 paper she wrote as a law student at Yale that made the case that Amazon.com Inc. is a threat to competition, even though it’s lowered some prices for consumers.

The ideas in Khan’s paper aligned with those of economists and lawyers, such as Tim Wu, a Columbia Law School professor, who’ve been arguing that the current antitrust framework is ill-equipped to deal with today’s technology titans. Among their recommendations is preventing tech platforms from vertically integrating into different lines of business, where they can potentially favor their own services and harm rivals. In this view, Facebook shouldn’t be allowed to own Instagram.

Defenders of the current framework say the New Brandeis School is nothing more than a big-is-bad ethos that would punish companies for being successful and popular with consumers. Yet it’s hard to ignore the growing body of research documenting the relationship between rising corporate consolidation and worrying economic trends, including a drop in the number of startups and tepid wage growth.

One sign of the movement’s increasing influence is that Joseph Simons, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, one of the country’s two antitrust watchdogs, has organized hearings on the new enforcement approach. Also, Democratic presidential candidates such as Senator Elizabeth Warren are making antitrust enforcement a central part of their campaigns. —David McLaughlin

Supply-Side Economics

The broad contours of the Republican plan to optimize capitalism don’t look much different today than they did in the 1980s. The supply-side pitch is that reducing taxes on companies and top-earning individuals, curtailing spending on welfare programs, and slashing regulation spurs business investment. This leads to faster economic growth that benefits all Americans. Even the cast of characters is familiar. President Trump’s top economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, promoted a similar agenda as an official in the Reagan White House.

The first piece of the formula is already in place: A Republican-controlled Congress approved tax cuts at the end of Trump’s first year in office. (The jury is still out on whether those have permanently lifted the U.S. economy onto a higher growth track, as proponents argued.) The other piece—reducing future obligations of major entitlement programs—will be difficult to pull off now that Democrats control the House of Representatives and the political winds blow in the direction of a more relaxed attitude toward government budget deficits.

Still, it’s seen as a key ingredient. In a 2017 white paper, John Cogan, Glenn Hubbard, John Taylor, and Kevin Warsh—all pillars of Republican establishment economic policy circles—argued that “without significant spending restraint, even with positive effects on economic growth, the tax rate reductions would likely be limited and temporary, limiting their economic benefits.”

The contention is that spending on welfare eventually will account for an ever-growing share of the economy, “crowding out” private-sector investment and weighing on growth.

This view is still widely held among Washington policymakers. At a Jan. 30 press conference, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said, “It is a long-known fact that the U.S. federal government budget is on an unsustainable path,” citing rising health-care costs and an aging population.

Conservative economists will likely have a difficult time rallying voters to their cause in 2020 because of the public perception that the orthodox prescription is partly to blame for widening inequality. It’s a fact that wealth disparities in the U.S. have been rising ever since the early 1980s—the last time Republicans presided over a sea change in the economic agenda. —Matthew Boesler

German Model

The search for better ways to distribute the fruits of American capitalism has some looking to Europe for inspiration. Germany offers a model of how corporate governance could be revamped to give American workers a bigger say over what happens to company profits. A law that took effect in 1976 formalized what had been common practice at many German companies as far back as the 1920s. It dictates that in a corporation with more than 500 employees, a third of supervisory board seats must be filled by directors elected by workers, a share that rises to one-half for companies with more than 2,000 employees.

The German system, known as co-determination, allows employees to have a say in working conditions, such as contractual terms and pay. It also gives them a voice in how profits are deployed—say, for a new research and development center vs. more dividends for shareholders. Some researchers say co-determination has helped spur productivity and innovation at German companies.

At the root of co-determination is the idea that companies should balance the interests of their various stakeholders, a group that includes equity owners but also workers, customers, and even local communities. That was also the ideal in the U.S. until the early 1980s, when under the influence of economist Milton Friedman it was supplanted by the belief that corporate managers’ sole responsibility is to maximize returns for shareholders. That single-minded devotion to stockholders has been cited as a factor in the stagnation of U.S. wages.

In August, Democratic presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren unveiled her Accountable Capitalism Act, which draws from the German experience. The plan would allocate a minimum of 40 percent of a company’s board seats to directors representing workers. The requirement would apply to U.S.-domiciled corporations with more than $1 billion in annual revenue. Warren’s proposal is designed as a corrective to a trend that has been drawing increased scrutiny of late: Publicly traded companies in the U.S. have been devoting more and more of their profits to share buybacks and dividends. Given that less than half of U.S. households own stocks, the chances that workers will benefit when their employer succeeds improve markedly when profits are plowed back into the company. —Carolynn Look

Modern Monetary Theory

Any ambitious government-led project to reshape the U.S. economy usually runs into the same objection: We can’t afford it. One school of economic thought says that’s all wrong.

Modern Monetary Theory, a once-fringe set of ideas now getting some mainstream attention, says governments borrowing in their own currency have more room to spend than they think. The U.S., for example, can run deficits without having to worry about going bust, because it creates the dollars in the first place. The real constraint only kicks in when there’s too much spending relative to a limited supply of goods and services—in other words, when inflation spikes. And there’s been little sign of that in America for decades.

MMTers argue that their system isn’t so radical; it’s the way things already work, at least some of the time. Presidents, including the current one, haven’t balked at measures to boost the military or cut taxes, even when the resulting deficits run into the hundreds of billions. And emergencies, such as the 2008 financial meltdown, typically push concerns about balanced budgets deep into the background.

Now there’s a different sort of emergency on the horizon: climate change. Since the threat is arguably greater than economic depression or even war, it requires action on a suitably vast scale, argue Democrats who’ve picked up on the issue.

And MMT offers a key to unlock the financing. That’s why freshman Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the first U.S. politicians to talk publicly about MMT, is also at the forefront of the drive for a Green New Deal. The maximal version of that program includes shifting the U.S. to 100 percent renewable energy within 10 years. If that wasn’t ambitious enough, the plan also calls for the government to guarantee a job for everyone who wants one—an MMT favorite that’s also a throwback to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.

“Clearly, the environment matters more than entries on balance sheets,” says Randall Wray, a senior scholar at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College and one of MMT’s most prominent proponents. “The environmental thing is real. It’s not financial.”

MMT’s detractors say government spending on that scale could trigger the kind of inflation that would wreck the whole economy. America’s national debt has already ballooned since the Great Recession, they warn, and adding more will erode the country’s creditworthiness and undermine the dollar’s role in global finance.

While those warnings are still frequently heard, there are signs that they’re losing their impact as the debate leans left. Several renowned economists who aren’t MMTers have recently tried to downplay the risks attached to deficits and debt. They include Olivier Blanchard, former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, and Obama administration heavyweights Larry Summers and Jason Furman. Bank of England chief Mark Carney has made the case that action on climate change represents an economic opportunity, not a burden.

Ocasio-Cortez didn’t manage to garner enough Democratic support for her first attempt at actual legislation, a proposal to set up a Green New Deal committee. But there’s broad sympathy for the idea in principle, including among several of the party’s presidential candidates, and many of them have also endorsed a jobs guarantee. —Katia Dmitrieva

Tech to the Rescue

Amazon.com Inc. Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos wishes there were a trillion human beings in the solar system. With room for that many people, there would be “a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts,” he told the Economic Club of Washington, D.C., in September. The world’s richest man is funneling $1 billion or more a year into a company, Blue Origin, that he hopes will help make extraterrestrial settlement a reality, creating places to live for all those Einsteins and Mozarts.

Bezos and others argue that innovation is the essential ingredient in human betterment. They have a point. Life would be pretty awful without the advances made by past generations, such as indoor plumbing, vaccines, refrigeration, and telephones. Bezos even asserts that freedom itself, not just material well-being, depends on technological progress: “I don’t even think stasis is compatible with liberty,” he told the Washington audience.

In the view of the tech-to-the-rescue crowd, innovation can solve just about every problem humanity faces. Global warming can be fixed with better electric cars, solar cells, wind turbines, and batteries. Income inequality can be solved by educating or retraining workers for the high-tech jobs of the future.

The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, a Washington think tank founded in 2006 to propagate this philosophy, argues that using antitrust law to break up or discipline the big technology companies can backfire, discouraging innovation and harming consumers. Robert Atkinson, president and founder of the ITIF, co-wrote a 2018 book with Michael Lind called Big Is Beautiful: Debunking the Myth of Small Business.

The techies welcome a prominent role for government in paying for education and conducting or supporting research and development. But the movement is split on trade. The nationalists want to keep the U.S. in the tech vanguard and are willing to resort to tariffs and subsidies to preserve its dominance. The globalists, including some heads of multinational companies that earn lots of their profits abroad, are happy to see other countries advance technologically, figuring that the benefits of breakthroughs—say, a cure for cancer—will be shared by all of humanity regardless of their origin.

The common theme is that prosperity depends on a robust tech sector. “We’re in a 10-year productivity depression” that’s hurting living standards, says Atkinson. “Tech is really the only way we’re going to raise productivity growth.” —Peter Coy

Tariff Truthers

If there’s one thing most economists around the world today can agree on, it’s that tariffs are bad. Protect one domestic industry with an import tax, and you hurt a swath of others. Tariffs reduce choices for consumers and push up prices for goods. They stifle competition and deter innovation. And they invite other countries to retaliate, leading to the sort of tit-for-tat behavior that’s left U.S. soybean farmers watching crops once destined for China rot in their fields.

The president, of course, disagrees. “I am a Tariff Man,” he proclaimed in a Dec. 4 tweet. Besides Trump, the maligned tariff has a small core of defenders on the fringes of mainstream economics who claim an intellectual history going back to Alexander Hamilton and his “Report on Manufactures” to justify the value of duties. Tariffs, argues Jeff Ferry, chief economist at the Coalition for a Prosperous America (CPA), preserve jobs and help unleash investment.

The Washington-based CPA has close ties to the administration. Its chairman, Dan DiMicco, is a former Nucor Corp. chief executive and was a vocal advocate for the steel tariffs Trump introduced in 2018. He also led the transition team that picked Robert Lighthizer for the job of trade czar.

The Trump tariffs have so far hit more than $300 billion in U.S. imports from around the world. And there may be more to come, with the U.S. Department of Commerce now finalizing an investigation into possible auto duties.

The Trump administration and groups such as the CPA that favor greater protectionism say the levies have helped trigger a manufacturing boom that led to the addition of 284,000 jobs in 2018, according to official statistics. “If you look at the evidence, tariffs are contributing to the growth of our economy,” wrote Ferry in a column published on the CPA’s website in December.

Many dispute those numbers. They also argue the tariffs will lead to longer-term economic harm by reducing the attraction of the U.S. as a location for export-oriented plants. Volvo Cars, for example, has scrapped plans to expand a South Carolina plant to ship cars to China. General Motors Co., meanwhile, has said the fallout from duties on foreign steel and aluminum have cost it at least $1 billion. But Ferry dismisses any such complaints. “Tariffs are a step in the right direction,” he says. “The evidence is all around us.” —Shawn Donnan

Libertarianism

Devotees of small government were stirred by candidate Trump’s vow to “drain the swamp” and pull U.S. troops out of foreign quagmires. But President Trump, with his tariffs and deficits, has proved to be “the opposite of a libertarian,” the Libertarian Party declared in March.

Still, the free-market purists aren’t giving up the fight. One of their bugbears is the Federal Reserve and its cheap money—a distortion of the market’s natural efficiency, according to Austrian economist and libertarian idol Friedrich Hayek. When Ron Paul, America’s highest-profile libertarian, ran for president in 2012, he pushed for the Fed’s abolition and a return to the gold standard. “If you want to restrain government, you restrain the power to create money,” he said. “That’s what gold does.”

The Fed can probably rest easy. Americans aren’t exactly clamoring for a return to gold, while hyperinflation and other disasters predicted by libertarians in the easy-money decade since 2008 haven’t come to pass.

Some libertarian ideas are finding a larger audience. Among them are the call for stripping back zoning rules, because they limit the construction of affordable housing, and their criticism of patents that lock in profits for Big Tech or Pharma and licensing requirements that insulate professionals like doctors from competition. A common theme of such critiques—that the economy is rigged in favor of big and established actors—commands growing support among mainstream economists.

And beyond the realms of U.S. policy, the world is evolving in ways that give libertarians hope. Those who deplore the “tyranny” of central banks are rejoicing at the explosion of cryptocurrencies. (The Libertarian Party accepts donations in Bitcoin.) Recreational marijuana use is already legal in 10 states and backed by more than 6 in 10 Americans, according to a poll by the Pew Research Center.

Paul, who outperformed most expectations during his own tilt at the presidency, says a popular Libertarian candidate could well emerge in 2020. It’s a stretch to say he’s cheerful about the wider outlook, though. “It’s a bubble economy in many, many different ways, and it’s going to come unglued,” he told the Washington Examiner. —Andrew Mayeda