Over the past few months, I have been debating with some of the intellectual leaders of a group called “national conservatives.” I consider myself a conservative (but I’m more of a libertarian on most issues). National conservatives mean well and make some very valid points about things that are culturally and economically going in the wrong direction in America, especially in a post-Covid-19 world under President Joe Biden.
Sometimes it truly feels like our country is failing: our government-run schools are broken; there are more suicides, more drug overdoses; our border is out of control; our debt is growing exponentially; our fundamental First Amendment rights are under attack; our cities are starting to look like third world countries and everything is more exorbitant. Biden, who has declared that he will be a unifier, is pushing the country into the abyss.
Do I need to continue?
But the nat cons take their argument a step further and maintain that the pressures on middle/working class Americans predate Bidenomics, and that America has experienced a 40-year secular decline of disappearing factories, income inequality, decline in union power, and shrinking wages.
There are several prominent Senate Republicans – including Florida’s Marco Rubio, Ohio’s J.D. Vance and Missouri’s Josh Hawley, to name a few – who have dabbled in this movement.
They want greater restrictions on “big business” (such as antitrust enforcement and controls on the prices charged by industries), more protectionist trade policies, tax policies that provide credits and deductions for having more children, restrictions on legal immigration, and even higher taxes on the wealthy. In compact, they argue for a more energetic role for government in responding to the alleged failures of the free market.
Citizens in Congress and beyond seem to have forgotten Ronald Reagan’s celebrated quip some 50 years ago: “The most terrifying nine words in the English language are: ‘I am a government representative and I am here to help.'”
A strange thing is happening politically in Washington. This modern wing of the GOP is adopting the decadent rhetoric of Senator Bernie Sanders that middle-class America has been left behind for the past 40 years, with all the economic gains going to the richest Americans and huge corporations.
But this argument about the last 40 years – the greatest period of wealth creation and technological progress in the history of the world – is completely false. It may actually be demanding to appreciate it, given the last three depressing years of pandemics, lockdowns, and then Bidenomics, but the last 40 years have been a golden age of prosperity for virtually every income group – including the middle class. Median family income reached $78,000 in 2020, up $20,000 a year from 1983. That’s about a 35% boost after inflation over that period.
These income measures do not capture the much wider availability of more non-cash benefits – such as health care, more vacation time, 401k. and other retirement benefits – which leave middle-class families almost 50% better off than they were in the delayed 1970s. They don’t take into account cleaner air and water, enormous progress in fighting diseases like cancer and heart disease, the higher quality of the products we buy today, and the fact that virtually all Americans now have devices in their devices. pockets that put the whole world and the entire Library of Congress at your fingertips – with virtually free access.
While it is true that money cannot buy love, happiness, or grace, the material well-being of the middle class and the penniless is much more secure than it was in the supposed golden days of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. I refer readers to the book I wrote with the delayed Julian Simon, “It Keeps Getting Better,” which provides an overview of all the economic and financial advances that have occurred in the middle class over the last 50 to 100 years. When Trump was president, the middle class saw some of the fastest gains, with incomes increasing by more than $6,000 in four compact years.
What sparked the rise of more than $50 trillion in American wealth over the past four decades was an era of lower tax rates, freer trade, a stable dollar, the degenerating dominance of labor unions, a massive expansion of right-to-work laws, and a generous legal immigration process that allowed the U.S. United to welcome more than 25 million talented immigrants who became Americans and expanded the pie to all.
I understand why an avowed “democratic socialist” like Bernie Sanders might want to reject this reality.
The scary thing is that now some conservative intellectuals who should know better are telling us that we need more government restrictions on business, less immigration, more trade protectionism, more union power, and even more redistributive tax policies. This would make America – and virtually all Americans – poorer.
Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and an economist at Freedom Works. He served as an economic advisor to President Donald J. Trump.
