Capitalisn’t: A Conservative’s Attack on Neoliberalism

Episode Transcript

Chris Griswold: What is capitalism for? I think it's for a bunch of things. One of them is channeling capital to productive use. When that's not happening, because it's easier to make profits by doing something else, then we have a problem, and it's time for policy to step in.

Bethany McLean: Luigi, have you ever read I, Pencil?

Luigi Zingales: Of course. It's one of the most famous essays in economics. The making of a pencil, seemingly a simple thing explained, and no single person knows how to make a pencil. The wood comes from one place, the graphite from another, the rubber from somewhere else, yet somehow millions of strangers coordinate their efforts without anyone directing them. In 2025, Chris Griswold, who is the policy director at American Compass, a think tank that The Economist calls a slaughterhouse for Republican sacred cows, wrote a viral essay called I, Sharpie.

Think of it as the anti-pencil essay. It used Sharpie's return from being made in China to be made in Tennessee to argue that business decision and government incentives, not invisible forces, determine where and how things get made.

Bethany: He's a conservative saying things that you once would have associated with a liberal, hence The Economist's view that they are slaying sacred Republican cows. He's pro-worker power, pro-unions, and worker voice, he argues, which help push technology toward better jobs. He argues that even Luddite-style resistance may be rational when workers are treated as disposable inputs. He warns that an economy premised on servility is democratically unstable. He opposes UBI because work is a source of dignity rather than just income. He grounds it all in this almost theological claim that labor is simply another term for people.

Our audience is more used to hearing from MBAs and PhDs, not MDivs. You have a Master of Divinity from Princeton, so you're a theologian by training, as you've discussed. There are these different branches of Christian conservative thinking. Which one are you closer to? Evangelical Protestantism, Catholic social teaching, neo-Calvinism? How do you think that your religious training has shaped your view of economics?

Chris: That's a fantastic question that you don't always get in an economics podcast. I appreciate it. Let's talk about our faith journeys. Let's all go there. [chuckles]

Bethany: It shapes how you view the world, right?

Chris: It does. I think the tradition I lean on the most in my economic work is Catholic social teaching. I actually printed this quote out just in case I had a chance to read it, which I now do. This is Pope Benedict XVI, who said, "The economy and finance do not exist for their own sake. They are only an instrument or means. Their sole end is the human person and his or her total fulfillment and dignity. This is the only capital it is right to safeguard."

Number one, I find that very moving, but I also find it very instructive. The economy is not an end unto itself. It's not a force of nature, and it's not a self-justifying end unto itself. It's a tool. It's a means. If it's a tool or a means, it means we have to be clear about what the end towards which those means are pointed is. I think the right answer to that question is human flourishing. As Pope Benedict put it, the fulfillment of the human person and dignity.

Once you start from the premise that the human person is created in the image of God, is endowed with infinite worth and value and dignity, then that absolutely starts to shape your economics, both in terms of what the market is for, but also importantly, what the market is not for. I think one implication of that is that there's a whole realm of life that the market is actually the wrong frame for. Family life, for example. We have subjected family life to market forces in incredibly corrosive ways. That's why our kids are addicted to smartphones in ways that are causing them tremendous anxiety and depression and social challenges.

We have variable scheduling for working parents where they can't plan their own schedule more than a day in advance. How is that conducive to family life or community participation? It's not. It's not at all. It's also important, if you have a certain view of the human person, that changes how you think about labor. We analyze labor as just a factor in production, but it's not. Labor is just another word for people, for human beings.

Human beings are not created for the purpose of selling their labor. They're created for other things. You have to acknowledge the supremacy of those other reasons and treat workers as persons with dignity, with families, with communities, with dreams, with feelings. I don't think our economic system does that very well. I think it exploits and squeezes working people. I think that's why they're mad. [chuckles] That's why we're in a populist moment, because people are tired of that, as they should be.

This has all kinds of implications for policy, labor policy, for example, and the centrality of giving workers a sense of agency and voice and power in the economic sphere. For what it's worth, I think all of this is highly relevant to the future of democracy generally. Martin Luther King knew that very well. He talked about it all the time, about how access to the ballot box was the necessary condition for healthy democracy, but it wasn't sufficient on its own. You also needed a sense of economic agency and participation. Without that, democracy was not going to be a viable long-term experiment. I think he was correct. I think that's part of the troubles we're having in America now.

Bethany: Do you think the neoliberal regime was explicitly rigged to benefit corporate America at the expense of America itself, or do you think it accidentally evolved that way through laziness and ideology?

Chris: That's a good question, and it's always hard to attribute intent to a group of people. I would say, in my opinion, both. I think there's plenty of well-meaning ideology that came out of the stagnation of the '70s. Look, the Reagan revolution happened for a reason. Milton Friedman and Hayek found purchase for a reason. They were responding to real concerns about sclerosis and stagnation. I don't think Milton Friedman set out to [chuckles] destroy the American working class or whatever, but I also think a sincere intellectual effort has ossified into an ideology.

If you still think that dropping the top marginal tax rate is the best and most effective way to spur economic growth, then you've missed it; you're 50 years out of date. That is no longer responsive to the economic challenges we have. I think this ideology has ossified, which is why you see Republicans continuing to run the same playbook of free trade tax cuts and deregulation. I think we've gotten over the free trade bit, which is good. Tax cuts and deregulation still seem to be the go-to remaining dusty plays, though. That's got to be updated. It desperately has to be updated.

Luigi: Can I provoke you a second? When you're talking about this historical revolution, to some extent, the Republicans as a party of business, did their job properly. It is the Democrats that traditionally were the party of the people that failed because the Republicans won every battle for business and the Democrats won none for the people. In fact, in a big part of this period, they become enamored with business as much as the Republican. I think it was a failure of the Democrat to represent the people that led to the situation we're in today.

Chris: If you're asking me to dunk on the Democrats, this is the lowest of low-hanging fruit. [chuckles] Agreed, yes, the Democratic Party has been a massive failure for quite a while. I don't know that anybody, including most of my Democratic friends, would disagree with that. I think everybody agrees. Just look at the last election. The Democrats roundly proved their electoral impotence. That was a wild election to watch.

After this last election, Bernie Sanders got up and tweeted. He was like, "I don't know why the Democratic Party is surprised. Why would a party that has abandoned working-class voters be surprised when working-class voters abandon it?" He was right. Senator Sanders is totally right. Of course, he is.

Bethany: What do you make of the split within the Republican Party between the traditional old-school conservatives who still are pushing these lines of deregulation and tax cuts and free markets, and then this growing faction within the Republican Party of which both JD Vance and Marco Rubio are examples of in their own ways? You look at how Rubio has changed his tune from his early years before the financial crisis to now, and they're both moving closer to, I think, a version of Republicanism that you might like, but it is still split within the party. How does that shake out?

Chris: Truth in advertising, I worked for Senator Rubio during those years that he was first exploring a different line of economic thinking. It was fascinating to be involved in that intellectual journey for him, but also for the conservative movement as a whole more broadly. I think a bunch of things happened. One was the wreckage of unfettered globalization had been taking its toll on working people for years without either party being responsive.

If you look at the 2000 election between George W. Bush and Al Gore, they fought about all kinds of things, and you remember it was an extremely contentious election. One thing they didn't fight about was whether or not China should be allowed into the WTO and granted permanent normal trade relations status. They agreed with that from the jump. During the campaign, they agreed on it, and the labor unions pleaded with Al Gore, "Please, this is dangerous." They fell on deaf ears."

It's been a long time that this Washington consensus just has not been responsive to the downside consequences of globalization, for example, or financialization, for example. Sooner or later, the backlash was coming, and it came in the form, in 2016, of a Democratic primary that Bernie Sanders almost won, probably would have won if the DNC hadn't interfered, and Donald Trump, who did, in fact, win, easily, the Republican primary, and handily won the election.

You have traditional then Republicans, like Rubio, who had to ask themselves, what was it about this 1980s-style sunny Reaganism wasn't selling? I think the conclusion for folks like me, for folks like my colleagues at American Compass, and for some of the leaders you mentioned, and others in the Senate and the House of Representatives and elsewhere, I came to the conclusion that a free market fundamentalism was not the same thing as conservatism.

To his great credit, and Friedrich Hayek knew that, he wrote a great essay called Why I Am Not a Conservative, that libertarianism and conservatism have been treated as synonymous for a long time, and the Republican Party had basically outsourced its economic policymaking to libertarians for a long time. They're not, in fact, synonymous, and perhaps, in fact, might be mutually exclusive. If you care about strong families, or strong and thriving local communities, or economic resilience and strength, or strong national defense, or any of the things that conservatives say they care about, turns out fundamentalist libertarianism hasn't been serving any of those goals particularly well.

The backlash was always coming, and I think what you're talking about is an effort to try and rethink. What does applying our values to the current economic situation require? It requires, I would argue, recapturing the purpose of an economy. It's going all the way back to first principles and asking ourself, "What is the purpose of an economy?" That's a question that neoliberalism doesn't quite allow you to ask in the same way because it's a self-justifying, like, well, you let the market optimize, and that is what's best for society. To me, that's the easy way out. That has not been working terribly well.

Look, the market's the greatest optimization tool we've ever discovered. That's true, but there's no guarantee that what it optimizes for is what's most conducive to human flourishing, for example. If you, from your first principles, conclude the purpose of an economy is to promote human flourishing, is to provide the material preconditions for human thriving, well, then you've got to ask a whole bunch of fundamental questions about the economic system you're running. I think that's what's been happening on the right. It's a real battle for the future of the Republican Party, for the conservative movement on economics.

Luigi: In my previous question, you accepted the premise that the Republican Party is the party of business. This begs the question of why, given your set of values and your goals, you see your natural home in the Republican Party, because I could see you being very close in many ways to Bernie Sanders.

Chris: Well, first of all, I did not concede your premise that the Republican Party is the party of business; I just didn't respond to the claim. I will respond to it now. I think, in practice, yes, functionally, the Republican Party still remains very pro-business, both in the sense that the rank and file are more what I would call market fundamentalists than I would care to see, although that's changing, and also in the sense that there is, in the current context, a very plutocratic strain in the current administration, as you pointed out. There's also a darker sense in which the current Republican Party is pro-business in a way that I don't care to see.

I think that marriage between the GOP and business is not nearly as strong as a lot of people would assume. There are plenty of populist members of the House of Representatives that are super suspicious of business. Sometimes for cultural reasons, they think it's too woke or whatever, but more deeply as well. It used to be an axiom that what was good for GM was good for America. That's clearly not true anymore. You can't represent a place that's been de-industrialized because the big American-headquartered, multinational businesses shipped all of the production to China or wherever.

You can't see that for that long and not start asking questions about the role of business and whether we're governing it properly. I think that relationship is in turmoil. As you said earlier, the relationship between business and the Democratic Party has also grown in an interesting set of ways that I think are causing problems for the Democrats, as you mentioned. No, I think there's a couple of things that distinguish the version of economics that I'm talking about from, say, a Bernie Sanders view.

I think, of course, you're right that there are diagnostic ways in which some of the analysis can be similar, but I think, number one, the Sanders wing of the left, I think, doesn't appreciate the value of free market. I've been trashing the free market fundamentalism, but I use fundamentalism advisedly as a term in that descriptive sense of an ossified ideology that can't see past a very narrow interpretation of its source documents. That's ideology, right? We also need to reclaim the proper appreciation for the free market and what it actually can do and should be allowed to do.

I worry that some progressive economics doesn't appreciate that and would rather intervene in highly intrusive and counterproductive ways or just reassign functions to the state entirely that don't belong properly to the state. Sports is a great analogy for this, where what is the purpose of professional sports, right? Ultimately, it's entertainment, and it's these social spillovers that we want from sports. The way we get that is free competition between teams on the field. They don't come to entertain us. They come to win by any means necessary within the rules. That is the definition of a free market competition, right? Free competition within the rules.

What matters isn't the state overtaking the team so that they play more entertainingly. What matters is a set of rules that is conducive to the spillovers we want. You see that in sports all the time. Like in American baseball, you invent a pitcher's mound or a pitch clock, or in basketball, you invent a three-point line. We change rules in sports constantly to make sure that once players are optimized under the current set of rules, it gets boring. We've got to tweak the rules so that it's not boring anymore.

That's how I view economic policymaking. I worry that it's about the constraints and the conditions and the policy environment, not about micromanaging. I do think that all too often progressive economics misunderstands that.

Luigi: We always had the suspicion that Juventus, which is the biggest team in Italy, that was connected with FIAT, so were connected with the powerful people, they were always winning because of the referee. I think that Italy is divided between the people who support Juventus and everybody else. Everybody else hates Juventus and thinks that Juventus is a conspiracy, but we've never seen the president of Juventus, let alone the president of the country, to go to the FIFA and change an outcome as a result. Bethany, you look perplexed. Do you know what we're talking about?

Chris: I know exactly what you're talking about.

Bethany: Believe it or not, I do know what you're talking about. Even I know what you're talking about. [laughs]

Chris: The memes are incredible. There's a picture of the ref holding the red card, and he's holding a Trump card with the picture of Donald Trump on it back at the ref. [laughs]

Bethany: Here's the question for both of you. Does this have anything to do with industrial policy? Can we draw any kind of analogy here?

Luigi: Actually, it's really dangerous because one reason why I was always suspicious of industrial policy is because it ends up being a policy for the poor. When you see Trump using this and using his crypto rulings, the other day it came out that the family made $2 billion at the expenses of the naive who believe in the system. What is appalling, we always rail against the rich and powerful that rigged the rules of the game, but this is the first time, I think, in history, at least in the United States, that the rules of the game are really rigged at the top and with gusto. There is not even a bit of shame that you do it behind the closed door, et cetera. No. It is with flair and-- yes.

Chris: No, I agree with you. I'm also disturbed by the reports of the financial disclosure you're talking about and the way that the president's family seem to have benefited financially from the presidency. Yes, that I don't see as related to industrial policy. Crypto, that's about financial-- That's a different set of questions. I would argue that the neoliberal free trade system we've been running for four decades has also been rigged at the top for the benefit of the rich and powerful and left the working class behind for decades. That's why we're in the middle of a populist backlash to begin with.

Yes, of course, any economic system can be rigged to the benefit of the powerful, but I don't think that is a reason not to do industrial policy. I think that's a reason to do industrial policy responsibly as well. For example, if we should legislate tariffs rather than leaving them at the whim of the president, not because tariffs are bad, but because it's good to give them stability and durability and predictability, legislate so that it's not quite so easily manipulated, to your point, Luigi.

I don't see it as an anti-industrial policy point; I see it as an anti-bad government point. Of course, we need an industrial strategy. Look at the mess we're in without having had one for the last 40 years.

Luigi: I agree, but I always like to say that if I were born in Sweden, I would be more sympathetic to a system of government intervention because actually, in Sweden, the government seems to work indecently well, but having been born in Italy where you don't even get the basic facts right, like putting people in jail and stuff like that, then the idea that you can pick the future success areas seems a bit remote. What we need, and I think we'll agree on this, we need a stronger government capacity, but giving the government a lot of power without the capacity is really, really dangerous in my view.

Chris: Sure. I think strong state capacity is prerequisite, of course, yes. One of the objections I have to the neoliberal regime is that it actively undermined the importance of state capacity, so agreed on that too. I think you're making a broader point. As a part Italian myself, I'll proudly claim the same heritage. Yes, I understand your point, but that to me is also a broader indictment of a political system that's not responsive to the needs and concerns of ordinary people. That's why part of our work is on that level as well, with a system of politics that needs to be responsive to the citizens in a real way.

Of course, we can pick what sectors matter and don't. It's like the famous quote from George H.W. Bush's former chair of economic advisors, who's like, "Potato chips, computer chips, what's the difference? A dollar is a dollar." He's like, "Well, no, there is a huge difference in terms of the national interest, in terms of national security, in terms of economic resilience and supply chain resilience and geopolitical strength and all the rest of it."

Of course, there's a difference between computer chips and potato chips, which is why eventually we needed to pass the CHIPS and Science Act so that we could rebuild an advanced semiconductor production capability in the United States that required direct policy intervention because of this neoliberal ideology that had let us invent the semiconductor and then ship it overseas for production. That was a terrible mistake.

No, do you want the government micromanaging every firm-level decision? No, of course not. Do you want the government setting broad strategic goals like, "Hey, maybe semiconductors matter"? Yes, of course you do. The failure to have done that has put us in a very weakened position, I would argue. I think, Luigi, I take your point, of course, but I think the level of analysis matters a lot. I have no concern at all about our ability to know what sectors matter in the future. Of course, chips matter in a special way. We know that.

Bethany: I appreciate your analogy about the World Cup teams and setting the rules and then having the team play on the field. What actually does that look like when it comes to business? Particularly, take some of these industries that are particularly fraught right now, as we think about what role industrial policy should play, like semiconductors or like biotech. What does the free market do that is apart from the rules that are attached to it, the rules of the game?

Chris: I think what the free market does is find efficient solutions motivated by the profit motive. What the Marxist analysis misses, I think, is the importance of that profit motive. You need the impulse and impetus to work hard, to innovate, to discover new things, to do productive things, to make advances. You need competition to keep you sharp as you do that. If you take the profit motive away, I think the system collapses. That's why I would call myself a capitalist. It's one of the reasons I would call myself a capitalist.

Even Adam Smith famously said, "Profits are highest in those countries that are running fastest to ruin." There is a way in which the profit motive can metastasize into something self-justifying. I don't think that's what the fathers of liberal economics like Adam Smith had in mind. They had a more morally grounded, and for that matter, a more nationally grounded view of economics. Adam Smith talked about the invisible hand. The only passage in The Wealth of Nations in which he discusses the invisible hand, he says, "If you are employing your capital domestically in the pursuit of productive uses, then yes, as if by an invisible hand, your pursuit of your private profit will redound to the benefit of the society in general."

It was almost a tautology, almost a truism. He's like, "If you're doing good things with your money, then yes, of course." There are conditions placed on the pursuit of profit because I think we see all the time that the pursuit of efficient profit doesn't automatically lead to a healthy society or a coherent and unified society or to human thriving or to the well-being of working people or to national strength on the global stage or any of the things that we care about.

That's where the conditions that policy can place become so important. That's why you have to have them. David Ricardo said something very similar. He had an assumption that capitalists would prefer to invest their capital domestically because of their affection for their home country rather than abroad, even if profits were higher abroad. He was wrong. He underappreciated the profit drive and how it could override patriotism and loyalty to your country. We see that all the time in the race to the bottom on wages, where companies are competing by how strongly they can squeeze their labor force.

Not every vector of competition in the pursuit of profit is good. It's the role of policy to constrain the market so that it is competing freely in those directions that are most productive and healthy. That's why, for me, as I said at the beginning, it's ultimately a teleological question. It's a question about purposes. What is the purpose of an economy? What is the purpose of capitalism? Aristotle taught us that the good of a thing is in its function. You can't analyze whether something is working well unless you know what it's for. What is capitalism for?

I think it's for a bunch of things. One of them is channeling capital to productive use. When that's not happening, because it's easier to make profits by doing something else, then we have a problem, and it's time for policy to step in.

Bethany: We're in a moment of upheaval for both political parties, as we've discussed. We're also, I think, in a moment of upheaval about what corporate power is. If you think about that through the lens of Nvidia or through the lens of Anthropic, part of the conversation is what does a company owe the nation that enabled its creation and success? How do you think about that?

Chris: We just started a new project at American Compass called Reclaiming American Citizenship, where we're trying to put words to the sense of what people think they've lost in the last few decades. It's economic, but it's also much deeper than just economics. People, again, feel this loss of a sense of shared agency, of mutual obligation to each other, of solidarity as a nation. Citizenship is a really powerful frame to talk about what full participation in a society and an economy and a nation should look like.

I think it's interesting to think about corporations as citizens, because good corporate citizenship has become this PR marketing term for, "Here are some nice programs we're going to throw some money at." This type of PR, stakeholder capitalism, whatever, that's quite empty and has nothing to do with the core business proposition of these corporations. I think we can go much deeper than that. If real citizenship is about not only rights, but mutual obligations to one another and to the country that we share, well, we grant corporations all kinds of rights. We grant them a form of legal personhood, in fact.

What are the mutual obligations that should come along with that? What is the baseline of patriotic duty and regard for their fellow citizens that American corporations should have? I think we've totally missed the mark on that. You get these companies like Nvidia, who, to boost their short-term profits, quarterly earnings, are selling advanced semiconductors to the Chinese Communist Party, having convinced the president, against the advice of every sane person in the administration, to do it.

That is transparently against the interests of the American people, like American national security. We have all kinds of examples of that type of behavior. In fairness, that's the system we've set up. I don't think we can fix that without changing, again, the policy incentives in which companies operate. It's not their fault that they're pursuing the easiest route to fastest profit. We have to change what the easiest route to fastest profit looks like, so they do something else.

Luigi: If in 2028, Chris Griswold was elected president, what would be the three-

Chris: God help us all.

[laughter]

Luigi: -things you would do differently? What are the three priorities to change and improve the world?

Chris: Just because I know we disagree on this topic. First, I would repeal the safe harbor for stock buybacks in the SEC rule. [laughs]

Luigi: You think this would be one of the first three?

Chris: No, of course not. I like to troll you because listeners should know that Luigi and I have fought about stock buybacks in the past.

Bethany: I did not know that.

Chris: Well, look, I think I would break it down into three things, like broad buckets of things that, again, have to do with the purpose of an economy and the purpose of capitalism. One is supporting the community and civic institutions that undergird rich life and that give us meaning and purpose—family, life, the education system. The other bucket of thing we've already talked about as well is making markets productive because not all market activity is equally productive, and we have to be allowed to say that, and redirect capital to productive use rather than the financial engineering that we're doing now. That's bucket 2.

Then bucket 3, making sure workers understand themselves and, in fact, are treated as co-creators of economic value and not widgets or units of production. Those are the three big buckets that I would start on day one, and then the right things to do in each of those buckets, well, we could have a long conversation about that. Bucket 1, I would reform the education system. Our college-for-all model is failed. Fewer than one in five American students go smoothly from graduating high school on time to a four-year degree that they graduate on time to a job that required a degree in the first place, and yet all of our federal dollars, for the most part, are focused on that minority of students.

College-for-all system has failed. We need a totally new system, in my opinion, of non-college pathways that lead both to dignified work economically and to social status as well and close this blue-collar, white-collar divide that has emerged as a result of this educational system. Bucket 2, yes, we need a national development bank. We need to start supporting critical industries. I'm glad that this administration and the previous one, SOF, have seen fit to much more aggressively invest in critical industries using public money, but we need to systematize it, Luigi, to your concern about it not being haphazard and corrupted or just subject to the whims of whoever.

We need to institutionalize it. We need a national development bank that is well-governed and properly mandated to invest in critical industries so that we don't have the problems vis-a-vis, say, critical minerals in China as we do now. In bucket 3, in terms of making sure American workers are enfranchised in the market, there's a lot of labor reforms that I think merit consideration. One of them, the most radical one, is sectoral bargaining, where I don't see why we have to fight workplace by workplace to unionize.

You do that, and then employers have a totally rational incentive to union-bust because they're competing on a race to the bottom on wages. You just set a floor, a mutually negotiated floor across an industry where workers and that industry meet in general across a region or sector, set that floor, then they all have to compete on something else like innovation or product quality or service quality and all the things we want them to actually be competing on rather than just squeezing wages.

Bethany: One thing that divides you from the progressive left, whatever the similarities on economic thinking, is the importance of a traditional family structure in your view. Why is the social part of the argument so critical to the economic part of the argument?

Chris: I don't even know that a lot of progressives disagree with that. I think we might disagree with how to get there, but I think most people agree that the ability to form and raise a family if you want one is essential and is critical. That's without mandating a kind of-- I'm not interested in imposing a 1950s model of family life on a very diverse country and a pluralist society. That's not my interest. My interest is making sure that policy privileges the choice to have a family if that's what you want because right now, number one, family formation plays a totally central role in social stability in any society.

Kids are good, families are good, just inherently, full stop, period. Also, without that future-oriented mentality, without the dynamism that future orientation brings, I think we run the risk of stagnation and sclerosis, which I think we are facing now as we become an increasingly aging society. A lot of other societies are in the same boat. Families matter. I think if we just treat family life as another consumer choice, some of us are dog moms or some of us are kid moms—that's not it.

Nothing wrong with having a dog, nothing wrong with not having kids. There is something wrong with, I think, a policy structure that doesn't make it possible for people to have families if they want to. If you poll, and we have done this, if you just ask working and middle-class people, the majority of whom say they don't have the number of kids they want, if you ask them why, far and away the top reason is affordability—their concern they can't afford to. That is an insane set of conditions that's just totally corrosive to a healthy society. If you want a family, you should be able to have one, and economics should not be the reason you can't.

That, I think, is just essential. I think the question for the left is-- I know a lot of progressive friends would agree with everything I just said. A lot of them wouldn't because they do have this highly individualized view of autonomous consumer choice, like whatever choice you make, policy should be neutral. I don't think policy should penalize your choices. I do think policy should privilege certain choices that are uniquely important, and the ability to have a family is one of them.

Luigi: Are you in favor of free childcare à la Mamdani?

Chris: My preferred policy solution would be a monthly cash benefit to working families with children, in part because, and this is, if you poll on this question as well, professionally-provided childcare is the first choice of dual-income, upper-income professionals only. Everyone else prefers a cash benefit because it's much more flexible and is much more conducive to a wider range of childcare solutions versus just we're both in the office, and so we have to use professional childcare.

It's a perfectly valid choice, and it is the right one for a lot of people. A cash benefit would help people afford that option too, but it would also afford if one parent wants to work a little less for a while, it makes that more plausible. If you want a family member, if you want your abuela, your grandma, or whoever to come and watch the kids and want to pay a little extra to make that possible, you can do that. It turns out that working-class people, when you ask them, have a much wider range of preferred childcare solution structures than professionals do.

I think we over-index on professional preferences sometimes because it's professionals who are all writing policy briefs and white papers and laws. I think it's important to be mindful of our own blind spots, those of us who are in DC or in government, anywhere in the country. Even a sizable majority of very conservative people or self-identified Republicans will say, "We think the federal government should do more directly to support working families."

The notion that conservatives are not interested in federal support for families is not true. The interest is high, and it's growing rapidly, but the form that takes, I think, is a matter of legitimate policy debate, and my preferred form is maximal flexibility, trusting families with cash in their pocket.

Bethany: To me, the key question still, the devil still is in the details, which is, where does the government draw those lines in order to encourage the free market? I'm still not clear on how exactly that works in principle, not just in theory.

Luigi: No, I agree with that. I think that actually, if I were a central planner and I were to create the ideal candidate for the conservative to regain credibility with the ordinary workers, Chris would be my number one candidate, and the most balanced of them all. You are criticizing him because of his vagueness. For example, on the Mamdani question, he was very clear and drew a very important distinction between the progressive left and, can we call it the progressive right or the populist? Populist has taken a negative connotation, but the workers' right--

Bethany: The rethinking, right? I don't know. We have to come up with it. We have to coin a name for it on this podcast. I think that would be good because it's the progressive left and not the radical right, maybe?

Luigi: It's not that radical because when you think about radical, you think about extreme right-winger, you think about [crosstalk]

Bethany: I know, but it's radical in terms of its approach to these Republican sacred cows around market fundamentalism, but I agree. It can be a misleading term, too, just as populist can be. Anyway, I didn't mean to interrupt your train of thought, but I started to think we should really come up with the right term that captures this.

Luigi: I think so, but I think that he's very clear, and even when I ask him about the proposals, I think he started at 30,000 feet, which was not very satisfactory. Then he was willing to go down in a more serious way, and in a way where you see a dramatic difference vis-a-vis the traditional left. Take the college view, the traditional left, particularly the progressive left, is very much embedded with the university system and supporting of the university system in every possible form or shape.

He's saying, look, half of the American people don't go to college. There's an enormous amount of money dedicated to college, and not necessarily for good purposes, so we need to rethink a alternative education way that is satisfactory for people who don't go to college, which I think is a very important point. At the end of the day, the way I see it is that capital is as a mean, not an end.

Bethany: Yes. I loved that. I think we've talked a lot on this podcast about how capitalism itself is shaped by the rules of the state and that there isn't necessarily and never has been such a thing as a purely free market, but I think the question we've never asked that Chris got at very eloquently is, what is a market for? What is an economy for? I love the idea of thinking about that through the lens of first principles. What is an economy for? What is it supposed to serve?

I think it's a question we haven't asked before and a really, really important one. I would really want to push and dig in on the details for how you make this work. Where should the rules stop in order to encourage the beauty of the free market? I think everything boils down to that question. I'm not sure that he doesn't have an answer. The problem might be that we didn't push him hard enough on that. As I said, I think it really is in the specifics.

Luigi: I think this is where you draw the compromise. We all do compromises, especially if you want to be active in politics. With two parties, there will never be a party that you subscribe 100% to. You have to accept certain things of a party in order to push other ideas you really feel strongly about. He seemed to have chosen to develop his policy, et cetera, within the Republican Party, in spite of the fact that the traditional Republican Party certainly was not very sympathetic to that.

My claim is even the Trump version is maybe sympathetic in words, but not in substance. It takes a lot of wishful thinking to see this transforming in his direction. Maybe he's right. I've been wrong before, so I'm not claiming that I know. I just find it surprising. As I said, in other people, I see it more like a strategic ploy. I think in this case, it's authentic, and I wish him good luck.

Bethany: I guess another place I would challenge him and push on, although I'm really thinking through this myself, and so I'm not sure if I disagree with him, but pro-family policies are a choice, and the idea that it doesn't disadvantage people who choose not to have a family is an interesting conundrum. I'm not sure that's true. I think it is more a challenge to some of the views of the progressive left than he might want to admit.

That said, I'm not sure he's wrong. Tyler Cohen wrote an interesting piece the other day about this population decline issue, and the world [chuckles] really is a real thing. A country that can start to encourage people to have children, it isn't just a religious view of the world; it's actually fast becoming a very practical one. There's an interesting intersection of his pro-family narrative with the reality of what's happening on the ground.

Luigi: Yes, but even in that dimension, I found him quite moderate in the sense that a lot of people who are worried about fertility, they tend to become kind of a obsessive pronatalist in a way that is disturbing and implying a particular role of women that both of us don't appreciate. I didn't hear that in his statement.

Bethany: I think he is, on that front, far more nuanced than I would have expected him to be. As I said, I think he might be right. Maybe where he sits is actually the right middle ground of really trying to be pro-family for all sorts of reasons. Anyway, without pushing this idea that a 1950s society is what's best for everybody.