Some Links
Thanksgiving invites us to pause and consider the gifts we often overlook. This year, at a moment of rising political unease and ideological confusion, I am especially grateful for one extraordinary inheritance: a nation and its creed brought into being by the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.
Why, in addition to family, friends, and a feast, is this on my mind today? In certain circles, especially among “post-liberal” thinkers on the right, it’s now fashionable to claim that the Constitution has failed. Some argue that the country’s founding was overly individualistic or insufficiently moral, that our constitutional structure prevents the pursuit of a unified national purpose, or that what we need instead is a more powerful state headed by a muscular executive and a more cohesive cultural or religious identity enforced from above.
These arguments aren’t abstract. Some theorists openly celebrate unchecked executive power or regimes that derive legitimacy from hierarchy rather than the people’s consent. Increasingly, they dismiss the Founding not as a glorious achievement but as an obstacle to national renewal through centralized authority.
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This agenda ignores the extraordinary success of the American constitutional experiment and the astonishing diversity it has held together for nearly two and a half centuries. As famed historian Gordon Wood recently reminded us in The Wall Street Journal, America has always been different. Most countries emerged from a shared language, lineage, or ancient heritage. The United States did the opposite: It built a state first and then had to discover what it meant to be a nation.
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This reality helps explain why post-liberal critiques faulting the Constitution for failing to impose a single moral or cultural vision miss the mark. Constitutional limits exist because the Founders feared unchecked power, whether exercised by a ruler or by majorities which have at times been egregiously wrong. The Constitution protects a pluralistic society from the dangers of centralized authority and ideological certitude. In a nation as varied as ours, those protections are not optional.
We live in a time when self-appointed saviors on all sides claim to possess the single solution to our problems. The Constitution responds with humility. It demands persuasion, not imposition. It insists on limits. It expects disagreements. It trusts that freedom, not enforced consensus, is the proper foundation for a lasting political community.
The Constitution doesn’t guarantee national unity. It guarantees something better: a system that channels conflict without destroying liberty. As Wood notes, democracy can be volatile. The Founders knew that well. Their answer is a framework that moderates collective impulses while preserving the rights of individuals and minorities.
In January 1964, manufacturing’s share of total nonfarm employment was 27 percent. Since then, manufacturing’s share of employment has declined, reaching 8 percent in 2024. This macroeconomic transformation has not led to deprivation for the average American family, but abundance. Median household income grew from an inflation-adjusted $66,750 to $83,730: A real increase in the average family’s income of 25 percent! And with imports growing from 4.1 percent of gross domestic product in 1964 to 14 percent in 2024, we now have access to a wider variety of goods than at any time in human history.
This Black Friday, we would do well to remember the many ways in which capitalism and globalization have boosted our real wealth by making goods more affordable, and thus our ability to do meaningful things for the people we care about. Of course, Christmas isn’t only about gifting material possessions (experiences are also a good option). But these items are a great way to show our love and affection for special people in our lives, and thanks to the fierce price competition promoted by global markets, we’re able to give more affordable and better tokens of our affection.
Adrian Wooldridge is not favorably impressed with Sven Beckert’s criticisms of capitalism. Three slices:
And it is surely an axiom of modern progressive thought, which reigns supreme in places like Harvard, that capitalism is about the forcible extraction of wealth rather than the free exchange of goods of mutual benefit. Our professor is swimming with the tide rather than battling against it.
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Beckert is less impressive when he comes to the world after the late 18th century, partly because he makes some odd decisions. He devotes little space to the railroads, particularly in the UK and US, despite their role in fueling early stock markets, creating bureaucratic hierarchies and, of course, shrinking distance. He says little about banking until he reaches the “neoliberal age.” But it is largely because he sidelines the role of liberalism in creating the great economic take-off that transformed capitalism from a system of reshuffling wealth around the world into a system of sustained growth based on higher productivity and sustained innovation.
This take-off not only started in a particular place at a particular time — Britain from the late 18th century onward. It took place in the context of a particular culture — a culture that embraced individual rights and limited government. Liberal reformers ushered in a regime of free trade by repealing the Corn Laws (1846), thereby reducing the price of food and the power of guilds. They made it much easier to create limited liability companies, swept aside state monopolies such as the East India Company, and first abolished slavery in the UK and then disrupted the global slave trade.
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Which brings us to the big hole at the heart of this big book: innovation. The thing that distinguishes capitalism from previous economic systems is not exploitation, still less the barbarism of slavery, a subject to which Beckert, whose best-known previous book is Empire of Cotton, frequently returns. All pre-capitalist systems have relied on exploitation and enforced labor of various degrees, as have post-capitalist systems such as Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China. The thing that distinguishes capitalism is its ability, indeed, its compulsion, to keep improving productivity by revolutionizing the means of production. Or, to paraphrase the economist Paul Romer, what matters is better cooking, not more ingredients.
The great heroes of capitalism are the entrepreneurs who can feel the future in their bones and will do anything to bring it into being — fanatics who are compelled to build castles in the air, as Joseph Schumpeter put it. The biggest beneficiaries of these innovations are consumers who are showered with products and services beyond the dreams of previous generations. Capitalism may have made accommodations with some horrible regimes and vile practices in the past, as Beckert shows in detail. But as a system it thrives best in conditions of freedom, where government power is limited, property rights secure and businesspeople left alone to pursue their dreams and subject them to the stern test of the market./blockquote>
Meg Reiss explains that “China’s rare-earth dominance is secured by American red tape.” Three slices:
Yet U.S. firms attempting to build processing capability and break China’s mineral dominance are hamstrung by onerous domestic regulations, including multi-year permitting delays and judicial reviews. The true obstacle is regulatory uncertainty, not environmental protection. When federal land or funding is involved, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) can trigger a full Environmental Impact Statement, which typically takes more than two years. Both mining and processing take time, but processing could be built in just a few years with predictable regulatory timelines. Capital flees when reviews drag across agencies with no clear end.
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Rebuilding capacity also requires predictability across administrations. Here, Congress can provide an answer. Critical processing projects should not be rereviewed simply because a new administration arrives. To encourage durable decision-making,the Council on Environmental Quality, responsible for overseeing NEPA, should finalize guidance on accelerated reviews, and Congress should codify it to lock in stability.
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If the government acts now to cut red tape, the United States can rebuild processing capacity in three to five years.
As politicization has ramped up, the judicial checks on partisan prosecutions have remained static. Targets of political prosecutions can challenge their indictments. But courts rarely dismiss indictments on grounds of selective or vindictive prosecution.
We propose that Congress give federal judges another option. When a prosecution appears politically motivated, a judge should have the discretion to impanel a “prosecutor jury” to assess the propriety of the indictment.
The prosecutor jury would be composed of 20 randomly selected former U.S. attorneys, evenly divided between those nominated by Democratic and Republican presidents. A prosecution could proceed only if at least two-thirds of this panel — 14 out of 20 — concluded that the indictment was appropriate. This supermajority would ensure that at least a substantial minority of prosecutors nominated by a defendant’s own party supported the prosecution.
Former U.S. attorneys are uniquely qualified to guard against weaponized prosecutions. Unlike ordinary grand jurors, they have extensive experience making charging decisions, understand prosecutorial strategy and can distinguish legally sound theories from problematic ones.
Walter Olson makes clear “the hazards of broad pardons.”
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