Alexis de Tocqueville was born on July 29, 1805. Two hundred and twenty-one years later, he has become a man whom every political tribe seeks to claim as its own. The most ardent suitors at the moment are the post-liberals. Patrick Deneen and the national conservatives have made Tocqueville something close to a patron saint, finding in his portrait of democratic America an early glimpse of liberalism’s fatal contradiction. Liberal societies, they argue, dissolve the moral and communal supports on which they depend, until nothing is left but isolated individuals standing alone before an enormous state. The remedy, they say, is to recover virtue, religion, and community, and to enlist a government willing to form its citizens toward the common good.

The first half of this story is hard to argue with. Tocqueville indeed believed that a free society draws on reserves of virtue it does not itself create. And he believed that a people interested in nothing beyond its own comfort would eventually lose the capacity to govern itself. He sometimes put the point more strongly still. “Despotism may govern without faith,” he wrote, “but liberty cannot.” 

But the post-liberals have Tocqueville exactly backwards on the question that actually divides us, which is not whether free societies need virtue but where a free society is supposed to get it.

A careful reading of Tocqueville reveals that the cure he prescribed is very nearly the opposite of the one they are selling.

What Tocqueville Granted 

Tocqueville thought that religion was indispensable to American freedom. One of its most important roles, he believed, was to serve as a public institution that gave democratic citizens fixed points in a world of flux. Tocqueville believed that the mores of a people — their habits, beliefs, and settled ways of living — mattered more to the survival of free government than its written laws.

“There is no country in the world,” he wrote, “in which political institutions can prove a substitute for common sense and public morality.”

Notice, though, that there are two different claims tangled together here. One is that a free people need virtue. This is the sound core of the post-liberal worry. A liberalism that pictures the free individual as requiring no formation, no restraint, and no inherited traditions is living on borrowed capital, and eventually the loan comes due.

The other claim is that freedom requires not merely virtue but religious faith. This claim is far more contestable, especially in our secular age. Nevertheless, we can grant it without handing the argument to the post-liberals. That’s because the real debate is not about ends but about means.

In a free society, what is it that actually cultivates virtue and sustains faith? It turns out that Tocqueville had an answer to this question. But it is far from anything on the post-liberal agenda.

Where Virtue Comes From 

In America, Tocqueville found a wide variety of institutions aimed at improving the character of the people. Crucially, however, the vast majority of these institutions belonged to society rather than the state. The thing that struck Tocqueville most forcibly was the sheer density of voluntary association.

“Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England,” he wrote, “in the United States you will be sure to find an association.”

Americans banded together to build schools, churches, hospitals, and a thousand other things a Frenchman would have waited for the state to provide. These associations were a kind of practical school where people developed customs of cooperation, responsibility, and self-command. Virtue, for the American, grows out of habit, and habit out of free action repeated until it becomes second nature.

The same was true of self-government. Tocqueville called the New England township the place where Americans learned to be free.

“Town-meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science,” he wrote; “they bring it within the people’s reach, they teach men how to use and how to enjoy it.”

The citizen who managed the affairs of his own town acquired the habits a free people cannot do without, and acquired them in the only way such habits can be acquired: by exercise.

And then there is religion, where his argument is sharpest and least convenient for the people now quoting him. American religion was powerful, Tocqueville thought, precisely because it kept its distance from political power.

“Religion in America takes no direct part in the government of society,” he wrote, “but it must nevertheless be regarded as the foremost of the political institutions of that country.”

He had seen what happened in Europe when churches climbed into bed with regimes, and he stated the lesson clearly: “The Church cannot share the temporal power of the State without being the object of a portion of that animosity which the latter excites.”

Tying a faith to the state only weakens it, binding its fortunes to a government that will someday fall and to all the resentments that government gathers on its way down.

The pattern here is clear. Every one of these institutions is local, participatory, and independent of central power. Each does its work from below, through free people acting for themselves. For Tocqueville, neither virtue nor faith is the kind of thing that can be handed down from above.

The Cure That Is the Disease 

Tocqueville would have been alarmed, then, by the post-liberal agenda, or at least by its most ambitious version. A post-liberal who wanted only to defend the family, the church, and the school against the forces dissolving them would find Tocqueville a friend, not a critic. The alarm comes with the further step of enlisting the central state in the work of moral formation.

Using the power of the state to make citizens good would, on his account, only deepen the very isolation and passivity of democracy that it promises to heal.

His most famous prophecy was of a new kind of despotism, gentler than the old and thus much harder to resist. He imagined “an immense and tutelary power” rising over a nation of busy private individuals and taking the whole business of living off their hands. The power would be “absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild.” It would labor willingly for their happiness, but would insist on being “the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness,” and would keep them, he said, in “perpetual childhood.”

Tocqueville’s target was a state that frees its people from the burden of an adult responsible life, one that takes the trouble of living off their hands and leaves them little to do but enjoy themselves. This comforting paternalism is, of course, not what the post-liberals are after. But in making the state the arbiter of virtue, they produce the same infantilizing effect in the domain that matters most. The post-liberal state relieves its citizens of the hardest and most personal labor there is: the labor of working out for themselves how to live.

That labor is precisely the mechanism through which character develops. Virtue is the fruit of habit, and the habits a free people most need ripen only where they are practiced. Law can restrain vice and shore up the institutions in which such practices happen. What it cannot do is practice for us. A government that commands its citizens into goodness gets the outward act, but the active virtue Tocqueville admired has to be grown, and it grows only where people govern themselves.

To be clear, this is not an argument against coercion as such. Tocqueville was no libertarian, and the townships he praised as schools of virtue were, after all, institutions of coercive government. But the authority of the townships was local, plural, and answerable. It was an authority that citizens could influence through voice and, if necessary, escape through exit.

What Tocqueville feared was not government but administrative centralization — the drawing of every local and private concern into the central state. Let a centralized power “penetrate into the privacy of individual interests,” he wrote, and “freedom would soon be banished.”

The post-liberal virtue-state is that penetration carried to the soul: the formation of souls lodged in the central state, the one task he thought had to stay dispersed, handed to the institution he trusted least to hold it.

In the end, Tocqueville cared less about who held power than about how much of it had pooled in one place.

“There is,” he wrote, “and I cannot repeat it too often, there is in this matter for profound reflection for those who look on freedom as a holy thing, and who hate not only the despot, but despotism.” 

When he felt the hand of power lie heavy on him, he said, he cared little to know whose hand it was, and was no readier to bow because it was “held out to me by the arms of a million of men.” He might have added that it makes little difference whether such a power reaches for our property or for our souls.

Classical liberals have always feared concentrated power in the first of those domains, and met it with competition and dispersion rather than gentler masters. The post-liberal virtue-state asks us to make an exception in the second. But a government strong enough to make us virtuous is a government strong enough to make us anything it likes. That alone is reason to keep the making of virtue where Tocqueville found it: in the hands of free people, governing and improving themselves.

The idea of a “pink tax,” that women commonly pay more for equivalent goods, has sparked public debate and inspired various policy proposals. This concept gained prominence after the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs released its 2015 report From Cradle to Cane: The Cost of Being a Female Consumer, describing many examples of women’s products costing more than nearly identical men’s products. While the report documented many cases of women paying more than men for similar products, the causes of these differences are more complicated than the notion of a straightforward tax. Understanding how prices emerge in a market economy offers another way to interpret these disparities. 

The NYC study offers several examples intended to highlight real-world price differences for women’s products. Early in the study, the authors acknowledge that some price disparities are justifiable but claim that “these higher prices are ‘mostly unavoidable for women.’” 

Some cases raise as many questions as they answer. One example in the report compares two Radio Flyer scooters sold on Target’s website: a standard red version priced at $24.99 and a ‘pink sparkle’ version priced at $49.99. The report treats this difference as an unavoidable burden on women or parents of girls, yet consumers remain free to purchase either product. Paying for the higher-priced pink version reflects a preference for a particular product design, rather than an unavoidable tax. 

Even the study’s own data suggest a more nuanced picture. Women’s products were priced higher 42 percent of the time, men’s products were higher 18 percent of the time, and prices were equal in the remaining 40 percent. Such findings are more complicated than the notion of a uniform tax imposed on women. 

Critics might push back against the scooter example as an outlier. The strongest version of the pink-tax argument isn’t really about isolated items like a single scooter. Rather, critics point to broader patterns across categories where comparison is harder to avoid, such as dry cleaning that charges more for women’s shirts, or personal-care products like razors marketed to women at a premium. In these cases, critics argue, “choice” is a weaker defense, since substitutes aren’t always available and the men’s and women’s products do not appear, at first glance, to differ in production costs.

This is a fair challenge, but it still doesn’t establish gendered pricing as the cause. Dry cleaners often cite genuine cost differences; women’s shirts frequently require hand processing or different cleaning methods altogether due to design and fabric. Personal care markups may reflect smaller batch sizes, different formulations, or packaging costs rather than gender per se. However, even if production costs are identical, a price difference alone does not establish bias any more than airlines charging more for aisle seats constitutes discrimination against passengers who prefer extra legroom. 

Economists associated with the Austrian school, beginning with Carl Menger and later developed by Friedrich Hayek and others, emphasized that value is subjective rather than inherent in goods themselves. As Peter Boettke, Don Lavoie, and Virgil Storr observe, subjectivism lies at the center of the Austrian tradition and directs attention toward the meanings and preferences individuals attach to goods and services. Earlier theories, such as the labor theory of value, suggested that value derives from production inputs, but experience shows otherwise. A hand-turned chair requiring many hours of labor may still garner no buyers, while a designer handbag costing relatively little to produce may sell for thousands. 

More than a century before the Austrian school emerged, Adam Smith observed the famous water-diamond paradox. Water is essential to life, yet it is generally inexpensive because it is abundant. Diamonds, though far less necessary, command high prices because they are scarce and highly valued by consumers. 

These examples show why price differences between men’s and women’s products are not necessarily discriminatory. Prices emerge from consumer preferences, perceived value, and supply and demand. If pink items are valued more highly, companies rationally price them higher. Even identical production costs can result in different prices if a segment of consumers is willing to pay more for one variant. Conversely, if people do not value a product as highly, they will pay less. 

Price differences should not automatically be interpreted as evidence of bias. More commonly, they are signals, the accumulated result of millions of individual preferences and purchasing decisions made across countless transactions. No single firm sets these prices arbitrarily. Prices emerge from the interaction of producers and consumers responding to the information available to them. 

The pink tax framing, while an entry into an interesting discussion, is misleading. A tax is imposed from above and remains just as it was legislated. Unlike a traditional “tax,” no one is forced to pay markup for women’s items. Prices respond, however imperfectly, to what consumers actually value. If prices are to change, the most direct mechanism is not legislation, but the accumulated force of consumer choices over time. Prices are not obstacles imposed on consumer preferences, but reflections of them. 

The Federal Open Market Committee is expected to leave its policy rate unchanged at this week’s meeting, with CME FedWatch assigning close to a 65 percent probability that the FOMC will maintain the current target range of 3.5 to 3.75 percent. For the second meeting in a row, that expected outcome is at odds with the guidance provided by the leading monetary rules. This raises the question of whether the new Warsh-led Fed is prepared to follow through on its promise of delivering price stability.

What the Rules Say

The latest Monetary Rules Report from AIER’s Sound Money Project shows that the Fed’s current policy rate falls below the range recommended by leading monetary rules. All twelve estimates in the report indicate that the Fed should raise its policy rate at the upcoming meeting.

The strongest case for tighter policy comes from Taylor-type rules. These rules respond to both inflation and labor market conditions, raising the recommended policy rate when inflation exceeds the Fed’s target unless that pressure is offset by significant economic weakness. With inflation still well above 2 percent and little evidence of substantial labor market weakness, both factors point toward a less accommodative policy stance.

The original Taylor Rule produces the most aggressive estimate, prescribing a federal funds rate of 6.01 percent. A modified version, which places more weight on the current policy rate and uses a forecast of future inflation, produces a lower estimate of 4.24 percent. Even after incorporating those more gradual and forward-looking features, however, the rule still prescribes a federal funds rate roughly half a percentage point above the current target range.

Rules based on nominal GDP, or total dollar spending in the economy, tell a similar story. A nominal GDP growth rule, which calls for raising rates when nominal GDP growth exceeds 4 percent, points to a 4.25 percent policy rate. A nominal GDP level rule, which recommends raising rates when total spending exceeds a steady growth path, produces the lowest estimate, at 3.76 percent. That prescription is very close to the upper bound of the current target range. Nevertheless, it is also consistent with a 25-basis-point hike, especially when considered alongside the other rules.

A Test of the Fed’s Credibility

The first FOMC statement of the Warsh era plainly stated, “The Committee will deliver price stability.” With inflation still well above the Fed’s 2-percent target and every leading monetary rule pointing toward a rate increase, will Warsh and his colleagues follow through on that promise and tighten monetary policy? The market considers a hike possible but unlikely, with CME FedWatch pricing in roughly a 35 percent probability of a 25-basis-point increase.

The committee can offer several reasons for waiting at least one more meeting before raising rates. The latest inflation data showed a notable decline in June, with the year-over-year CPI inflation rate falling from 4.2 percent in May to 3.5 percent in June, while overall prices declined by 0.4 percent on a monthly basis. Officials may want to see whether that trend continues through the next September FOMC meeting before tightening policy. The Fed will also likely receive some assistance from a planned change in how the BEA calculates the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge, the PCE price index, which may trim a few tenths from the PCE inflation rate this fall. Estimates of second-quarter growth have also weakened. The Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow model currently puts real GDP growth at just 1.7 percent, down from the first quarter’s 2.1 percent pace. 

Taken together, these factors make a plausible case for waiting. If inflation falls toward 2.5 percent and real growth slows to roughly 1.5 percent, nominal GDP growth would return to the NGDP growth rule’s 4 percent benchmark by September. Under that scenario, the current policy rate might prove appropriate, and a July increase would look premature.

The problem with this argument is that it assumes too much. The conflict with Iran is re-escalating, and despite energy prices declining from May to June, average gas prices are already pushing back over $4 while diesel prices exceed $5. The Fed should generally avoid overreacting to a temporary supply shock, but it should also be cautious about assuming inflationary pressures will resolve on their own, especially given the uncertain path of the conflict. And while the BEA update may bring the Fed’s preferred inflation rate down slightly, Fed officials should not rely on methodological revisions to deliver price stability.  Lastly, even if real GDP growth in the second quarter comes in a bit below 2 percent, NGDP growth would likely still exceed 4 percent without any signs of imminent weakness in the labor market. Overall, if the Warsh Fed is serious about delivering price stability, it’s time to start backing up words with actions.

Words and Actions 

Chair Warsh has called for less groupthink and more open disagreement inside the FOMC. Dallas Fed President Lorie Logan may provide an early test of that commitment by making the case for higher rates at the July meeting. With nearly half of FOMC participants projecting at least one increase in 2026, she may find considerable support even if a majority is not yet prepared to act.

If the Fed leaves rates unchanged this week, the September meeting will take on added importance. Another two months of inflation near current levels would make it increasingly difficult for the Committee to reconcile its commitment to deliver price stability with its reluctance to raise rates. The leading monetary rules already indicate that policy is too accommodative. If inflation remains elevated, the Warsh Fed will eventually have to back its promise of price stability with action.

In September 2025, two months before the election, Democratic candidate for New York City’s mayoral Election, Zohran Mamdani, pledged to take on FIFA, the world’s largest soccer federation, with a bold proposal. Celebrating “Game Over Greed,” the campaign sought to end dynamic pricing, the practice of adjusting prices in real time based on market demand and scarcity. Zohran’s petition would made three demands: “No dynamic pricing, Reinstatement of the cap on ticket resales; 15 percent of tickets set aside for residents at a discount.” Much of the discontent among fans came from the fact that FIFA’s ticket pricing would allow seats initially sold for affordable prices to be marked up by thousands. Critics argued that these market practices were another form of price gouging by FIFA, exploiting historically high demand. 

Now, with the tournament finished, the debate has intensified among fans and officials. The attorney general of both New York and New Jersey issued subpoenas to FIFA, investigating ticketing practices and citing a 34-percent price hike across all ticket categories. Reports showed that prices for seats at the World Cup Final in MetLife Stadium in the New York/New Jersey area reached new heights. Questions of how to allocate that game’s 80,663 seats among five billion soccer fans invited scrutiny of FIFA’s pricing practices and the broader use of dynamic pricing. 

So what is dynamic pricing exactly, and how does it work? Unlike traditional ticketing, where prices are predetermined at a fixed rate regardless of conditions, dynamic pricing uses algorithms to adjust prices based on supply, demand, remaining inventory, and purchase timing. Companies adjust rates based on demand while also allocating scarce tickets to the consumers who value them most (as measured by willingness to pay). For example, if thousands of fans want to buy tickets to a playoff game, teams raise prices in response to stronger demand. It also helps consumers, though, by allowing them to get true market prices for tickets, especially in conditions that might drive down demand, such as a game on a hot Tuesday afternoon or a team performing poorly late in the season. Dynamic pricing allows prices to move (up or down and often both) toward a market-clearing price, as supply and demand change. 

Sports teams have employed demand-based and variable pricing models for decades. Teams set their ticket prices in response to team quality, fan interest, market size, and even business concentration. The Yankees, Cowboys, Knicks, Dodgers, and others have capitalized on that flexibility, setting prices based on team success, national branding, and broader economic activity. Sports ticket pricing has long been tied to tiered systems, with dynamic pricing adjusting those tiers in real time based on various indicators.

This is consistent with firms’ expected behavior. In a 2012 study, researchers Shapiro and Drayer examined ticket pricing behavior across MLB teams, accounting for both primary and secondary markets. Their results supported the hypothesis that baseball teams maximized ticket prices, like any other competing firm. MLB teams were responsive to ongoing shifts in demand, adjusting prices based on the strength of the matchup, day of the week, current team success, and seasonal milestones. In other words, teams will use dynamic pricing to gain up-to-date data about demand, maximizing the profitability of each transaction. Both teams and fans discover the market-clearing price. Fans evaluate the opportunity costs and may choose lower-demand games that better fit their budgets. 

Critics argue that the World Cup is different, as fans may travel around the world to find themselves priced out at the gate. With a limited number of games and incredibly high demand, few affordable options are available for fans to attend games without spending a fortune. Accusations of “price gouging” view the system itself is flawed, with prices continuing to rise given as evidence that FIFA exploiting its market power at consumers’ expense. 

We watched this scenario play out in real time as fans scrambled to purchase tickets to the World Cup final in New York/New Jersey. As defending champion Argentina prepared to take on Spain, Forbes reported an average ticket price of over $11,000 (the highest ever recorded for a sporting event). Few fans could afford to purchase tickets, prompting online backlash against FIFA and dynamic pricing. 

No failure of the market is necessary here. Prices are logical consequence of an extraordinarily high demand from fans chasing a fixed supply of seats. Allegations of “price gouging” by corporations, and attempts to fix them with policy, will do little to shift either factor.

(Some attorneys general are investigating allegations involving deceptive practices or broken promises in the ticketing process. Policymakers should distinguish between high prices caused by scarcity and deceptive or fraudulent practices, which are legitimate cause for official inquiry.)

More to the point, Mamdani’s proposal to FIFA to end dynamic pricing for the World Cup would not have “ended dynamic pricing,” but would likely make the problem worse. In fact, banning dynamic pricing would push more ticket sales off official sites and into secondary markets, where scalpers can capture the premium created by scarcity

Imagine FIFA sells tickets to a game at $100 apiece. The game may sell out immediately, with resellers and automated bots acquiring many of the available tickets. In turn, scalpers can charge prices close to or above the market-demand price that fans would have been willing to pay on FIFA’s own site, raking in a large profit margin on each transaction. The swap reduces FIFA’s potential revenue (by $500, if a $100 ticket were resold for $600), gained by the scalper rather than the federation itself. The buyer is no better off.

This may not seem like such a big deal for a global federation or national sports league; however, its effects will be greater on smaller franchises with tighter margins. Local clubs, newer leagues, and smaller venues rely on revenue from high-demand games to subsidize their high fixed operating costs. Stripping them of the opportunity to set prices based on demand may be destructive to many smaller operations. 

Perhaps the great irony of Mamdani’s proposal is that even the most well-intended price caps couldn’t reduce what fans ultimately pay. Demand remains unchanged, so some fans still pay the market rate for tickets regardless of the supplier, while others will be priced out, or encounter sellouts or lotteries. What price-fixing policy does is transfer FIFA’s “excess revenue” to a middleman reseller. By widening the gap between face value and resale value (resale premium), the attempted “fix” attracts professional scalpers and bot networks to purchase scarce inventory before regular consumers can access it, forcing them to buy on a less-transparent gray market.

While slogans such as “Game Over Greed” may resonate intuitively, policymakers should carefully consider the unintended economic consequences of restricting dynamic pricing. With states already reviewing bills to ban dynamic pricing across a variety of entertainment industries, alongside outdated or inconsistently enforced anti-scalping laws, these proposals are gaining more traction in mainstream policy debate. 

Dynamic pricing does not create scarcity. It exposes it. Banning market prices won’t create more seats in the stadium — it will only change who profits. If policymakers want to help fans, they should allow prices to reflect real market conditions.

In Edgar Allan Poe’s classic short story The Purloined Letter, a group of investigators search tirelessly for a stolen letter containing information that could be used for blackmail. They conduct elaborate searches and speculate endlessly about where the letter could be hidden, only for detective C. Auguste Dupin to find it hiding in plain sight on a card rack.

The story mirrors how policymakers often respond to problems: crafting elaborate policies while overlooking simpler solutions that may be hiding in plain sight.

As geopolitical competition with China and conflicts across the world highlight shortcomings in America’s defense industrial base and vulnerabilities in its supply chain for rare earth minerals, industrial policy has become fashionable on both sides of the aisle. Whether it’s the subsidies included in President Biden’s signature CHIPS and Science Act or President Trump’s sweeping tariffs, leaders of both parties seem willing to enact costly, distortionary measures to rebuild America’s industrial base and sever dangerous dependencies. 

While it is worth discussing the merits and drawbacks of these policies, there are more straightforward ways to strengthen America’s industrial capacity. One of the most important is permitting reform: improving the way infrastructure, manufacturing, and mining projects are approved. If implemented impartially, permitting reform could enable entrepreneurs to respond more rapidly to America’s security needs and unleash the country’s industrial potential. 

In order to get a project in mining or manufacturing approved, one must navigate a sprawling web of (frequently overlapping) regulations and get approval from a multitude of state and federal authorities. Agencies can often retroactively veto already-approved projects (if they get around to the approval decision at all), and the lengthy process opens up opportunities for interest groups to shoot down projects they oppose through litigation.

Former National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan summarized America’s permitting challenges well when he argued, “Too many people possess the power to say no. Too few are empowered to say yes.” 

Permitting reform tackles this issue head-on with measures like reducing redundant permission requirements, modernizing legal processes, eliminating retroactive veto power, and setting strict timelines for regulators to reduce delays and uncertainty. 

As it stands, mining projects critical to America’s industrial needs are often bogged down by extensive permitting requirements. A report from S&P Global found that the average lead time — the gap between mineral discovery and production — for mines worldwide has increased from about six years in 1990 to nearly 30 years today. Permitting delays frequently push projects back by years or cause them to be cancelled altogether. For the United States to access its abundant reserves of rare earths and eventually reduce its reliance on Chinese supply chains, the permitting process must be reformed. 

These problems plague manufacturing as well. One study examining permitting and microchip production noted that “permit notification and review processes can impose delays of weeks, months, or even years. In the presence of competition, delays threaten to erode slim technological and marketing leads.” This echoes broader economic research showing that extensive regulation impedes capital investment and reduces industrial efficiency and competitiveness. 

If the process for approving projects were simplified and streamlined, it would empower miners, manufacturers, and entrepreneurs to respond more effectively to demand for critical minerals and improvements in America’s industrial base. A mistake many proponents of state-directed industry make is underestimating the ability of markets to respond to national security priorities. Record private investment in defense manufacturing demonstrates that markets can identify strategic needs and allocate capital accordingly. Effective permitting reform would allow those investments to become finished projects more quickly. 

As America’s industrial and infrastructure needs continue to take center stage, policymakers will inevitably face pressure to take an ad hoc approach to permitting reform, allowing favored projects to move through the process more quickly while others remain stuck. Recent permitting exceptions for data centers in Utah and Wyoming, as well as streamlined permitting efforts for rare earth mining, illustrate this tendency. 

If lawmakers continue this piecemeal approach, they risk making themselves the kingmakers of industrial policy. An abundance of economic research suggests that government favoritism in industry has a tendency to distort markets, impede competition, and create destructive incentives for rent-seeking among government officials.

More immediately, government favoritism is already hindering broader permitting reform efforts that could provide a genuine boost to American industry. The bipartisan SPEED Act, a bill that streamlines legal processes for industrial projects, faces an uncertain fate in the Senate after being passed by the House of Representatives, as many democrats remain hesitant to embrace broad permitting reform while the Trump administration weaponizes regulatory power to block clean energy projects.

Given the bipartisan momentum behind permitting reform, this should be the moment for a historic compromise. Reform could allow manufacturers, miners, and energy producers to address America’s strategic and economic needs more quickly and effectively. 

Americans should ask themselves, like detective C. Auguste Dupin did, whether a solution is hiding in plain sight. If analysts, journalists, and the public paid as much attention to permitting as they do tariffs and subsidies, it could build momentum for policymakers to prioritize the issue and finally unlock meaningful change.

The Trump administration finalized new Section 301 tariffs on dozens of trading partners, ranging from 10 to 12.5 percent, perfectly timed to take effect as the temporary global tariff of 10 percent under Section 122 expires. The basis for these new tariffs is a five-month investigation into whether those countries have done enough to keep goods made with forced labor out of their supply chains. 

There has been plenty of coverage on this. Ilya Somin lays out why this action is likely illegal and runs afoul of Section 301’s own requirements as well as the major questions and nondelegation doctrines. Scott Lincicome argues, powerfully, that the investigation itself was a sham, with the outcome promised early and repeatedly by several members of the administration well before the investigation was completed.

But there’s a far worse outcome from this that cannot be undone by courts, elections, or policy reversals. These new tariffs and their justifications have only served to further destroy the relationships with allies and trading partners that we had previously taken as given. The costs of this will outlast every tariff schedule, court ruling, and this administration. They won’t show up on BLS reports, BEA analyses, or Fed surveys. But they will be felt by every single American for years to come.

As a result of these tariffs, Japan, South Korea, and Australia now face 12.5 percent tariffs for their alleged complicity in using forced labor. China is in the same boat. Three of our closest allies are now accused of being just as negligent about slave labor as China.

Canada, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Mexico now face 10 percent tariffs for their alleged forced labor practices. Canada and Mexico are, of course, also parties to the USMCA, a trade agreement that this very president negotiated, signed, and called “a colossal victory” only to then walk away from. That same week, the President hit Canada with an additional 50 percent tariff on goods ranging from “wine to hockey sticks to cement” regardless of whether or not those goods qualify under the USMCA.

So in the span of a week, the White House effectively told Canada, our closest trading partner and ally, that America’s word means nothing and then told them that they are complicit in forced labor.

An ordinary tariff is a tax. Trading partners are annoyed, sometimes retaliate, and sometimes negotiate. These tariffs are different. We didn’t just tax Japanese goods. We announced to the world, as an official finding of the United States government, that Japan is profiting from slavery and needs to be punished for it. Norway, Switzerland, Australia, the United Kingdom, and South Korea are guilty of this, too. Then we set a penalty that just so happens to approximate the Section 122 tariffs that just expired.

Foreign officials must now contend with an even clearer reality: not only is an agreement with the United States not worth the paper it’s printed on, but we will accuse you of horrendous practices if it means that an administration can re-impose tariffs. Our trading partners saw that the findings of investigations will be written to fit the desires of an administration instead of the facts on the ground. They learned that not only is America protectionist but that they will publish a serious moral accusation against a friend when doing so is politically convenient.

This changes how other countries will deal with us going forward.

Consider what a foreign trade minister in Tokyo or Ottawa does next. Obviously, over the coming days, they will be releasing press statements. But over the following years, two things become obvious. First, an agreement with the US is never a settled matter. Second, compliance with the American findings buys nothing because the US Trade Representative did not issue any guidelines of what sorts of labor practices could be adopted to lift these tariffs.

If nothing you do can get you off the list, there’s no reason to try. And if no trade agreement is actually binding, there’s no need to come to the table. Instead, there is every reason to find new trading partners.

That work is already happening. The countries hit by tariffs this week have been signing agreements with one another, expanding trading blocs that do not include the US, and diversifying supply chains away from the American market. Every one of those deals is a small, but largely permanent move away from doing business with America. Factories being built in Europe, China, and India won’t be picked up and moved if the US suddenly reverses its tariff policy. These lost opportunities won’t show up in BLS reports, BEA analyses, or Fed surveys.

The impacts of these tariffs and the accusations they come with aren’t confined to the commercial realm. They also affect our national security. Alliances, whether they be trade or otherwise, work based on accumulated good will. When we ask a country to host our submarines or NATO members to send troops somewhere, we draw upon the goodwill that we have accumulated over decades. Those governments have to sell the request to their own legislatures and voters who will sensibly ask: “What has America done for us lately?” And unfortunately, trade policy over the past 18 months has not engendered support.

A schedule of tariff rates can be repealed by proclamation. An accusation, once made and in the name of the United States government, is not so easily repealed. Those accusations carry weight because, traditionally, we have used them sparingly and when the evidence was abundantly clear. Now, if Lincicome is correct, our credibility on this stage has been strained.

These new tariffs may not survive on a legal basis. Courts struck down the emergency tariffs in February and the Section 122 tariffs in May. Somin expects this action to be challenged and believes that courts will strike these down, too. Whether or not the courts strike these down, too, the damage is already done.

The trust that America enjoys took generations to build and is being spent at a record pace. In the meantime, the world is moving on and increasingly without us. Unfortunately, courts cannot restore what was actually lost this week. Judges can void tariffs and force refunds, but they cannot unsay an accusation. 

“Fascism entirely agrees with Mr. Maynard Keynes, despite the latter’s prominent position as a Liberal.” 

So wrote the British fascist James Strachey Barnes in his 1928 book Universal Aspects of Fascism, which included a glowing preface written by Mussolini himself. “In fact,” Barnes continued, “Mr. Keynes’s excellent little book, The End of Laissez-Faire…might, so far as it goes, serve as a useful introduction to fascist economics.”

Even today, crackpots apply Keynes’s name to economic nonsense, hoping that some of his credibility will rub off; what might be called “Keyneswashing.” Was Barnes “Keyneswashing” fascist economics, or is there a genuine similarity with the Keynesian variety? 

Laissez-Faire 

Keynes defined “laissez-faire” as the “idea of a divine harmony between private advantage and the public good.” Adam Smith’s legacy, he summarized was, “in the main, to allow the public good to rest on the natural effort of every individual to better his own condition.”

The balance rested on two pillars, Keynes reasoned. First was ideology: if economic theory was followed to its conclusion, laissez-fire would be found at the end. He argued that this was not so, that the great economists — Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill — had said no such thing, that this was only “what the popularizers and the vulgarizers said.” It was they, not the economists, who “fixed laissez-faire in the popular mind as the practical conclusion of orthodox political economy.” 

Second, an accident of historical circumstance meant that “the corruption and incompetence of eighteenth-century government, many legacies of which survived into the nineteenth” coincided with “material progress between 1750 and 1850 [which] came from individual initiative, and owed almost nothing to the directive influence of organised society as a whole.” This practical experience, it was said, confirmed the “a priori reasonings” of the economists. 

By the time Keynes published The End of Laissez-Faire in July 1926, these no longer held.  

Keynes rejected the a priori reasonings. “It is not a correct deduction from the principles of economics that enlightened self-interest always operates in the public interest,” he wrote. “Nor is it true that self-interest generally is enlightened; more often individuals acting separately to promote their own ends are too ignorant or too weak to attain even these.” Keynes argued that experience showed that individuals, acting collectively, through government, actually could make better decisions than they did acting individually.

The experience of World War I was what Keynes had in mind. “War socialism unquestionably achieved a production of wealth on a scale far greater than we ever knew in peace, for though the goods and services delivered were destined for immediate and fruitless extinction, none the less they were wealth,” he wrote. If “the dissipation of effort was…prodigious, and the atmosphere of waste and not counting the cost…disgusting to any thrifty or provident spirit,” that merely reflected “socialism” in wartime; in peacetime, it could be different. 

Corporatism 

“[P]rogress lies in the growth and the recognition of semi-autonomous bodies within the State.”

— John Maynard Keynes, The End of Laissez-Faire  

Such was Keynes’s proposed model for these bodies were corporations. “Bodies whose criterion of action within their own field is solely the public good as they understand it, and from whose deliberations motives of private advantage are excluded,” he wrote, giving the examples of universities, the Bank of England, the Port of London Authority, the railway companies, and “joint stock institutions,” which, “when they have reached a certain age and size, [tend] to approximate to the status of public corporations rather than that of individualistic private enterprise.” 

This is corporatism, as Merriam-Webster tells us: “the organization of a society into industrial and professional corporations serving as organs of political representation and exercising control over persons and activities within their jurisdiction.” 

And it was corporatism with a wide scope. Keynes argued for government direction of savings, foreign investment and income distribution. “I do not think that these matters should be left entirely to the chances of private judgement and private profits, as they are at present,” he wrote.  

This was “Keynes’s Middle Way” between capitalism and socialism, as his biographer, Robert Skidelsky explained; “Today we might call it a Third Way.” 

Fascism 

“The fascist state is corporative or it is nothing.”

— Benito Mussolini 

Political scientist Andrew Heywood wrote that the distinguishing feature of fascist economic thought is the idea of corporatism. Mussolini, architect of the first fascist state, explained that “the fascist state is corporative or it is nothing” and called the corporations “the fascist institution par excellence.” 

Corporatism was the thin end of the authoritarian wedge. In 1926, Mussolini created a special ministry of corporations, explaining that a new cooperative machinery, as well as fixing wages and conditions of work, would eventually regulate the whole economy and that, eventually, the corporations would affect what would amount to compulsory recruitment of all Italian citizens for civilian work. In 1927, twenty-two corporations were established representing employers, workers, and government, charged with overseeing the development of all the major industries in Italy. In 1930, a National Council of Corporations was set up, comprising seven large worker and employer organizations; it had no legislative power, but could issue binding orders in matters concerning wages and conditions. By 1934, this had been expanded to include twenty-two sectors of the economy and social life. 

Finally, in 1939, a chamber of Fasces and corporations was created to replace parliament. Mussolini saw this, Heywood writes, as a “‘third way’ between capitalism and socialism.” 

Can Economic Planning Remain Politically Neutral?

Much of this lay in the future as Keynes wrote, and perhaps we should not condemn him for lack of foresight. 

Keynes believed, according to his biographer, the economist Roy Harrod, that “the government of Britain was and would continue to be in the hands of an intellectual aristocracy,” of which he was part. He supported economic central planning, via corporatism, because he assumed that enlightened experts like himself, a leading member of the Bloomsbury group, not a goon like Mussolini, would be doing the planning. He underestimated the political dangers of replacing decentralized decision-making with central planning, assuming that economic freedom could be curtailed without curtailing other freedoms. 

But if we can excuse such a belief held in 1926 as naivety, how can we excuse it still held ten years later when fascism’s true nature was becoming apparent? In September 1936, Keynes wrote in the preface to the German edition of his masterpiece, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, that “the theory of output as a whole, which is what the following book purports to provide, is much more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state, than is the theory of the production and distribution of a given output produced under conditions of free competition and a large measure of laissez-faire.” 

If a totalitarian state is the price we must pay for the Keynesian “theory of output” to be put into practice, it is not a price worth paying. Likewise, if laissez-faire was the economic manifestation of political liberalism, then its death was to be mourned, not celebrated. If economic freedom is surrendered, other freedoms follow. “The economy” is just people acting, and one can only control “the economy” by controlling people.  

Fortunately, and not for the last time, Keynes would be proven wrong. Laissez-faire was, like the Norwegian Blue parrot, not dead, but merely resting. Given the alternative, it is a good thing for humanity that this was so.