It’s always amusing when someone who has not been an active conservative and free marketer for over 40 years and did not run his own small business for nearly 30 years, as I have, gets accused of being a socialist because he refuses to pretend that the world is not as it is. I like free enterprise. It’s in my blood – everyone in my nuclear family had his/her own business. And while I am not sure that Donald Trump‘s latest heresies to the Cult of Milton Friedman (and I’m definitely a Friedman believer) will ultimately prove efficacious, I know the current system certainly isn’t doing the job for us. And the current system isn’t anything like free enterprise.
I’m tired of the unprincipled application of conservative principles. What we have here are many conservatives making the same fundamental error that they make about so many other things. They are assuming the world is as they wish it to be, not as it is. They are mad because real life is screwing up the application of their beautiful theories – and again, I want to emphasize, I love these theories. I would love to have a system where the courts do the courts’ proper things, the Congress does the Congress’s proper things, and the president does the president’s proper things, but that’s not our system. I would love to have a system where immigration is rationally handled both for input and output, but that’s also not the system we have. And I would love to have as free a market as humanly possible. I would also like a pony.
But in so many areas, we don’t have a free market. The problem is that many of our co-conservatives demand that we pretend we do. They wish to govern based on that fantasy. Of course, our opponents don’t feel themselves bound to that. They do what’s to their advantage. This is how we get a situation where we are charged whatever other countries and large companies want to charge, but we are effectively barred from putting price pressure downward by the imposition of regulations and monopolies. In other words, we’re supposed to pay only what the market will bear, but we end up paying what the government and big corporations tell us we must pay.
This is not capitalism. This gives capitalism a bad name. The “principled” conservatives pretend that a free market exists where there is no free market, and they tell us that we must accept the downside of free enterprise without any of the upside. The upside is defeated, in large part, by other players who are not expected to fulfill their obligations under a free enterprise paradigm. That’s a pretty lousy deal, and it should come as no surprise that we’re tired of it.
What Trump is doing is beginning the discussion over how we resolve this problem, because us normal people getting screwed while other people benefit cannot continue. I’m tired of being told that I’m violating conservative principles by pointing out that I’m the only one expected to adhere to the conservative principles, and the people who don’t are getting a free ride.
Just last month, we had that discussion over tariffs. Of course, the default conservative position – the super-simplistic one – is tariffs bad, no tariffs good. OK, I think that’s the correct default position if you only consider the economic considerations. But there are other considerations; it’s not all about the money. There’s national security. Even Milton Friedman understood that you had to have your own on-shore bomb-making industry because you can’t rely on cheaper foreign bomb producers. But there are also cultural considerations. We destroyed the Midwest by allowing massive outsourcing of our manufacturing. According to some conservatives, I’m not supposed to notice that, but it’s hard to miss unless you’re in Manhattan or Washington, DC. The hell with that. Having millions of my fellow Americans impoverished and their communities wrecked is bad, and we should not do that. I’ll sacrifice some economic efficiency so that tens of thousands of Americans aren’t so broke that they turn to fentanyl and other social pathologies. If it makes me not a conservative to point out there are effects other than ones that involve bank accounts, you are free to call me whatever name you like. My country is more than just a profit and loss statement.
Here’s the thing. We didn’t have a free-market tariff regime before Donald Trump came along. We had America with, in many cases, significantly lower tariffs on stuff imported from foreign countries than those foreign countries put up against us. There was once a reason for that. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, it allowed the rest of the world to rebuild. We hadn’t been destroyed as many other countries had. But I just checked my watch, and it’s been about 80 years since Hitler blew his brains out. Why are we still doing this? If, after eight decades, a country is not back on its feet, it’s on its own.
All we hear from the hyper-principled gang is how raising our tariffs is terrible, but we never hear anything about how the foreigners’ higher tariffs are terrible. Once again, we bear the obligations of the free market paradigm, but don’t get the upside. I’m looking for a good argument for why, in 2025, we should generally allow foreigners to have higher tariffs on American goods than Americans put on foreign goods. Why are we forbidden from leveraging our economic power to force reciprocity with other countries? I have yet to see someone make a case for the status quo ante Trump. All I hear is about how I’m now a Democrat and maybe even a socialist for not believing we should get the short end of the stick in a non-free enterprise paradigm.
It hasn’t helped the critics’ case that the sky did not fall. Yes, there was some disruption immediately after Trump began to change the postwar order. Who would think there wouldn’t be a disruption when you’re disrupting the post-war paradigm? But the disruption seems to be dissipating. As I write this, my 401(k) has nearly recovered from the shock of Liberation Day. There might still be some problems down the road. There are plenty of people out there predicting/hoping that we’re going to have an economic convulsion that they can pin on Trump – remember, a lot of the uproar is pure politics from people who hate him. But the fact is that the free marketers who are mad at Trump’s refusal to pretend the old tariff regime was a free-market regime have not seen their dire predictions come true. Nor have they offered any alternative to the old regime that has caused us so much non-economic damage. Their only suggestion is to keep unilaterally free marketing even harder in the face of foreigners who aren’t free marketing at all.
The same thing is true of Trump’s drug proclamation. We all know that Big Pharma has been in the pockets of Democrats and screwed Republicans over for decades, so on a purely tactical level, I don’t understand why we would sacrifice even an iota of political capital to keep our enemies happy. Defending the status quo, where drug companies charge Americans hugely inflated prices compared to the rest of the world, has a political cost. Why should we bear it so that allies of our political enemies can get even richer?
We’re hearing a lot about price controls. Price controls are a bad thing in general. But here’s the thing. Drug prices are already controlled. They are controlled by government action and regulations, which Big Pharma directly influences through direct lobbying. How is that free enterprise? Maybe it’s time we do the controlling ourselves to our advantage, since nobody seems interested in deregulating the medical industry and making it an actual free enterprise system.
We should. I was a lawyer, one of the fields that is about as close to a free market as you can get. I could charge per hour what the market could bear with very minimal regulation – the ethics rules said I could not charge “an unconscionable fee,” but what was that? Plus, there was also substantial price pressure downward. I often defended large companies. I could charge them a decent rate because I was pretty good, but somebody else was always good too and might want to undercut me. As such, we had real price competition in the legal market. Consumers could put pressure on providers, and providers could put pressure on consumers. That’s how it’s supposed to be.
But that’s not to pretend that the drug market is like that. It is super-regulated on every level, from production to testing to distribution to what can be charged by whom. Big Pharma manipulates the government via lobbying; that’s what stands in for competition in setting prices. We consumers have almost no price power regarding a product where, if you don’t get it, you literally die.
In other words, the drug market is not a free market, but we’re being told that we have to pretend it is and not play by the rules that actually exist. In a free market, I could find cheaper drug sources. How do I do that today? For example, drugs are much cheaper in Canada. In a free market, I could go buy them in Canada. Except I can’t go buy drugs from Canada. That’s not legal. There’s no way for consumers to force prices down via consumer spending choice, yet I’m supposed to pretend there is and refuse any attempt to regulate the market to my advantage while not objecting to the current regulation of the market that is not to my advantage. Yeah, no thanks. Trump has recognized that political power sets drug prices, not competition; he’s simply using that power for our advantage rather than for Big Pharma’s. I’m unsure why that’s unprincipled. One set of rules, folks.
There is nothing wrong with belonging to the mainline Cult of Milton Friedman, but I’m not going to be part of any fanatical offshoot demanding I offer human sacrifices. If we want to convert the medical sector of our economy into a real free enterprise paradigm – something I think would be a great policy choice – then let’s do that. But the idea that we’re going to highly regulate the industry and also decree that any attempt to regulate it in our favor, as opposed to Big Pharma’s favor, violates the sacred texts is just not going to fly. I didn’t want this system, and I don’t want this system, but I’m not morally obligated to pretend this system doesn’t exist as currently constituted. None of us is. So, if Trump is going to change the rules of the rigged game so that we get screwed a little less, as he’s done on both tariffs and Big Pharma, cool. When you “principled” conservatives who demand unilateral free enterprise puritanism present me with an actual free enterprise paradigm, we can talk. Until then, we’re going to play the game by the game’s rules, and if you don’t like it, you can go ahead and call me a “socialist” again.
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