March 20, 2025
By Jace White
The free market movement has a problem. A growing number of so-called “populists” on the “New Right” are developing an affinity for government-expanding policies like tax increases, minimum wage hikes, industrial subsidies, railroad safety regulations, caps on credit card interest rates, increased government powers for labor union bosses, and more.
In response to the New Right, the “Freedom Conservatives,” or “FreeCons” for short, have emerged. They hope to rally support for their “Statement of Principles” which includes things like “liberty,” “free enterprise,” “equality under the law,” and of course, “freedom.”
These are good principles, and I agree with most of what’s in the FreeCon Statement. Having attended their February conference, it’s clear the project is helping draw attention to the rift that is forming in the conservative movement, and bringing together people who want to respond to it.
But the response to the New Right, particularly on economic issues, cannot solely focus on abstract principles. Doing so avoids directly confronting a major problem: There is a growing number of people who consider themselves principled conservatives, but who don’t find themselves persuaded by free market arguments.
New Right figureheads dismiss traditional conservative economic arguments as mere “market fundamentalism” dominated by stale, repetitive slogans. Yes, such complaints are sometimes made by obnoxious people operating in bad faith, but the uncomfortable truth is that these complaints ring true for many conservatives, especially young ones working in Washington. They find free market arguments stale and New Right arguments fresh.
Hearing that, free marketers often complain that the New Right isn’t presenting the free market side fairly—that what young people are hearing is a caricature of the free market position, and a bunch of hyped-up lies about the New Right position.
If that’s true, it merely expands the scope of the problem. Both the arguments themselves and the system that is supposed to deliver those arguments to the ears of people involved in the policy process, are no longer sufficiently effective, measured by their ability to prevent things like the growth of an anti-free market wing of conservatism.
Improving the quality of free market arguments and the increasing the number of people skilled at making them is the best investment the movement can make right now. An approach centered around on-the-ground persuasion has a number of advantages over one that focuses on higher level principles.
In politics, a principle is something you compromise on.
There are moral principles like “tell the truth,” and “don’t take bribes,” that our leaders should uphold at all times, and politicians should be “principled,” in the sense that they should have a code of right and wrong that they stick to even when it’s difficult.
But a politician’s entire job is to take political principles like “low taxes,” “fiscal responsibility” and “public safety,” and balance them against each other.
Believing in the principle of “low taxes,” a politician could seek to reduce taxes to zero and finance government programs by borrowing money. But if he also believes in the principle of “fiscal responsibility,” he’ll want to avoid large deficits. He could eliminate all government spending to avoid a deficit, but if he believes in “public safety,” he’ll probably want the government to pay for courts, a police force, and a military.
It's not hypocritical or unscrupulous to hold all of these principles at once. Politicians have to make trade-offs, balancing practical and political considerations while trying to fulfill each of their principles to the greatest extent possible.
Principles are just one input in the decision-making process that produces a political trade-off.
Just as we wouldn’t counsel a bad baker to meditate on the importance of flour, we can’t simply tell politicians to re-commit to particular principles if we don’t like the trade-offs they are serving us. A baker can combine flour, eggs, milk, and butter, and still get an inedible result, and a politician can combine the principles of “freedom,” “strong communities,” and “fiscal responsibility,” and come up with an unworkable policy if he has totally mistaken notions of what is practicable.
The crux of the disagreement between FreeCons and (honest) members of the New Right is not whether principles like freedom are at all valuable, but what arguments each side believes about the extent to which their principles should apply in particular situations.
For example, legally capping credit card interest rates is in tension with the principle of “personal choice,” but is the access to unsecured credit an important freedom or a troublesome temptation? Two people could be equally committed to personal choice, yet have radically different views on credit card regulation because of what they think it will lead to.
Doubling the credit card skeptic’s commitment to “freedom” could have no effect on his opinion. But doubling his sense of credit cards’ usefulness, his perception of the consequences of regulating them, or his certainty that a ban would open the door to future bad government actions, is bound to alter his views.
Politicians who only make decisions by dispassionately calculating what they think the voting public will like are still evaluating arguments—they’re just evaluating whether they will persuade other people instead of themselves. Either way, arguments matter.
Another advantage of placing the focus on improving and spreading pro-free market arguments is that it is an equal and opposite reaction to anti-market populism.
The one thing that the New Right agrees on is that markets are suspicious. Its members differ wildly in their individual interpretations of what that means. Some just want tariffs and industrial policy, others want the US to become a religious monarchy, but whether it is dealing with trade, unions, or taxes, every New Right policy project is attempting to sour conservatives on free markets.
If conservatives were twice as good at defending markets, they’d be twice as resistant to the New Right. If they were twice as committed to the principle of “freedom,” they’d still be just as susceptible to arguments that “true freedom” requires things like empowering union bosses or increasing government spending.
Focusing on getting better at defending markets in general reduces the need for consensus on particular big questions.
Translating an abstract principle into an argument about a concrete policy often requires us to solve for utopia, then advocate for it. One could argue that “in a free society, the government wouldn’t interfere with private businesses, so we shouldn’t subsidize the steel industry.” That’s a valid argument, but it obligates the person making it to argue against every possible government subsidy. If there are some edge cases where subsidies are appropriate, then maybe the steel subsidy is one of those cases. You wind up arguing about the practical merits of the steel subsidies on their own, and the more streamlined approach would be to just do that from the beginning.
Not having to agree on one particular utopia helps unify groups with different social visions. If free market advocates and organizations simply helped train lots of conservatives to better defend free markets, those conservatives could use their improved skill for whatever goal they found appropriate. It would be up to each of them whether to defend marijuana legalization or open borders as free market policies, or to make them exceptions to the rule. Achieving consensus on every issue is not necessary to proceed with learning a debating skill, but it’s almost impossible to discuss principles without examining the controversial issues that define a principle’s boundaries.
Conservatism today lacks a Milton Friedman-esque spirit of cheerful yet relentless political argument. It’s significant that no modern Milton Friedman exists.
There are still famous economists, and there are still economists who write about liberty and free markets. Yet none of them can match Friedman’s influence. The title of Jennifer Burns’ excellent biography, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative, recognizes that Friedman’s political impact made him unique, and that in that respect he has no modern heir.
Tyler Cowen and others have argued that Friedman benefitted from “random forces,” including the fact that the fall of Communism and stagflation happened at the perfect time for Friedman to ride the pendulum swing away from these government excesses. Yet so many debates bear Friedman’s fingerprints, including ones over inflation and the money supply, privatizing government programs, school vouchers, and even the end of forced conscription in the military. No one could have turned a lucky break into that much influence without dedicating impossible amounts of energy to public persuasion.
Friedman always argued. His son says that Friedman would often get in a cab and debate the taxi medallion system with the driver. If that wasn’t enough, his wife Rose, herself an accomplished economist, was also itching to popularize their ideas. The duo produced a massive volume of academic, yet accessible material, including books, newspaper columns, TV shows and lectures, all aimed at winning the public and lawmakers over to their limited government, free market views.
Unlike many conservative academics, Friedman was willing to spend time in the mud of politics, explaining things to politicians, who often didn’t listen, and doing it all over again anyway.
It made him the greatest free market polemicist of the modern era.
It may be that no one living is as talented as Friedman, but he can be brought back tenfold by reviving a Friedman-esque love for free market polemics across the conservative movement.
To effectuate this revival, conservative organizations and individuals should treat free market polemics like a general skill, and devote more energy to helping people develop it, especially those involved in DC policymaking. That means giving them the intellectual tools either to oppose proposed government interventions in the economy, or support the removal of existing ones.
Government programs have seen and unseen costs. The ability to quickly identify and articulate the unseen costs is a skill that increases in proportion to one’s understanding of economics. It’s also important to be able to sniff out when a government program’s actual benefits differ from their purported benefits, and to be able to explain why. Skilled polemicists have to study the rhetoric of their opponents, and be tuned into what internet-types call “the discourse,” so that they don’t make points that the other side considers unimpressive.
Calculating unseen costs, quantifying real benefits, and studying the other side’s rhetoric are all common fodder for free market think tanks and columnists, so I’m not claiming that the free market side doesn’t produce mountains of this stuff already. The emergence of an anti-market New Right simply means we need even more of it than we already have.
Principles are still important. If we forget why we believe in freedom over tyranny, in representative democracy over monarchy, and in the rule of law over dictatorship, we are in serious trouble. The problem with principles is that they can deceive us into thinking that simply holding the right ones is good enough.
The FreeCon convention brought together a great group of principled people who want to protect free market conservatism. Now, they have some arguments to win.
Jace White works in grassroots politics in Washington, DC. His twitter is @_JaceWhite.