Conservatives and the Market

There's nothing surprising about a right-wing critique of a dynamic market society

Sohrab Ahmari’s new book, Tyranny, Inc., has been getting a great deal of attention. A lot of the interest seems to stem from the fact that the book is an extended criticism of the free market - written by a conservative, of all things. Because conservatives are supposed to love the free market, right?

Well, no. It’s true that for most of the 20th century, libertarians and conservatives were on the same side in a number of battles over issues involving regulation, redistribution, and the role of government versus the individual in society. But as John Tomasi and I argue in The Individualists, this was always a marriage based on convenience, not deeply shared principles.

Conservatives and libertarians were united in their opposition to socialism, at home and abroad. In the United States, the alliance really began to take form in the 1930s, in opposition to the FDR’s New Deal. Individuals like H.L. Mencken, Albert Jay Nock, Ayn Rand, and Frank Chodorov might have disagreed about a lot of things, but they all shared the fear that FDR was trying to bring socialism to the United States, and they all believed that stopping this was a top political priority.

A shared opposition to socialism, however, is not the same thing as a shared commitment to individual liberty. From the beginning, there were tensions between “Old Right” conservatives like Garret Garrett and libertarians like Isabel Paterson over issues of free trade and immigration (both of which Paterson supported and Garrett opposed). And the conservative willingness to expand and deploy state military power against socialism abroad was a continual source of disagreement, especially between committed libertarians like Frank Chdorov and the conservatives associated with William F. Buckley and National Review.

In The Individualists, we argue that in the wake of the collapse of socialism as both a political and an intellectual force, libertarianism was thrown into a crisis of identity. Without socialism to define itself against, what was libertarianism for? But, as should be obvious to anyone who has been watching the Republican Party for the last seven years, conservatism is undergoing exactly the same crisis, and for exactly the same reason. National conservatism, Catholic Integralism, populism, and Ahmari’s flirtations with social democracy are all symptoms of the same fragmentation.

None of which is to deny that the Ahmari’s book raises genuinely important issues. Libertarians who purport to take individual liberty seriously ought to be just as concerned with private coercion as they are with state coercion. And responding that “it’s not really coercion because it doesn’t violate the NAP” isn’t going to get you far, either rhetorically or philosophically. The problem is real.

How we should respond to that problem, of course, is an altogether different matter. I’ve argued that a Hayekian concern to minimize coercion gives libertarians some ground to support a limited kind of redistribution, perhaps in the form of a Universal Basic Income. In my view, redistribution poses a much less significant threat to individual liberty than does the kind of regulation favored by Ahmari and many on the left. Ahmari is right to stress the danger of private coercion. But I think he is too naive regarding the dangers of state coercion, especially its tendency to be captured and employed for purposes other than those for which it was intended.

My view is that free markets and voluntary transactions are the default solution, to be departed from only with very good reason and in exceptional circumstances. But that’s because I am, at heart, a liberal. For a social conservative like Ahmari, whose commitment to the market was always uneasy at best, the identification of problems with the market are much more likely to lead him to jettison the whole structure altogether. A commitment to free markets and all that they entail - individualism, dynamism, pluralism, and creative destruction - has never co-existed easily with the conservative commitment to tradition, localism, nationalism, and hierarchy. In that respect, there’s nothing new about Ahmari’s book, and nothing surprising about it either.