James M. Buchanan famously described Public Choice as “politics without romance,” observing that in politics, like the rest of their lives, people respond to incentives, pursue goals, and try to improve their positions. His observations, and those of myriad scholars who came after him, while uncontroversial to the average voter, revolutionized the study of politics.  

This approach explains how bureaucrats seek agency resources, jurisdiction, stability, and advancement. Interest groups seek access and influence. Elected officials want to remain in office while building coalitions large enough to pass their preferred policies. Explaining the rise of iron-triangle politics and issue networks, public choice gave shape to how agencies, congressional committees with jurisdiction over those agencies, and organized interest groups develop durable relationships. Agencies depend on outside groups for information and expertise. Congressional committees rely on agencies to execute statutory mandates and on interest groups for political support. Organized interests gain privileged access to the rulemaking process. 

At the center of this process is the political entrepreneur. Elected officials, bureaucrats, and interest groups discover opportunities to use existing rules, reinterpret mandates, or reshape procedures in ways that advance their goals. Once one person demonstrates that a rule can be stretched, bypassed, or weaponized, others have incentives to imitate the strategy. Radicalization is, then, a product of institutional competition. Rules shape behavior. When those rules reward escalation, escalation should not surprise us. 

We explored this reality in a chapter in Broken: How American Politics is Driving Civil Unrest, Financial Collapse & War. 

Using this logic of Public Choice and two cases (federal budgeting and immigration), we show how political incentives and institutional constraints contribute to radicalization and how rules can reward escalation over compromise. 

Expanding Budgets and Ugly Budget Battles 

When government commitments were more limited and more spending was discretionary, budget conflict was managed largely through bargaining. But as permanent spending commitments grew, the fiscal space available for annual political negotiation narrowed. 

The Great Society and its expanded spending marked a major change. Medicare, Medicaid, and other entitlement programs expanded mandatory spending, placing large parts of the budget on autopilot unless Congress changed the underlying law. 

Legislators could claim credit for broad statutory commitments while leaving implementation details and difficult trade-offs to administrators. Beneficiaries of federal programs had strong incentives to defend them. Taxpayers, on the other hand, faced dispersed costs and weaker incentives to organize. Over time, budget politics became increasingly dominated by concentrated interests defending existing commitments. 

The Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 added another institutional layer: the modern budget resolution process, but its reconciliation procedure proved especially consequential. Reconciliation lowered procedural barriers for budget-related legislation by limiting debate and allowing measures to pass the Senate with a simple majority. Major fiscal changes became easier to enact on narrow partisan margins. 

The debt ceiling battles of the early 2010s reflected the deeper rigidity of this system. Entitlement growth, tax reductions, defense commitments, recession-era stimulus, and emergency financial interventions all contributed to rising debt. The Budget Control Act of 2011 constrained discretionary spending but left the largest drivers of long-term spending, entitlements protected under mandatory spending, largely untouched. Political conflict focused on the most flexible portion of the budget, not the most fiscally significant ones. 

As debt and interest costs rise, each budget decision becomes more contentious. Groups that expect benefits from government programs resist reductions. Groups that expect to pay for those programs demand limits. When reform is delayed, symbolic brinkmanship substitutes for structural correction. Radical budget politics come directly from a system that promises concentrated benefits, disperses costs, and postpones facing budget realities. 

Incentives Shift Immigration

Immigration policy followed a similar pattern of incentive-driven radicalization. The Hart-Celler Act of 1965 replaced the national-origins quota system with priorities centered on family reunification and skills-based immigration. This reform had broad support, but it also changed immigration outcomes by diversifying countries of origin and contributing to new political disputes over migration levels, impacts on the labor market and demographic change. 

By the mid-1980s, unauthorized immigration had become a major political issue. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 attempted a compromise: legalization for millions of unauthorized immigrants combined with employer sanctions meant to restore a permission-based system. The compromise temporarily reduced pressure, but it also made immigration a permanent national political issue. 

The Immigration Act of 1990 expanded legal immigration channels while retaining family reunification and employment priorities. But by the mid-1990s, enforcement had become more central. The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 expanded detention, deportation authority, and expedited removal. Immigration was increasingly framed through legal compliance and public order. 

After September 11, 2001, the incentive structure shifted again. Immigration administration was reorganized under the Department of Homeland Security, and national security became one of a handful of dominant policy priorities. Later disputes over comprehensive reform failed repeatedly, pushing more immigration policymaking into executive action. DACA, DAPA, travel restrictions, “Remain in Mexico,” Title 42, and subsequent reversals showed how legislative gridlock encouraged executive oscillation. 

The result is a politics no longer centered primarily on Hart-Celler’s balance of family, employment, and humanitarian priorities. It has moved toward conflict over enforcement, border control, executive authority, and legal status. As with the budget, when those rules reward escalation, stable compromise becomes harder to sustain, and radicalization rises.

Ambition No Longer Counteracts Ambition

The expansion of the government’s size and scope has made Madison’s call for “ambition counteracting ambition” increasingly difficult to obtain. The current system gives self-interested political actors many ways to pursue their preferences through government power. 

The roots of radicalization are found in those incentives and the institutions that create them. A government that continually grows creates more opportunities for politicians, bureaucrats, and interest groups to use its levers for their own ends. As those opportunities grow, so do the incentives for escalation, and ultimately radicalization. 

Broken is available here.

Congress may finally receive the inflation adjustments lawmakers have spent years blocking. But before legislators get a raise, Congress should first do its most important job: budgeting responsibly. 

A federal judge recently ruled that Congress likely violated the Constitution’s Twenty-Seventh Amendment by repeatedly canceling automatic cost-of-living adjustments for lawmakers’ pay. Since 2009, congressional salaries have remained frozen at $174,000, even as inflation steadily eroded their value by about 31 percent. 

Members fear the political backlash of voting for higher pay. But the broader issue is not whether congressional compensation should keep pace with inflation. The real problem is that Congress routinely fails to fulfill its most basic fiscal responsibilities while operating one of the largest and most indebted governments in the world — an increasingly dysfunctional enterprise.

Imagine executives at a major corporation repeatedly failing to adopt budgets on time, relying on temporary patches to keep operations running, and allowing debt to spiral out of control. Smart shareholders would not reward those executives with automatic raises. They would demand financial accountability and better performance. 

Meanwhile, in Congress, legislators regularly miss budget deadlines and fail to pass appropriations bills before the fiscal year begins. Instead, Congress lurches from continuing resolution to shutdown threat to a budget package passed in the middle of the night when few people are watching.  

The result is a less transparent, less accountable, and more expensive federal government that adds trillions annually to an already dangerously large national debt that is on track to exceed its record high last seen in the immediate aftermath of World War II. 

Americans care about attracting and retaining a highly qualified Congress. But lawmakers should not receive automatic pay increases without accountability for results. More important than how much Congress gets paid is what taxpayers can expect in return. 

Any future congressional pay adjustment should be paired with meaningful pay-for-performance reforms tied to Congress’s fulfillment of its most basic responsibilities: passing budgets and appropriations bills on time, avoiding government shutdowns, and putting the federal budget on a sustainable fiscal path. 

If lawmakers carry out the basic work of fiscally responsible governing, they should receive their cost-of-living adjustment. If they fail, pay should be withheld or delayed until they complete those responsibilities. 

Congress has already demonstrated that these incentives can work. In 2013, after the Senate failed to pass a budget resolution for three years in a row, Congress adopted a “No Budget, No Pay” policy. The threat of withheld compensation helped motivate the Senate to pass a budget within three weeks of the statutory deadline.

More recently, the Senate unanimously advanced a resolution sponsored by Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) to suspend senators’ pay during a government shutdown. The measure reflects a growing recognition that lawmakers should face direct consequences when Congress fails to fund the government. It’s absurd that air traffic controllers and TSA agents will miss paychecks during a shutdown while the members of Congress responsible for the funding lapse continue collecting salaries. 

Incentives matter. Congress’s institutional incentives are poorly aligned with fiscal stewardship. Legislators are rewarded for seniority, toeing the party line, and fundraising success over doing the difficult work of responsible budgeting and engaging in fiscal oversight. 

Competitive compensation can help attract and retain qualified legislators. But compensation should be tied to performance in carrying out Congress’s core constitutional responsibilities in managing the public purse. A Congress that cannot carry out the basic functions of funding the government responsibly on time and fix an unsustainable debt trajectory should not expect automatic raises with no conditions attached. 

A deeper irony is also at play here: Congress’s fiscal failures contribute to the very inflation that has eroded the buying power of lawmakers’ salaries in the first place. Persistent deficit spending and chronic budget dysfunction reduce investor confidence in the future value of US bonds, and inflation expectations rise with unsustainable debt accumulation. 

Absent automatic inflation adjustments, members of Congress can protect the purchasing power of their salaries by governing in ways that help keep inflation under control.

There’s not much that the federal government can do to make housing less costly; most of the action must be at the state and local levels. But there are a few areas where federal regulations or guidance, backed by subsidies, make housing development more expensive or difficult. 

One such area comes out of the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP). The NFIP insures property owners against the risk of catastrophic loss from flooding. In the United States, regular homeowners’ insurance policies do not cover flooding or other “acts of God.” 

The NFIP generally attempts to charge owners of new structures in floodplains an actuarially fair rate that reflects the risk of flood damage. However, the program grandfathered existing structures into heavily subsidized rates, encouraging beneficiaries to rebuild — sometimes multiple times — in high-risk flood zones. Premium growth is capped at 18 percent per year. As of 2023, only one-third of policyholders paid an actuarially fair premium, with the remainder paying substantially less — at an anticipated cost of $27 billion to US taxpayers by 2037.

The main way the NFIP reduces housing affordability is through its regulatory requirements. The NFIP requires states and localities to adopt flood management regulations before their property owners can participate in the program. Some of these regulations are reasonable, but others are crude or outdated.

These requirements are how the NFIP attempts to control moral hazard, the tendency of insured parties to behave in ways that increase the likelihood of the insured risk occurring. Without requiring some form of flood loss mitigation, the NFIP would likely encourage more construction in floodplains, as well as building techniques that may be cheaper but less protective — risks that the program could not easily monitor and therefore could not price accurately.

It is understandable, then, that the NFIP seeks to encourage mitigation measures. But its approach of working through local governments rather than individual property owners has often encouraged excessive and unnecessary regulations that increase the cost of housing production without a clear mitigation rationale.

For example, the NFIP requires every participating community to adopt a floodplain management ordinance. These ordinances give local governments the authority to regulate development in floodplains, defined as areas with at least a one percent annual risk of flooding.

While some regulations might be reasonable — requiring buildings to be elevated above the 100-year high-water mark, for instance — localities have frequently taken the opportunity to ban residential development in the floodplain altogether. Fort Collins and Brighton, Colorado, have both banned new housing in the floodplain, no matter how it is built. 

Until recently, Lebanon, New Hampshire allowed single-family housing but banned multi-family housing in the floodplain. Perhaps realizing that this distinction had no rationale in sound flood management practice, the city council repealed the ban on multi-family housing in 2019. 

Outright prohibitions of manufactured housing in floodplains are common nationwide, even though such homes can be made as safe as other single-family houses through anchoring and elevation.

Another common regulation not technically required under federal law is to make new housing development in floodplains subject to a discretionary public hearing process, rather than relying on the judgment of technical staff. It is not clear how the general public would be better qualified to assess the flood-resistant qualities of new construction than trained professionals, but making permitting discretionary and subject to public hearings does create more opportunities to delay or block new residential development.

FEMA, which administers the NFIP, explicitly encourages communities to adopt “more restrictive” floodplain regulations than the minimums set forth in federal law. The Community Rating System gives policyholders discounts in communities that implement anti-development regulations in floodplains and watersheds, giving them an incentive to do so.

Examples of regulations that FEMA explicitly encourages include larger minimum lot sizes, applying the stricter International Building Code to a wider range of development, placing open space into public ownership for conservation, and prohibiting residential or commercial development in floodplains. Communities are then scored using a complex points system that rewards adoption of these measures.

If the NFIP charged policyholders market-based premiums on new construction, there would be less need to encourage localities to adopt specific regulations. Those premiums would reflect flood risk, which communities could reduce through a range of mitigation strategies. But does FEMA actually know how effective each of these strategies is? The Community Rating System has the appearance of scientific precision, but the weights assigned to its components are ultimately arbitrary.

Giving communities credit for applying the International Building Code is an example of this arbitrariness. The IBC applies higher standards to development than the International Residential Code, but most of those standards have nothing to do with flooding. Requiring costly sprinkler systems for small buildings drives up costs without improving safety much.

In fact, the Government Accountability Office says that the Community Rating System does not reduce flood risk by as much as the premium discounts that participating communities receive: “The amounts of CRS discounts — both to individual properties and program-wide — are not closely linked to potential loss reduction of currently insured properties.” As a result, they say, policyholders in non-CRS communities are cross-subsidizing those in CRS communities.

Unfortunately, much of the damage may already be done. By incentivizing strict floodplain regulations, the NFIP has given localities a tool that can be used for exclusionary purposes. Reforming or privatizing the program will not put the genie back in the bottle, but it could reduce incentives that encourage even well-intentioned communities to maintain stricter regulations than they otherwise would.

Ideally, the federal government would no longer provide flood insurance. Private flood insurance is available in countries like the United Kingdom and France, and there is no clear reason it could not function in the United States as well.

If that is not politically feasible, FEMA could at least revise the Community Rating System to reward outcomes rather than the regulatory tools assumed to produce them. Instead of rewarding communities for increasing minimum lot sizes, it could reward reductions in impervious surface area, perhaps measured through satellite imagery. Instead of rewarding stricter building codes, it could reward policyholders for elevating structures above base flood elevation or locating them near higher-capacity storm sewers. Residents could then pressure local governments to adopt the specific mitigation measures that reduce flood risk and, in turn, premiums.

Reforming flood insurance will not solve the housing shortage on its own, but it could help at the margins. As federal policymakers consider ways to address affordability, this is one of several levers worth examining.

As German forces launched what would become their final major offensive on the Western Front in March 1918, President Woodrow Wilson’s Food Administrator, Herbert Hoover, identified what he called “one of the most vital problems confronting the nation”: a shortage of sugar. Demand had surged. Soldiers needed sugar in their rations, while producers and civilians relied on it to preserve and can food for the war effort. At the same time, supply had collapsed due to Europe’s engulfment in war, the disruption of Cuban cane fields during the 1917 Chambelona War, and German U-boats threatening Atlantic shipping.

What followed became one of the clearest examples in American history of price controls spiraling into creeping interventionism — and a textbook demonstration of why such schemes fail, even when administered by capable and patriotic officials pursuing a common wartime goal.

Hoover was commissioned as Food Administrator of the United States on August 10, 1917. A successful mining engineer and humanitarian, he seemed the ideal public servant for such an important task. He wasted little time, setting out to “assure to the American consumer a fair and just price” of sugar. Blaming rising prices on speculators rather than on underlying economic conditions, he ordered the suspension of trading in sugar futures on August 16 until “further notice.” And, by the end of the month, he had pressured American beet sugar producers “to limit the price of their product” with an expected savings of $30 million within the next year.

But replacing the flow of information and the structure of incentives supplied by the price system was far more difficult than Hoover, a graduate of Stanford University, imagined. Hoover’s attempts to adjust the system to unexpected changes in economic conditions were frustrated by the sugar industry’s attempt to divert the program to their own benefit. Hoover ultimately created a tripartite bureaucratic apparatus: the Sugar Division of the Food Administration, the International Sugar Committee, and the Sugar Distributing Committee. He set prices by signing agreements with producers and refiners under the threat of revocation of their license if they charged “excessive” prices.

But artificially low prices did exactly what economics textbooks predict: they encouraged consumption while discouraging production. Pre-war per-capita consumption stood at roughly 85 pounds annually, much of it in candy, soft drinks, condensed milk, canned goods, ice cream, and ketchup. Even at the beginning of the program, administrators acknowledged the predictable difficulties of holding prices low by urging consumers to limit consumption in the face of increased demand and decreased supply. By mid-October, a sugar famine was already causing sugar-using factories to shut down, and Hoover was forced to order cuts in candy production. The low price of sugar discouraged retailers from stocking it, especially given that it would not cover the increasing costs of transporting it from refineries. 

Under Hoover’s informal price ceilings, demand stayed high while beet growers watched competing crops become more profitable. As economist Joshua Bernhardt (1919) noted, mounting production costs and unregulated prices for other foods made sugar beets progressively less attractive. In desperation, Hoover tried to enlist schoolchildren and boys’ and girls’ clubs in sugar production, offering families an allotment of sugar in exchange for planting an acre of sugar beets. Pledge cards, circulars, and monetary incentives were deployed with patriotic fervor.

Hoover also formed local commissions to investigate spiraling production costs, producing thousands of pages of testimony from planters, nearly all of whom recommended higher prices. Testimonies from over 100 planters in California alone filled nine thick volumes (Bernhardt 1919). Planters rejected a flat price because it gave an advantage to low-cost producers, especially foreigners. Cuba could deliver sugar for about 5.5 cents per pound, while domestic beet sugar planters required nine cents and Louisiana cane sugar planters needed ten. Hoover’s political solution to these competing special interest groups was to buy cheap foreign sugar, along with domestic output purchased at higher prices, and then resell it to American refiners at an average price.

Price controls on sugar gradually expanded the scope of intervention. Transportation priorities, refinery allocations, export quotas, and distribution zones were imposed. Louisiana sugar failed to reach New England refineries because regulated prices made it more profitable for Louisiana mills to sell lower-grade sugars directly to confectioners than to ship to Atlantic refiners. Centrally prioritizing sugar allocation without market prices led to accusations of misallocation. While households went without sugar for canning and baking, Hoover argued in Senate testimony that the candy industry employed 250,000 Americans and that further diversion of sugar would put them “entirely out of work.” Yet, as Blakey (1918) notes, the knowledge problem cuts the other way: candy might have deserved a higher priority “in view of the national campaign for prohibition,” given its potential as a substitute for alcohol.

The Food Administration proudly claimed it had saved consumers millions. Yet as Roy Blakey (1918) observed, gratitude evaporated when sugar simply sporadically disappeared from tables in regionalized shortages. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge’s mocking refrain captured the public mood: “What comfort is there in a low price when no sugar can be obtained?” Searches for “Sugar Famine” on Newspapers.com yield over 20,000 matches during the years 1917-1920, the years Hoover’s sugar programs were operative, yet only 284 in 1916 and 370 in 1920.

The dilemma Hoover faced was classic: he needed “capable and informed representatives” who inevitably had skin in the game, or “uninformed ones who were disinterested.” Neither produced efficiency. Instead, the plan spawned a clerical army, including state-level certificate systems classifying industrial sugar use into five categories (A through E), population-based allocations, and transportation zones, which required a system of prioritization as well, designed to match supply to “equitable” demand. As Frank Rutter (1902) earlier recognized about attempts to regulate the sugar industry, any regulation would pit the concentrated interest of producers against the dispersed costs faced by consumers, “Opposed to these demands [of the sugar industry] there is only the diffused interest of the consuming public, with no detailed knowledge concerning trade conditions or the inner workings of the tariff, and without organization….”

The sugar episode was not an isolated wartime curiosity. It was a microcosm of the broader logic of Ludwig von Mises’ interventionism. Regulate the price of one commodity and you must regulate its inputs, its substitutes, its transport, and its distribution. “From the few instances cited,” Blakey wrote, “as well as from one’s daily observation, it is easy to see that the regulation of the price of one thing involves the regulation of the prices of all constituent factors and competing commodities, which in the last analysis means the regulation of wages, as well as the regulation of the prices, the supply and the distribution of everything else.”

Today’s policymakers would do well to revisit this forgotten chapter before reaching for price controls, “equitable allocation” schemes, or industrial policy boards. Price ceilings create shortages, which in turn necessitate rationing. Rationing requires bureaucracy, which opens the door to lobbying and favoritism. The consumer — the very citizens Hoover was commissioned to serve — ultimately pays in empty shelves and higher overall costs.

Herbert Hoover was a brilliant engineer and a sincere public servant. He believed he could “stabilize” markets through expert administration. The sugar famine suggested otherwise. Markets are not problems to be solved by committees; they are discovery processes that coordinate millions of decisions without central direction. When governments try to override that process, even with the best of intentions and the full powers of wartime emergency, the result is not order but the very chaos they sought to prevent.

For years now, a persistent narrative has circulated in American political discourse: China is quietly buying up vast swaths of US farmland, threatening food security, undermining sovereignty, and gradually gaining strategic control over America’s agricultural base.

It is an emotionally resonant story, one that combines geopolitical rivalry, declining trust in institutions, and anxieties about national decline. Yet like many claims that gain traction through repetition, its empirical foundations are weak.

The short version: Chinese ownership of US farmland exists, but the scale is dramatically smaller than commonly portrayed, the economic implications are muted, and any genuinely important concerns are narrower, more specific, and less sensational than the public narrative machine alleges.

We begin with the numbers. Chinese-linked investors own somewhere between roughly 250,000 acres of US agricultural land, depending on the year and reporting method used. That may sound substantial in isolation, but context matters. The United States contains roughly 880 to 900 million acres of farmland. Chinese ownership therefore amounts to approximately 0.02 percent of total US agricultural land: a rounding error in macroeconomic terms. Even within the category of all foreign-held US farmland, China represents well under one percent. Put differently, the claim that China is “buying up American farmland” is not supported by the available data.

Indeed, the broader story of foreign ownership looks very different from the one often implied in political debates. Foreign entities collectively own approximately 43 to 46 million acres of US agricultural land, or roughly three to four percent of the national total. Yet the overwhelming majority of this ownership comes not from geopolitical adversaries, but from long-standing allies and trading partners. Canada alone owns roughly one-third of foreign-owned US farmland: 13 to 15 million acres, or forty to sixty times more than China. The Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and other European countries collectively account for millions more acres. If acreage alone constituted an economic threat, political attention would look very different.

Moreover, much of what is classified as “foreign-owned agricultural land” is not traditional cropland at all. Large portions consist of timberland, renewable energy projects, grazing areas, or institutional investment holdings. Particularly in states such as Texas, foreign-held acreage is often tied to wind or solar developments rather than farming. In many cases, land ownership reflects pension funds, long-term asset diversification, or industrial activity rather than strategic attempts to influence agricultural production. This distinction matters because public imagination tends to conjure images of foreign governments quietly accumulating Midwestern cropland, when the reality is often corporate ownership structures tied to energy, forestry, or vertically integrated agribusiness.

The Chinese component of this story is especially concentrated. More than eighty percent of Chinese-linked agricultural holdings are associated with only a handful of entities, the most notable being the 2013 acquisition of Smithfield Foods. That transaction alone brought approximately 146,000 acres under Chinese ownership. Yet even here, the political symbolism tends to outweigh the underlying economics. Smithfield remains a US-based producer, operating largely through American supply chains, workers, facilities, and domestic production. Although its ownership structure changed amid heated opposition from interest groups, the firm did not suddenly transform into an instrument of foreign agricultural control. The firm primarily produces for US consumers and functions within American regulatory and legal institutions.

Geographically, Chinese-linked holdings are concentrated in a relatively small number of states, including Texas, North Carolina, Missouri, Utah, and Florida, with smaller holdings scattered elsewhere. Even in these states, however, Chinese ownership typically represents far less than one percent of total agricultural acreage. There is little evidence that such ownership materially influences agricultural output, commodity pricing, food availability, or broader land markets. The United States remains one of the largest and most productive agricultural exporters in the world. No plausible reading of the data suggests Chinese land ownership threatens American food security in any meaningful sense.

Still, dismissing the matter entirely would be a mistake. There are concerns, but they are much narrower than fearmongers tend to imply. The first involves proximity to sensitive military or strategic sites. Several proposed or completed Chinese-linked land purchases have raised scrutiny because of their location near military installations or critical infrastructure. A frequently cited example involved land near Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota, where national security objections ultimately helped block development plans. In these cases, acreage is less important than geography. A few hundred strategically placed acres may matter more than tens of thousands of remote ones.

Second, there are reasonable questions regarding ownership transparency. Land can be acquired through subsidiaries, partnerships, shell corporations, or joint ventures that obscure beneficial ownership. This creates legitimate challenges for regulators attempting to distinguish between normal commercial investment and potentially sensitive acquisitions. Yet here too, the appropriate response is targeted transparency and review mechanisms, not broad exaggerations about foreign domination of American agriculture.

Third is the issue of reciprocity, though its significance is open to debate. The United States remains one of the world’s most desirable destinations for investment precisely because of our stable institutions, relatively open markets, and strong protections for private property. Other countries, including China, operate under far more restrictive legal and ownership systems, particularly with respect to land. Yet it is not immediately obvious that differing rules necessarily constitute a problem. A country that attracts global capital because investors trust its institutions occupies a different position than one in which investment is constrained by legal uncertainty or state control. The relevant policy question, then, is not merely whether reciprocal access exists in a formal sense, but whether particular forms of foreign investment create identifiable national-security or strategic risks that outweigh the broader benefits of openness. 

If one argues that Chinese purchases of agricultural land should be prohibited categorically, the logic quickly expands to foreign direct investment as a category. Should foreign firms be barred from investing in American factories, warehouses, logistics networks, commercial real estate, or manufacturing facilities? Should allied pension funds be prohibited from owning timberland? Should energy investments be restricted simply because ownership is foreign? Such questions illustrate why precision matters. Nearly $6 trillion of cumulative foreign investment underpins swaths of the American economy. The policy issue is not foreign investment per se, but how to distinguish productive capital inflows from genuinely sensitive national security risks.

The conclusion is far from dramatic, which may explain why it struggles to compete politically. Chinese ownership of US farmland is tiny, highly concentrated, and irrelevant to both America’s agricultural production and food security. The broader narrative of sweeping foreign control is substantially overstated relative to the facts and data. National security concerns can exist in specific cases, especially near sensitive infrastructure, and reciprocity deserves thoughtful debate. But neither concern justifies abandoning proportionality or confusing a handful of narrow issues for a sweeping economic threat that does not exist.

Almost 250 years ago, a group of revolutionaries published a document declaring their independence from the world’s largest empire. The Declaration of Independence clearly articulated a set of principles that had been developing for centuries — namely, that people are born free and possess an inherent right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Seven years later, after a long and arduous war, they realized their dream, and the United States of America began its grand experiment: a nation governed by its citizens rather than a monarch or dictator, with liberty placed firmly at its center. Contemporary defenders of liberalism are the progeny of that generation. We are the revolutionaries carrying this dream forward.

Today, many on both the Right and the Left — national conservatives and so-called progressives alike — seek to undermine the American experiment. They claim it has failed the middle class, minorities, women, and other groups. They argue that their ideas — tariffs, class warfare, and greater state control over the economy — will make us safer, restore jobs, and reduce poverty. But these ideas are old, and when nations have relied on them in the past, they have faltered.

Take trade. Peter Navarro and others in and around the Trump administration believe America needs to pull back from international commerce. They advocate high tariffs on imports to restrict Americans’ access to foreign goods, raise revenue, and boost domestic manufacturing. This is not new thinking. It is very old thinking.

From 1815 to 1846, the United Kingdom had a series of policies, known as the Corn Laws, that in effect imposed a 28 percent tariff on imported grains. These laws benefited landowners at the expense of workers and consumers who paid 9 percent more for food, leaving less money for clothing, shelter, and everything else. These laws made the United Kingdom poorer, not richer.

In 1434, the Chinese Emperor Xuande issued the Edict of Haijin. It suspended official ocean-going voyages, effectively isolating China from much of the outside world. Privately owned ocean-going vessels were destroyed, and the empire’s naval fleet was allowed to decay. For much of the next 350 years, China remained largely inward-looking and self-sufficient — an outcome that might please many Republicans these days. Some purported justifications for China’s isolationist swing were to end piracy and to put pressure on Japan, which was a large importer of Chinese goods. 

Unfortunately for China, the policy backfired. By the time it re-engaged with the West through contact with England in the late 1700s and early 1800s, it had fallen significantly behind in both technological and military development. England easily defeated China in the Opium Wars, kickstarting China’s “century of humiliation.”

Protectionism is an old idea with periods of widespread support across the globe. The newer idea, the innovative idea, is realizing that international trade brings benefits to all involved. Supporters of freer trade are the true radicals in the best sense of the word. They are the ones pushing a counterintuitive idea that makes people better off.

Class warfare is another old idea that is back in vogue. Progressives make their living denouncing billionaires and big business. Republicans used to largely avoid such rhetoric, but now folks on the Right are okay with higher taxes on corporations, “Big Tech,” and the wealthy. 

The novel idea is not going after the rich just because they are successful. That has been done in countries all over the globe. The communists in Cuba do it, the socialists in Venezuela do it, and the European progressives do it, too. The revolutionary idea is allowing people to keep the fruits of their labor. Successful entrepreneurs in America have a lot of money because they have created a lot of value for society. Their wealth is a just reward for the value they have created. 

Paying taxes to support essential government programs is one way we help the least fortunate among us. But levying punitive taxes on the rich reflects a more primitive impulse, appealing to base instincts of envy and resentment. The real innovation was overcoming those instincts to build a system that respects individuals, encourages success, and protects private property. American capitalism, born of our Revolution, has largely achieved this, and we continue the work of the Founders when we defend it.

State-owned enterprises are also making a comeback. After World War II, the United Kingdom nationalized dozens of industries as part of the post-war consensus. This consensus, promoted by progressive intellectual heavyweights such as John Maynard Keynes and William Beveridge, argued for a mixed economy with significant government involvement in industry. Coal, telecommunications, railways, canals, steel, and shipbuilding were just a few of the industries the UK government took over. Nationalization was supposed to generate full employment, and along with a robust welfare state, prevent the type of conditions experienced by Europeans and Americans alike during the depression of the 1930s.

The reality was different. As John Moore, former UK Financial Secretary to the Treasury, discussed in a Harvard Business Review article, nationalized industries had low returns on capital, high costs, bad labor relations, and were generally unable to satisfy consumers. According to Moore, by 1979, government-controlled industries were costing taxpayers £3 billion per year, or nearly $24 billion in current US dollars. The United Kingdom’s economic woes in the 1970s gave former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher the opening she needed to privatize these industries. Her actions improved the industries previously crushed by government mismanagement and boosted the larger economy.

This year marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. There will be no shortage of celebrations, but as we commemorate the occasion, we should remember what exactly we are celebrating: a group of radical thinkers who demanded liberty, not paternalism; trade, not protectionism; and a government that protected rights rather than one that determined them. America has not always lived up to those ideals, but our pursuit of them has enabled us to extend freedom to more people than any other nation in history. The result, though imperfect, has been extraordinary prosperity.

Today’s defenders of liberalism are the true revolutionaries, and we must do our part to advance the ideals of the American founding.