The Errors of Economic Nationalism

Executive Summary

Economic nationalism is once again in vogue. The United States government now has an ownership stake in approximately 30 private companies.^[1] It has also broadened and increased tariffs on its trading partners. Republican officials have been putting forward economic nationalist policies to strengthen labor unions, offer preferential regulatory treatment to large firms, and give other special tax exemptions or subsidies to favored companies and industries. This represents a significant departure from the limited-government, free-market principles of the political right only a few decades ago.

This paper examines the claims and ideas fueling the rise of economic nationalism within the “New Right.” This term encompasses several different groups: postliberals, National Conservatives, America First protectionists, etc. While their concerns vary, they are united in their belief that the federal government should be far more involved in economic matters when it comes to industrial policy and international trade. In other words, they are economic nationalists.

Unfortunately, much of what they advocate carries significant costs, risks, and unintended consequences. Incorrect economic reasoning leads economic nationalists to recommend policies that distort markets, increase corruption, and reduce rates of economic growth, all of which slow or reduce improvements in people’s quality of life.

The New Right’s approach to the global economy has wrongly equated overbearing international governance with international trade. As a result, economic nationalists argue that the US government should actively use its power to protect domestic industries and workers from foreign competition, particularly from adversarial powers like China. They view tariffs not merely as taxes on consumers but as essential tools of statecraft.

President Trump’s “America First” agenda, including the now-defunct 10 percent universal tariff as well as aggressive duties on Chinese goods, has paved the way for the New Right’s economic nationalist agenda.^[2]

Key Points

1. Economic nationalism involves centrally planning parts of the economy in pursuit of various social, cultural, and political ends.
2. Criticisms of free markets and free trade fall into two distinct, but often conflated, categories: moral or spiritual failings and economic failings.
3. Accepting the existence of higher values than material prosperity does not negate economic constraints or enable economic nationalists to defy economic reality.
4. Claims of manufacturing decline and wage stagnation are greatly exaggerated and misleading.
5. Social, moral, and cultural concerns may be quite real and legitimate, yet have little to do with economic liberalism and much to do with government interference in markets and society.
6. Free markets and robust economies unleash dynamism and creativity that spill over into social and cultural endeavors.

The Rise of Economic Nationalism

Despite centuries of broad agreement among economists about the benefits of free trade and free markets, Donald Trump’s 2016 election sparked a revival of mercantilist thinking on the political right, particularly among those associated with what is sometimes called the “New Right.”

The New Right consists of different camps, including postliberals, National Conservatives, and reactionaries. Despite their differing concerns, they are relatively united in their economic nationalism. They have attacked orthodox economic theory regarding free trade. Many of its members move beyond criticizing international trade to argue that competitive free markets fail to promote sufficient national goods such as a robust manufacturing sector, vibrant defense-related industries and technologies, or sufficient wage growth and job opportunities for less-educated workers and small communities.

In Adam Smith’s time, economic nationalism was called mercantilism. Though the word is now used primarily in classrooms and works of economic history, mercantilism applies nearly as much today as it did in the eighteenth century. Economic nationalists raise similar concerns and arguments as their mercantilist forebears. The current US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer has said he wants to renegotiate major trade agreements to increase barriers to imports and to gain more concessions from trading partners.^[3] This “beggar thy neighbor” mindset, in which countries sought to strengthen themselves at the expense of others, was what motivated mercantilist policymaking in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

This paper looks at a variety of real and imagined problems highlighted recently by right-leaning critics of free markets and limited government: declining manufacturing output, stagnating or declining wages for blue-collar workers, family disintegration, supply chain dependency, and more. It explores what their claims mean when it comes to economic theory and why most economic nationalist policy recommendations are misguided and destructive. The paper concludes with real economic theory for real economic problems.

Economic nationalism is a set of policies and ideas popular on the New Right. It can be seen as a reaction against what they call “neoliberal” orthodoxy. “Neoliberalism,” to them, amounts to a constructivist political project that uses the state to establish and protect market-like reforms in every aspect of social life. It prioritizes the price mechanism, free enterprise, and the mobility of capital and labor, often insulating these processes from democratic contestation through supranational institutions and legal frameworks. This “neoliberalism” reached its pinnacle under the Reagan and Thatcher administrations.

The ascent of the New Right is also a response to what it sees as the failure of the center-left’s adaptation of neoliberalism, associated with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair in the 1990s. More importantly, the economic catastrophe of the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent stagnation fueled much of the current discontent with market economies. The crisis led economic nationalists to argue that while corporate profits soared, the middle-class stagnated and blue-collar workers were left behind.

The New Right seeks to dismantle what they see as the “neoliberal consensus” — a framework characterized by faith in open markets, free trade, managed immigration, and individual autonomy — and replace it with an economy oriented toward the “common good,” national sovereignty, and the stability of the nuclear family. We set aside for now whether this ‘neoliberalism’ was as prevalent as they suggest or whether it fairly characterizes pro-market, pro-trade advocates.

New Right thinkers view the current historical moment as a crisis of liberalism and argue that the liberal focus on maximizing individual choice and market efficiency has led to the atomization of society, the hollowing out of domestic industries, and a “new class war” between a globalist technocratic elite and a neglected working class.

Their thesis about the economy and their diagnosis of its problems overlap in important ways with those of the Progressive Left, particularly in their support for government-directed industrial policy, antitrust enforcement, and worker empowerment. Both sides emphasize:

• National Interest Over Consumer Choice: Economic policy should serve the “common good” of the nation rather than prioritize consumer choice and low prices.
• National Sovereignty and Reciprocity: Trade policy should protect national manufacturing capacity and prevent dependence on foreign powers, particularly hostile ones.
• Non-Supremacy of Markets: Democratic political institutions should be used to improve the lives of ordinary people.
• Rejection of Globalism: The New Right suspects global institutions like the WEF, the WTO, the UN, and the IMF insulate corporations from democratic oversight and thereby erode national sovereignty.

A central hub for the development of New Right economic policy is the think tank American Compass, founded by Oren Cass.^[4] The organization’s mission is to move past the “blind faith in free markets” that characterized late-twentieth-century conservatism and return to a focus on the “importance of family, community, and industry to the nation’s liberty and prosperity.”^[5]

Their economic philosophy centers on the idea that public policy should create the conditions for productive, engaging, and remunerative work, particularly for those without college degrees. This stands in sharp contrast to what Cass sees as the libertarian conception of “neoliberalism,” which prioritizes maximizing GDP and consumption while relying on redistribution to compensate for the decline of working-class communities.

Cass argues that labor is not a mere commodity to be bought and sold at the lowest possible price. Treating labor as a commodity alienates workers and leads to a sense of powerlessness and self-estrangement. Instead, he advocates for “productive pluralism,” where people of diverse abilities can form self-sufficient families and contribute to their local communities through stable employment.^[6]

Concerns about economic stagnation and social decline have gained prominence in the past fifteen years. These concerns have been raised in the broader culture through books such as Hillbilly Elegy and Alienated America. They have been explored on the cultural front in books such as Coming Apart and Deaths of Despair^[7] and on the economic front by Lighthizer, Greer, American Compass, and others.^[8]

The Philosophy Behind Economic Nationalism

The New Right’s rejection of orthodox economic theory stems less from an economic critique than from a philosophic critique of “liberal humanism” that its members believe has underpinned Western policy for decades. Postliberal theorists such as Patrick Deneen, Yoram Hazony, and Adrian Vermeule argue that liberalism’s fundamental flaw is its conception of the human person as an autonomous, unencumbered individual. This “autonomy-maximizing” norm, they contend, erodes the structures of nature and tradition — family, tribe, and nation — that provide meaning and limits to human life.^[9]

Hazony, in particular, argues that the liberal framework ignores the “collective identity” inherent in the nation-state and views political obligation only through the lens of consent rather than inherited duty.^[10] New Right thinkers view this philosophical atomization, which they link to free markets, as a root cause of sterile decadence and social dysfunction, contributing to declining family formation, increasing isolation, and rising suicide and depression.

According to this view, the breakdown in social institutions, especially the family, necessitates a massive administrative state to manage the social problems left by the destruction of communal norms. Consequently, some on the New Right call for a “postliberal order” in which the state is no longer a neutral mediator but an active promoter of a substantive conception of morality based on the “common good.”

In some ways, the philosophical appeal of economic nationalism is easy to see. Which is more important, happiness or stuff? Virtue or wealth? Human flourishing or loneliness, depression, anxiety, and suicide? Philosophers like Hazony, Deneen, and others rightly put moral and spiritual goods above material or economic goods. That hierarchy resonates with most people.

National conservatives will often argue that there’s nothing particularly moral or virtuous about a free market. They’ll say that markets are only a means to the end of human flourishing. But they wrongly conclude that we can simply change, restrict, or manipulate those markets through legal force to achieve other social and political goals.

This seemingly moral prioritization, however, errs in assuming that because economic prosperity is secondary, it either doesn’t matter or it can simply be molded and shaped to support moral and cultural goals. Leaving aside the deep challenges and disagreements over what exactly the moral and cultural goals of a society should be, the economic error lies in adopting the central-planning mindset. Adam Smith called this the “man of system”; Austrian economists later criticized it as the socialist central planner.

Economic nationalism relies on state intervention on, direction of, and control over markets and market participants. It delivers far less abundance and prosperity than economic liberalism and brings a host of unpleasant and unintended consequences in its wake — ultimately leading to corporatism (crony capitalism) or sliding into full-blown socialism.

Leaders of the New Right put forward many economic claims about the state of employment, wages, and production, as well as standards of living, family formation, and innovation. They make theoretical claims about the nature of trade, tariffs, and comparative advantage. They also make claims about prices and consumption and argue that a private market system cannot be largely self-regulated and productive.

Economic nationalists tie a vast array of different problems, real and imagined, to what they portray as a naive “neoliberal” faith in free markets. They use these alleged failures to justify greater government intervention in the economy and in society.

This paper considers five areas of concern for economic nationalists: 1) manufacturing output; 2) stagnating wages and rising living costs; 3) family disintegration; 4) opioids and declining labor force participation; 5) national security concerns.

1. Manufacturing’s Decline?

Economic nationalists hold that decades of trade liberalization and offshoring have hollowed out American manufacturing. Cass has argued that manufacturing output, excluding the semiconductor/electronics category, has essentially stagnated or fallen for two decades, and that reported output growth is largely an artifact of how the government counts semiconductor transistors rather than real production increases.^[11] American Compass materials describe long-term “actual investment” — new plant, equipment, and IP — as having weakened in the US for decades, attributing this to a “financialized” corporate sector prioritizing shareholder payouts over production.

Manufacturing’s share of GDP and of total employment has fallen substantially — from roughly 23 percent of gross output in 1997 to about 18.5 percent more recently — a pattern common across advanced economies as services grow faster and manufactured goods get cheaper relative to other goods.^[12] This is a genuine structural shift, but “manufacturing is a shrinking share of a growing economy” is a different claim than “manufacturing has collapsed.”

But the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) “value added” measures show that real US manufacturing output reached an all-time record high of more than $2 trillion (in 2009 dollars) in recent years, and multiple independent tallies put the 2025 figure at the highest level ever recorded. Over three decades, inflation-adjusted manufacturing output has risen more than 80 percent, according to BLS data, even as manufacturing employment fell — a pattern that illustrates substantial productivity gains rather than a simple story of manufacturing decline.^[13]

Critics of Cass argue that he cherry-picks the subcategory and time window that produces the most pessimistic reading, while omitting that non-tech manufacturing sectors (autos, machinery, chemicals) have also grown in absolute output, even if at a slower rate than tech. The Cato Institute’s multi-part critique of American Compass’s “Rebuilding American Capitalism,” for example, specifically faults it for using selective examples that support a predetermined conclusion rather than a consistent, falsifiable measure of actual investment.^[14]

Economic nationalists raise a related concern that US companies will “underinvest” in the United States as they chase profit by shifting production to low-cost parts of the world. That means shifting factories and other production facilities to Vietnam, Mexico, China, or other countries. These international investments also affect technological development, innovation, and sophistication in the countries where production takes place.

But US companies have been outsourcing high-tech production, especially of microprocessor chips, for decades. As a result, most leading-edge semiconductor chips are manufactured in Asia, especially Taiwan. Taiwanese company TSMC has developed technology and manufacturing processes superior to those of US companies. And China is right on its heels.

The CHIPS Act was passed primarily because of concern that US outsourcing semiconductor manufacturing also meant outsourcing technological innovation.^[15] While semiconductors are the most salient example, this dynamic of outsourcing production and thereby also outsourcing technological innovation could also be applied to phones, cars, solar panels, and other products. This helps explain economic nationalists’ concern about the “hollowing out” or decline of US manufacturing output and capabilities.

Yet the United States continues to lead the world in innovation and value creation. It is home to a disproportionate share of trillion-dollar companies, billionaires, and start-ups. The economic nationalists’ focus on innovation and technological development in a handful of industries misses the broader picture.

2. Stagnating Wages

J.D. Vance, in the foreword to Cass’s The Once and Future Worker, wrote that wages have stagnated for more than a generation, welfare dependence has surged, and life expectancy is falling amid rising substance abuse and obesity.^[16] Cass’s core statistical claim, repeated across American Compass reports, is that the inflation-adjusted average hourly wage for production and nonsupervisory workers rose only about 1 percent between 1972 and 2022 — essentially flat for half a century.^[17] Senator Josh Hawley’s legislative materials similarly assert that the wages of everyday working Americans have remained stagnant for decades while large corporations have secured record profits.^[18]

This stagnation claim uses only wages and excludes the value of employer-provided health insurance, retirement contributions, and other benefits. Economist Don Boudreaux, drawing on estimates from economists Phil Gramm, Robert Ekelund, and John Early, notes that employer-paid benefits added roughly 25 percent more to total compensation in 2017 than they did in 1967.^[19] This means total compensation — not just cash wages — grew considerably more than the wage-only framing suggests.

Another problem is that Cass uses a specific inflation deflator (CPI-U) that many economists believe overstates inflation relative to the alternative PCE deflator used in GDP accounting. When economists use total compensation (wages plus benefits) and the PCE deflator, median worker compensation has grown meaningfully since the 1970s — less than productivity growth or top-decile income growth, but not flat.

The real, defensible finding in the wage-stagnation literature, dating back to work by economists such as Lawrence Katz and Claudia Goldin, is that wage growth has been uneven — strongest for high earners and workers with college degrees, weaker for median and below-median workers, especially men without a college degree.^[20] And the gap between productivity growth and median compensation growth widened after the 1970s. These aggregate statistics overlook income mobility over people’s lifetimes and the movement of more workers into upper-middle-class and upper-class professions.

American Compass developed the “Cost-of-Thriving Index” (COTI) to broaden its case that wages have not advanced. COTI provides an alternative to traditional inflation adjustments, which its opponents argue overstate prosperity by failing to account for the “mandatory” nature of modern middle-class costs. Instead, the COTI calculates the number of weeks of work a median male earner requires to pay for a standard “middle-class basket” of housing, healthcare, transportation, and education.

COTI data indicate that while a worker in 1985 could provide for a family of four in 40 weeks, a worker in 2022 needs 62 weeks — more than a full year of work.^[21] This “catastrophic erosion of middle-class life” suggests that even as the economy grows, the foundational security of the American family is disappearing. Critics from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) have countered that this index ignores the significant “quality improvements” in cars and healthcare and fails to account for tax subsidies like the Child Tax Credit (CTC), which they claim makes it easier to support a family today.^[22] Advocates of COTI reject these quality adjustments, noting that a family cannot choose to live in a “1985 house” or receive “1985 medical care” to save money. Those options no longer exist in a modern market. Still, COTI fails to account for large differences in regional costs of living. Some elements of this basket, such as childcare, are also highly questionable as “mandatory.” Finally, as mentioned earlier, the share of workers represented by the median male earner category has declined, and non-cash benefits are still ignored.

In a similar vein, Sohrab Ahmari, in his book Tyranny, Inc., argues that the concentration of economic power in the hands of a few corporations has created a new form of “private coercion.” He contends that free-market capitalism has evolved into “corporatism,” where powerful firms manipulate labor markets through noncompete clauses, excessive NDAs, and the exploitation of worker vulnerability.^[23] Ahmari’s solution is to “raise up the countervailing power” of workers through regulation and unionization.

This narrative about the plight of blue-collar workers has led many economic nationalists to break from traditional conservative orthodoxy and embrace labor unions and collective bargaining. This anti-corporate, pro-worker position argues that strengthening the bargaining power of labor is the surest way to limit the ideological and economic influence of large businesses. But this position rests on suspect assumptions about the prevalence of monopolistic and monopsonistic power.

Real wage growth over time comes from greater competition and productivity, not by government fiat. Only if one assumes significant monopsony or monopoly and widespread market failure — conditions in which workers are grossly underpaid relative to their productivity — would these bargaining proposals be likely to have any positive effect.

3. Family Disintegration

Beyond the economic claims of declining manufacturing and stagnating wages, postliberal and national-conservative writers — especially Deneen and Vance — argue that liberal individualism has driven a decline in marriage and family stability, which has had corrosive effects on communities. Vance has argued that easy divorce, framed as “liberation” during the sexual revolution, often made the lives of children worse. He praised his grandparents’ volatile-but-enduring marriage as preferable to divorce, and has suggested that American culture devalues parenthood.

Yet there is a difference between claiming that divorce rates are high and damage communities and claiming that divorce rates are rising. The US divorce rate peaked around 1980 at 22.6 divorces per 1,000 married women, fell to 20.5 by 2008, and has since fallen more sharply to 14.4 in 2023. The proportion of first marriages likely to end in divorce has fallen from roughly 50 percent in 1980 to a bit over 40 percent today.^[24] Divorce, in other words, has been declining in the aggregate for more than 40 years, not rising — though this aggregate trend conceals a divergent pattern for Americans without a college degree.

Marriage rates, however, have fallen sharply. The share of adults married by age 30 fell from about 80 percent in the 1980s to around 64 percent by the 2000s, with the median first-marriage age rising several years.^[25] This part of the New Right claim — fewer people marrying, and marrying later — is accurate and well documented. Few dispute the decline in family formation that concerns economic nationalists.

But concerns about family disintegration have less to do with economic trends and more to do with class divergence. The decline in marriage has been concentrated among Americans without a college degree. College-educated Americans have seen marriage rates hold up better and divorce rates fall about 30 percent since the early 1980s. Among Americans without college degrees, divorce rates have risen by about 6 percent.^[26] This “marriage divide” has been well-documented by sociologists like Andrew Cherlin and W. Bradley Wilcox. But it’s a story of growing inequality in family stability, not generalized societal collapse.

While the declines in marriage and family stability may appear to be caused by economic factors like unemployment and low wages, the causal relationship more likely runs in the opposite direction. Vance makes just this point in Hillbilly Elegy when he describes people having trouble holding jobs, not trouble finding them, because of what he describes as their personal shortcomings. The declines that concern the New Right are tied more closely to academic achievement and other confounding factors. Healthier economic conditions alone are unlikely to reverse these trends.

4 Social Decay: Opioids and ‘Deaths of Despair’

Economic nationalists also invoke the concern of rising mortality from suicide, overdose, and alcohol-related disease, what Anne Case and Angus Deaton call “deaths of despair.” These deaths of despair are used as evidence that decades of trade liberalization, globalization, and elite indifference have devastated working-class communities, particularly white Americans without college degrees. Cass’s introduction to The Once and Future Worker links falling life expectancy and rising substance abuse directly to the “economic consensus” favoring consumption and free trade over domestic employment.^[27]

Regarding job losses, economists broadly agree that the 1999–2011 “China shock” (increased competition following China’s entry into the WTO) caused real, concentrated, geographically clustered harm to manufacturing communities. This part of the New Right critique is empirically well supported, and many economists have revised their views somewhat since the influential Autor-Dorn-Hanson research.^[28] Yet the New Right narrative overreaches when it generalizes from that real, bounded shock (concentrated in furniture, textiles, and a few other import-exposed industries in the 2000s) to claim continuous, sector-wide, ongoing collapse due to international trade.

The New Right’s claim is at least defensible in its diagnosis. The harms from the China shock were real and geographically concentrated. But its rhetoric that manufacturing has died or has been hollowed out conflicts with record real output figures. And the claim that manufacturing has been flat since 2000 when excluding semiconductors is contested by economists across the political spectrum.

There is little dispute over the underlying mortality data. Case and Deaton documented a real and substantial rise in midlife mortality, reversing decades of improvement, among white Americans without a bachelor’s degree driven by suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholic liver disease.

How much does economic decline, stagnation, or dislocation contribute to deaths of despair? Are international trade restrictions and industrial policy likely to reverse the economic problems experienced by these communities? While some conservatives argue that increased drug availability is the primary cause of deaths of despair rather than a symptom, this explanation is difficult to reconcile with the fact that drug availability increased across the country without producing similar epidemics elsewhere.

Case and Deaton argue that the declining position of non-college workers in the labor market, reflected in job loss and wage stagnation, fosters drug use, family breakdown, and community erosion. Research testing the hypothesis that trade shocks caused deaths of despair, however, finds only a modest and geographically uneven relationship. Exposure to Chinese import competition, especially through manufacturing job losses, is associated with increases in suicide and accidental poisoning deaths, though less so with alcohol-related deaths. But at least one study found that much of the county-level correlation between economic decline and overdose deaths is “mostly explained by confounding factors” rather than direct causation.^[29] Other research attributes a large share of white deaths of despair specifically to high-school dropouts, a narrower and more specific group than the broader non-college population emphasized by Case and Deaton.

Economists skeptical of the claim that free markets or international trade caused these problems point out that research on the net employment effects of trade suggests that job losses in import-competing manufacturing have been substantially offset by job gains in the export and services sectors nationally, even though the losses and gains fall on different people and places — a real distributional problem, but one that undermines the claim that trade as a whole destroyed American jobs or prosperity.

5. National Security Concerns (Supply Chains, China, Industrial Base)

The complexity of national security leads many people to take a kitchen sink approach in which nearly every element of the economy affects a nation’s security. While unlikely to satisfy the kitchen sink theorist, we will consider and address how many aspects of trade policies could improve a country’s geopolitical standing and national security.

Economic nationalists regularly claim that offshoring critical manufacturing (especially pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, and defense-relevant materials) to China has created dangerous single-source dependencies that adversaries could exploit in a crisis. Marco Rubio has repeatedly warned about the risks of depending on China for critical rare earth minerals and critical supply-chain components.^[30] He and others have argued that excessive reliance on a single supplier could become a serious vulnerability during a future geopolitical crisis or conflict.

US pharmaceutical exposure to Chinese firms is real but smaller than most public statements suggest. While some members of Congress claim that 80 percent of US drugs come from China, such statements are not well supported. The 80 percent figure appears to be a misreading of an FDA study. The real number is closer to 17 percent of US active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) imports coming from China over the past decade.^[31]

That said, the underlying concern is not baseless. China is a huge supplier of all kinds of goods, pharmaceuticals or otherwise. The question becomes how damaging would a Chinese moratorium on exporting certain goods be? How can supply chains be made more robust? That second question is surely better answered by companies and entrepreneurs, not government officials.

But the broader concern about a “hollowed-out” defense industrial base is genuinely contested among national-security specialists. Certainly, industrial capacity has contracted in some sectors over the decades, including shipbuilding, munitions production, and rare-earth or critical-mineral processing. The disagreement is more about the size and urgency of the problem than about whether it exists at all. A full examination of the issue requires a paper of its own, but the concerns raised are often exaggerated or highly speculative.^[32]

Some resources are important for manufacturing military equipment, and the manufacturing capabilities needed to produce that equipment are important as well. However, there are many large defense contractors that maintain robust supply chains and manufacturing capacity. If the military identifies a sourcing risk — say, by importing inputs from China or from regions that could be cut off — it can require contractors to find or develop alternative sources.

We don’t need broad national restrictions on trade to do this. Similarly, if a significant amount or type of manufacturing capacity poses a risk, the military can develop programs and direct funding toward it. Ironically, one of the major threats identified by a top defense official was not supply chains or insufficient manufacturing, but unsustainable federal debt accumulation.

But as Adam Smith noted in 1776, military strength really comes from production, not spending. The mercantilists of his day misunderstood the role of gold and silver in promoting national defense. They thought having large stores of precious metals and “beggaring thy neighbor” were keys to military success. But military power is about men, materials, equipment, and technology, not money itself. Large amounts of spending are a proxy for bringing more resources to bear.

National security relies on wealth and prosperity. Wealth and prosperity not only allow greater resources to go toward military preparedness, but also create a broader industrial base and better technology. Wealthy countries can build and field more military strength than poor countries can. Consider how the United States spends nearly as much on its military as the next 10 biggest spenders combined.

Beyond creating economic ties that would be costly for an aggressor to break, more extensive trade can create geopolitical sympathy and support. How else can one explain the fact that Taiwan remains independent of China while lacking formal international recognition? More extensive international trade also strengthens the economic incentives of many interest groups within the trading countries to avoid war.

Real Economic Challenges: Regulation and Technology

While economic nationalists lay nearly all the blame for their concerns at the feet of international trade and free markets, two other forces in society are the real culprits: technology and regulation. What appears to be market-driven “underinvestment” simply reveals how private companies have adapted to costly political interventions. Blaming international trade ignores these technological and political dynamics.

American companies invest overseas in large part because of the increasing costs of doing business in the US. Unfavorable tax rates on labor (such as FICA and unemployment), increasing taxes on capital and land use, significant red tape when employing people, and increasingly expensive regulatory compliance — especially environmental regulation — have all reduced the profitability and attractiveness of developing manufacturing facilities in the US.

Many US manufacturing problems arise from tying our own hands rather than from market competition abroad. When it comes to rare earth mining and refining, for example, the EPA has made it prohibitively expensive. And so the US has almost no rare earth mineral development. While this is concerning since these minerals are key elements of batteries and other advanced technology used by the military, the problem was not created by free trade or trade liberalization. Nor is it a problem of China subsidizing its mining and refining industries.

It’s a problem driven within the United States. If the EPA loosened many of its regulations regarding rare-earth mining and refining, rare earth minerals, innovation, and production would likely increase significantly. Just as the EPA hobbled American development of rare earth minerals, state regulatory policies across the Midwest have tied the hands of many of their industries — contributing to outsourcing and capital flight. These unforced errors are equally or more important than trade liberalization and foreign competition.

Similarly, Detroit became the symbol of urban decline with its population shrinking from 1.85 million residents in 1950 to 713,000 by 2010.^[33] Its fortune was tied to the auto industry, which had been subsidized, protected, and enabled by a series of political entities (the city, the state, etc.). These interventions created an industrial monoculture and thereby put the city at risk should its main industry be disrupted. To put all the blame for Detroit’s decline on international trade eroding the dominance of the Big Three misses the main issue: historical government interventions and protectionism reduced industrial diversity in Detroit and weakened the efficiency of these firms because they didn’t have to compete with foreign automakers.^[34]

Unions also play a role in creating fragility and reducing the competitiveness of companies where they have negotiated high wages and retirement benefits. Vehicle investment and production in the US have expanded significantly in recent years — but almost entirely in right-to-work states rather than legacy car-manufacturing states. While one divide falls along state-level labor policy, there are many other laws, both state and local, responsible for the differing fortunes of the “Sunbelt” and the “Rust Belt.” Federal laws, which apply to both sets of states, also reduce economic competitiveness and resiliency in general.

Focusing on the “China Shock” distracts from these rigidities created by government rules. It also ignores the deep effects of technological change and disruption. Manufacturing output relative to manufacturing employment has been moving in opposite directions for more than 40 years. That’s partly why geographic regions with greater connections to technological innovation and high-tech industries have fared so well over that same period.

Why, for example, have the decline in production, the reduction in wages, and the opioid epidemic been largely concentrated in the Midwest, even as the South saw manufacturing increase year after year? Domestic and local policy have far more to do with these kinds of problems and shortcomings. Yet economic nationalists blame free trade and free markets.

The outsourcing of US resources and technology feared by economic nationalists is not a stable political or economic equilibrium. The political backlash of the past seven years, under both the Trump and Biden administrations, has also created economic forces. The Chinese government has made its business climate less friendly, while foreign investment and foreign manufacturing have withdrawn. COVID restrictions, political constraints, and geopolitical risk have accelerated the migration of foreign investment from China.

China’s advantage of abundant low-cost labor has declined as its economy, wages, and standards of living have grown. Diminishing marginal utility and declining marginal productivity eventually constrain individuals, firms, industries, and even countries. Ignoring this universal economic dynamic was one of the chief sins of the eighteenth century mercantilists who wanted to run perpetual trade surpluses and perpetually increase their country’s stock of gold and silver.

Economic Nationalists’ Grab Bag of Bad Ideas

In their quest to increase social welfare through industrial policy and protectionism, economic nationalists have become increasingly skeptical of large corporations and profits. They argue that free-market capitalism has led to increasing “financialization,” by which they mean that Wall Street banks and bankers make ever larger sums of money via financial engineering, not by investing and building in the “real” economy. Selling derivatives, securities, and other sophisticated financial instruments has replaced building factories, machines, and infrastructure. David Bahnsen has ably put this myth to rest by explaining how financial capital spreads risk, provides liquidity, and facilitates price discovery.^[35]

Yet in their skepticism of profits and large corporations, economic nationalists often sound surprisingly like their counterparts on the political left. While taxing wealth and financial transactions fits in the agenda of collectivists like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, it’s far more jarring to hear figures from the political right like Cass, Ahmari, or Rubio calling for them.^[36]

“Financialization” is just one more reason economic nationalists advocate active industrial policy. They think that pursuing comparative advantage can lock a country into less valuable, low-growth industries (Landes),^[37] or that private actors have insufficient incentives to invest in research and development (R&D). Recent examples include the CHIPS Act, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and even the Inflation Reduction Act.

The list of ideas for government programs has become quite extensive. Because modern economic nationalists believe market forces are unable to ensure the optimal rate of economic growth, they turn to a grab bag of government interventions. When it comes to reforming industry, there have been proposals for:

• The Defense Plant Corporation (DPC) Model: Utilizing government-owned, privately managed facilities to rapidly rebuild industrial capacity in sectors like shipbuilding and aerospace.
• Sector-Specific Subsidies: More legislation like the CHIPS and Science Acts to secure key industries and supply chains.
• National Investment Funds: Creating a kind of domestic export-import bank or sovereign wealth fund for breakthrough technologies and industrial priorities.

Yet scholars at the Cato Institute have shown that industrial policies like these lead to “wasted resources, distorted incentives, and fragile outcomes.”^[38] For example, the tariffs on steel and aluminum led to a net loss of $600 million in directly affected US industries. And foreign exporters passed nearly 96 percent of the costs onto American households and businesses.

When it comes to workers, Cass and his colleagues at American Compass, as well as Ahmari, have proposed a wholesale remaking of US labor law to move away from the “adversarial” enterprise-based model established by the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). Their proposals include:

• Sectoral Bargaining: A model where unions negotiate for an entire industry or profession simultaneously. This prevents “labor arbitrage,” where individual firms have an incentive to avoid unionization to gain a price advantage over unionized competitors.
• Works Councils: Based on the German model, these would be non-adversarial, workplace-level forums for worker-management cooperation. Current law (specifically Section 8(a)(2) of the NLRA) makes such organizations illegal if they are not part of a traditional union, a restriction the New Right seeks to lift.
• Workers on Boards: Proposing that workers should have the right to elect representatives directly to their corporation’s board of directors.
• Wage Boards: Industry-specific labor councils that bring together business, labor, and government representatives to set minimum wage floors and working standards for an entire sector.

Even some elected Republicans have spoken in favor of more labor union membership.^[39] But these labor policy proposals ignore both history and theory. While labor unions can have some success boosting workers’ wages for a time, they do so at the expense of customers and shareholders. They make those businesses less efficient and competitive over time, leading them to shrink or relocate. Either decision will leave unemployed workers and their communities worse off.

This, in fact, is the story of the Rust Belt. We’ve seen this movie before with the US auto industry, its decline, and the destruction left in its wake. And tariffs won’t fix the problem. Rather than preventing firms from shrinking or relocating by protecting them from competition, tariffs compound economic inefficiency. They raise the costs consumers pay even more than union wages do while removing an important incentive to innovate and improve the protected industry.

And protected resources are almost always going to be another industry’s input. Increasing input costs makes even more firms less competitive on the global stage.

Many economic nationalists argue that economic success should be measured not by GDP growth, but by the ability of families to thrive and to reproduce (hence the COTI). To address declining birthrates, they propose a variety of “pro-natalist” policies including:

• Direct Family Subsidies: Proposals for an expanded Child Tax Credit and “baby bonuses” (e.g., $4,000 per child) to offset the financial burden of child rearing.
• The “Manhattan Project to Restore the Nuclear Family”: A sweeping Heritage Foundation proposal to use government intervention to encourage married couples to have more children.^[40]
• Preference for Home-Based Care: The New Right is often critical of “universal daycare,” which Vance described as “class war against normal people.” They prefer policies that redirect funding to individual families, allowing one parent to stay at home.

Planning Research and the Economy?

A less controversial but still problematic industrial policy proposal is government funding for research and development. At a theoretical level, the case for government funding of general research and development projects seems strong. Many kinds of R&D create positive externalities for an economy but will therefore be “underprovided” even though the “social” benefits they generate will be greater than the “social” costs of providing them.

We can easily imagine a technology or scientific breakthrough that provides great social value but little private economic value. Suppose a technology reduces the cost of producing steel. For the entire steel industry, suppose it saves $1 billion in terms of net present value. If the industry consists of five identical firms, the savings per firm would be $200 million. But if developing the technology costs $250 million, no individual steel firm has an incentive to develop it on a cost-benefit basis.

Licensing such a technology might make developing it profitable. We could also imagine a consortium of steel companies developing such a technology. But the issue of “free riding” remains. Why contribute resources to the creation of a good if you can benefit without incurring the expense? Expanding on this narrowly contrived example, what about a broader research or technological discovery that applies across multiple industries? The cost-benefit dynamics still favor such research from a society-wide calculus, but now many more firms outside the steel industry would have to be part of the consortium.

As we expand the hypothetical applications of research and development, the benefits of funding it grow, even as coordinating or raising funding for it becomes more difficult. Surely this kind of industrial policy rests on firm footing. Yet this seemingly impregnable argument for publicly funding general research is a fiction. It assumes access to knowledge that doesn’t exist. In fact, it only differs from the arguments of many socialists in its more limited scope.

The billion-dollar question, of course, is which scientific or technological research will generate these massive social benefits? And the corollary question is: which individuals, institutions, and projects should receive public funding? Politicians and bureaucrats have no special insight into scientific inquiry and discovery. Even with the unrealistic assumptions that they will seek out true scientific experts offering impartial recommendations, and then follow those recommendations with no concern for benefiting their constituencies or the popularity of the research project, the endeavor would still likely fail.

The unknowable and unpredictable nature of scientific advances makes “optimal” or even “rational” research and development funding inherently speculative. Even in specific fields, scientists disagree and argue. That’s a key element of the scientific process. Philosophers of science have long known this. Michael Polanyi, for example, emphasizes the unpredictable and unexpected nature of scientific breakthroughs.

The problems of publicly funding research and development relate directly to other industrial policy recommendations.

The limits of knowledge in scientific discovery also apply to economic discovery. Which firms will innovate most? Which will develop the best products? Which will generate the most social or total benefits? No one knows.

That’s why we have open competition! When the US government takes stakes in specific companies or promotes specific industries and technologies, it has just as much likelihood of picking winners as bureaucrats at the National Institutes of Health or the Centers for Disease Control have of picking which new scientific breakthroughs to fund. It is an exercise in hubristic futility.

But it gets worse.

In place of knowledge and objective decisions seeking the public good, political actors can, and will, be strongly influenced by parochial, popular, or well-funded interests. So, for example, tariff rates will not be set at some “optimal” level. They will end up looking like Swiss cheese with all the loopholes created to benefit those with political connections.

Beyond direct federal funding of research and development, many economic nationalists propose subsidizing certain kinds of manufacturing, taxing or restricting foreign competition, creating domestic purchase agreements, and other interventions to tilt the global economy in favor of US producers. They would largely agree with Mariana Mazzucato’s assessment that government research and programs drive most economic growth.^[41] But the errors of her book have been exposed by McCloskey and Mingardi in their book The Myth of the Entrepreneurial State.

Conclusion: Real Economics for Real Problems

It’s hard to disagree that human flourishing is the reason we want markets. We all engage in trade and production in order to meet our needs and wants, to care for our families, to build things that we desire, and to achieve our plans and goals. That’s what markets are for. We produce because we want to consume.

But economic nationalists err in thinking that the market is malleable or can simply be made subservient to some centralized plan. Markets only work well under conditions of freedom and decentralization. They cannot be directed by economic nationalists (or anyone else) without creating significant costs and unintended consequences while often failing to achieve their objectives. Heavy-handed interference and centralized planning reduce the market’s ability to deliver useful goods and services at relatively low cost to those who should have it. This is not market dogmatism, but a matter of theory and history.

Economic nationalists often present themselves and their ideas as embodying “realism” and sophistication. They claim to see the world as it is, not as economists imagine it to be. Henry Clay, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, and Richard Nixon all framed their economic agendas as clear-eyed, realistic policies. Many economic nationalists are concerned, literally, with the nuts and bolts of global trade and domestic manufacturing. They operate within a zero-sum view of competition between nation-states.

Yet for all its “realism,” economic nationalism ultimately fails to provide an accurate representation of the world. Greater wealth and productivity provide more resources for military spending and development. They support technological innovation. And more extensive global trade increases the cost of conflict and increases goodwill, as well as fostering greater social and political ties between trading partners.

A regime of free trade makes a country wealthier than a policy of protectionism. The historical record here is clear: nations with freer trade are more prosperous than those with less free trade. This can be most clearly seen at the limit: Hong Kong, Singapore, and Great Britain versus any poor country you can think of (Zimbabwe, North Korea, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uzbekistan, etc.). But it is also borne out in many studies about the relationship between free trade and economic prosperity. While relatively free international trade is not the only reason for countries becoming wealthy, it is an essential ingredient.

Economic nationalists also neglect the forces at work shaping economies. They naively assume they have sufficient knowledge to guide the economy: from what research and development should be done to what investments should be made to what goods should be produced. And they seem blissfully ignorant of the political economy dynamics, what economists call rent-seeking, that lead to resource allocation by political connections or influence rather than by efficiency and productivity.

While economic nationalists identify some real problems and challenges in American society such as declining labor force participation, family disintegration, rising rates of suicide and depression, and certain national security risks and imbalances (such as rare earth mineral refining and magnet and semiconductor production), none of these problems was caused primarily by “neoliberal” or free market policy. Heavy-handed government regulation has hobbled US rare earth mining and refining. It also made certain industries and areas of the country more vulnerable to disruption by foreign competition and technological change. Nor can these problems be solved by economic central planning.

The economy is not in nearly as dire shape as the economic nationalists suggest. Yes, there are affordability problems. Yes, some communities and industries are struggling. But claims of deindustrialization and declining manufacturing are greatly exaggerated. While manufacturing employment has fallen steadily, output has grown.

Tariffs will not revitalize most Rust Belt factories or communities. Nor will they raise worker wages. Nor will they be implemented in any kind of coherent or rational manner. Pro-natalist policies of tax credits and subsidies have generally failed to increase birthrates wherever they have been tried, from Hungary and France to South Korea and Japan. Industrial policy and handouts are not the right kind of tool to address that problem.

Even where the economic nationalists have valid national security concerns, sweeping federal trade or industrial policy is a blunt instrument that will likely do more harm than good. There are other, more focused and restrained methods of dealing with national security issues. The best general economic policy for defense is dynamism, innovation, and growth.

Which brings us to the fundamental problem with economic nationalists: everything they propose fails to take economic theory seriously. They seem to think that the economy is simply a machine or tool that they can wield or direct toward whatever goals they want. Their policies repackage central planning and market socialism. But as Austrian economists showed in the socialist calculation debate of the 1920s, no planner can collect enough decentralized knowledge to make decisions about the best way to produce and allocate resources. Nor can they predict all the consequences of their intentions.

Even worse, theory and experience show that when public officials control and direct valuable resources, many vested interests emerge to “advise” them on how those resources should be used, not in pursuit of some “common good,” but in pursuit of the narrow interests of lobbyists and the politically connected.

If economic nationalists want a manufacturing boom and renaissance, they should advocate reducing tax burdens, especially those associated with employing people. They should also advocate aggressive cuts to red tape, especially environmental red tape. Doing this would encourage significant “reshoring” of investment dollars by large corporations. And it would do so without costing taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars, creating grift and rent-seeking by picking winners and losers to receive government largesse, or creating artificial booms and busts in favored industries.

Better business and economic conditions increase productivity and output. Improving these conditions will also support economic resiliency in the face of international competition and technologically driven creative destruction. We already see this at work in the states. Freer states with lower tax burdens and less regulation are booming — both economically and demographically.

There is nothing magical about Florida or Texas that couldn’t be imitated by states in decline or stagnation. State policy reform, coupled with federal policy reforms, could help check and maybe reverse trends in deaths of despair, poverty, and social disintegration.

Free markets and liberal trade regimes need not undermine the geopolitical power of national governments. In fact, free enterprise arguably makes regimes more powerful over time. Cracks or declines in a nation’s geopolitical power can be tied much more easily to departures from the free enterprise system than to an embrace of free enterprise. And it is fortuitous that this is so because it means that the economic well-being of a people need not come at the expense of their military power.

Whatever one’s beliefs or concerns about cultural, social, or moral issues, they are no excuse for ignoring economics. This paper has made the case that economic constraints are real, and that many of the problems economic nationalists talk about have little connection with too much trade or overly free markets.

Government restrictions in the economy have created many of our national security vulnerabilities. It’s the long shadow of state regulation that we see in deaths of despair, which tend to be concentrated in pockets of economic stagnation. A rightly ordered economy — one that upholds property rights, freedom to trade, build, and innovate, limited government, and decentralized decision-making — best supports well-ordered individuals, families, and communities.

Notes

[1] Jonathan E. Hillman and Ishaan Thakker, “Washington’s Growing Portfolio: Tracking US Government Investments,” Council on Foreign Relations, July 2, 2026, https://www.cfr.org/articles/washingtons-growing-portfolio-tracking-u-s-government-investments.

[2] “The New Right: Anatomy of a Global Political Revolution,” European Council on Foreign Relations, accessed March 7, 2026.

[3] United States Trade Representative, “Ambassador Greer Announces 2026 Trade Policy Agenda and 2025 Annual Report,” news release, March 2, 2026, https://ustr.gov/about/policy-offices/press-office/press-releases/2026/march/ambassador-greer-announces-2026-trade-policy-agenda-and-2025-annual-report.

[4] American Compass, “About,” accessed March 7, 2026, https://americancompass.org.

[5] American Compass, Rebuilding American Capitalism: A Handbook for Conservative Policymakers (Washington, DC: American Compass, 2023).

[6] Oren Cass, The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America (New York: Encounter Books, 2018).

[7] Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020).

[8] J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (New York: Harper, 2016); Timothy P. Carney, Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse (New York: Harper, 2019); Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (New York: Forum Books, 2013); Nicholas Eberstadt, Men Without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Foundation Press, 2016).

[9] Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018); Yoram Hazony et al., “National Conservatism: A Statement of Principles,” National Conservatism, accessed March 7, 2026.

[10] Yoram Hazony et al., “National Conservatism: A Statement of Principles.”

[11] American Compass, Rebuilding American Capitalism: A Handbook for Conservative Policymakers (Washington, DC: American Compass, 2023).

[12] Pew Research Center, “Most Americans Unaware That as US Manufacturing Jobs Have Disappeared, Output Has Grown,” 2017, updated 2024; SSTI, “Is US Manufacturing Productivity on a Decline? A Detailed Look at BLS OPT Data.”

[13] American Enterprise Institute, “Despite Getting No Respect, US Manufacturing Is Alive and Well,” Carpe Diem (blog), Mark J. Perry; US Bureau of Economic Analysis, value-added-by-industry data.

[14] Cato Institute, “American Compass Dystopia: The ‘Decline’ in Investment,” Cato at Liberty (blog series); “Oren Cass Can’t Keep His Story Straight about Manufacturing,” Independent Institute, 2025.

[15] CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, Public Law 117-167, 136 Stat. 1366.

[16] J. D. Vance, foreword to Oren Cass, The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America (New York: Encounter Books, 2018).

[17] American Compass, “The 2023 Cost-of-Thriving Index,” February 2023, https://americancompass.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/COTI_2023_Final.pdf.

[18] Office of Senator Josh Hawley, “Blue-Collar Bonus” and “$15 Minimum Wage for Billion-Dollar Corporations,” press releases.

[19] Phil Gramm, Robert Ekelund, and John Early, The Myth of American Inequality: How Government Biases Policy Debate (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2022); Donald J. Boudreaux, “Oren Cass Again Grossly Understates the Rise in Ordinary Americans’ Wages,” Cafe Hayek, May 5, 2023.

[20] Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, The Race between Education and Technology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

[21] American Compass, “The 2023 Cost-of-Thriving Index.”

[22] Edward Conard, “The Cost of Thriving Has Fallen: Correcting and Rejecting the American Compass Cost of Thriving Index,” accessed March 7, 2026, edwardconard.com; Jeremy Horpedahl, interview, “The Real Cost of Thriving Index,” The Great Antidote, AdamSmithWorks, accessed March 7, 2026.

[23] Sohrab Ahmari, Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty—and What to Do about It (New York: Forum Books, 2023).

[24] National Center for Family and Marriage Research, Bowling Green State University, “Divorce: More Than a Century of Change, 1900–2022”; Pew Research Center, “8 Facts about Divorce, Marriage and Remarriage in the United States,” 2025.

[25] Pew Research Center, “8 Facts about Divorce, Marriage and Remarriage in the United States,” 2025.

[26] W. Bradley Wilcox et al., “The Evolution of Divorce,” National Affairs; see also Andrew J. Cherlin, cited therein.

[27] Oren Cass, introduction to The Once and Future Worker.

[28] David H. Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon H. Hanson, “The China Shock: Learning from Labor-Market Adjustment to Large Changes in Trade,” Annual Review of Economics 8 (2016): 205–40; David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon H. Hanson, “On the Persistence of the China Shock,” NBER Working Paper No. 29401 (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2021).

[29] Christopher J. Ruhm, “Deaths of Despair or Drug Problems?,” NBER Working Paper No. 24188 (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2018).

[30] Remarks of Secretary of State Marco Rubio before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, June 3, 2026; US Senator Marco Rubio, “Rubio Introduces Bill to Combat China’s Rare Earth Monopoly, Boost US Advanced Manufacturing,” press release, July 11, 2019.

[31] American Action Forum, “US Dependence on Chinese Pharmaceuticals Is Overstated,” 2020; Reason, “Why You Shouldn’t Trust Anyone Who Claims 80 Percent of America’s Drugs Come from China”; US Senate Special Committee on Aging, testimony on API/pharmaceutical supply chains, 2026.

[32] Samuel Gregg, “A Free, Prosperous, and Secure America,” American Institute for Economic Research, July 12, 2024, https://aier.org/article/a-free-prosperous-and-secure-america/.

[33] US Census Bureau, decennial census population counts for Detroit, Michigan, 1950 and 2010.

[34] David Hebert, “Michigan Needs Empowerment Not Protectionism,” The Detroit News, May 6, 2025.

[35] David Bahnsen, “Financialization and Missed Boats: When Mythology Papers over Reality” (American Institute for Economic Research white paper, November 25, 2024), https://aier.org/article/financialization-and-missed-boats/.

[36] Marco Rubio proposed taxing stock buybacks at the same rate as dividends in American Investment in the 21st Century (Office of Senator Marco Rubio, May 2019).

[37] David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (London: Little, Brown, 1998; repr. Hachette UK, 2015).

[38] Scott Lincicome, “Separating Tariff Facts from Tariff Fictions,” Cato Institute, accessed March 7, 2026, https://www.cato.org/publications/separating-tariff-facts-tariff-fictions; Erica York, “How the Section 232 Tariffs on Steel and Aluminum Harmed the Economy,” Tax Foundation, March 4, 2025.

[39] Marco Rubio, “Amazon Should Face Unionization Drive Without Republican Support,” USA Today, March 12, 2021; Josh Hawley visited striking United Auto Workers in Wentzville, Missouri and co-sponsored S.Res. 412, a Senate resolution in solidarity with the strikers (118th Cong., 2023).

[40] Heritage Foundation, “We Must Save the American Family” (draft position paper), reported in Jenny Kane, “Heritage Foundation Making Plans to Boost US Birth Rate,” Newsweek, September 4, 2025.

[41] Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths (London: Anthem Press, 2013).