This article is adapted from a lecture presented at the Mises Student Circle “Why the Economy Is Failing Generation Z” on November 1, 2025, in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
We live in politically interesting times.
The popularity of Donald Trump as a candidate and his two victories has been framed as a big shift on the American right, mirrored by the same shift on the left with the popularity of figures like Bernie Sanders, AOC, and now Zohran Mamdani. So what’s causing this? What factor or central dynamic lies at the core of all this change?
I would argue that it all comes back to one thing: Many Americans now recognize that the status quo—the political economic system as it has existed for the last few decades at least—is unacceptable. The trajectory we are on is bad for them, their families, their communities, and most everyday Americans, and therefore we need to make substantial moves away from it.
What I want to focus on here is one faction within the Right that is presenting an answer—an answer that evidently makes a lot of sense to a lot of people, especially a lot of young right-wingers, but that is also dangerously wrong.
Their lead thinker is a policy analyst named Oren Cass. He argues the Right ought to move away from free-market dogma, stop treating big business profits as a good in themselves, and instead judge the economy by the strength of American industry, by the security of American workers, and within the context of the broader national interest. He argues that corporate power often requires state power to restrain it and that the Right should reject unmitigated free trade.
In short, Cass and his allies argue that the Right has delegated domestic economic policy to libertarians and the results have been disastrous. That is what they say has caused our terrible economic status quo.
So what’s wrong with this?
The problem is that they completely accept the left-wing progressive narrative of economic history.
And that version of economic history is not just wrong, it’s a deliberate deception—a mythology—meant to help further the progressive cause.
This progressive narrative starts in the late 1800s with the end of what truly was an era of laissez-faire capitalism. In their telling, the government reluctantly took more power during the Progressive Era after widespread demands for reform. But Wall Street speculation slid through the cracks and caused the Great Depression. Hoover refused to help, so FDR had to prevent the economy from collapsing entirely with the New Deal. World War II then fully rescued the economy, and the postwar years became a golden age of high taxes, strong unions, and booming prosperity. Then stagflation hit, Reagan walked back the progress, and the country returned to an era of unfettered capitalism that has defined our system ever since.
The obvious takeaway from this narrative is that laissez-faire ought to be rejected again and that the best way forward is to return to the high-tax, union-heavy model that progressives advocate.
But almost the entire narrative is wrong.
The Progressive Era was not a grassroots uprising against big business. After trying and failing to form industry cartels and monopolies during the truly laissez-faire days of the nineteenth century, some heads of industry recognized that the only way they’d be able to form these cartels and monopolies was with state power. The extensive rollout of agencies and regulations was not designed to hold big business in check. It was meant— from the beginning—to leverage the power of government to protect the businesses that were already on top. And that’s how it’s worked since.
The Great Depression was caused by the government’s credit expansion in the 1920s and then greatly exacerbated by Hoover and FDR. Both intervened heavily in the economy and did so in a way that prevented the economy from correcting itself. Recessions and depressions are market corrections, and Hoover’s and FDR’s policies prevented a correction from happening, which froze the economy in a long recession. World War II also did not help the economy heal. It derailed the recovery that had finally begun in the late 1930s.
Moving on to the ’70s—one incredibly consequential event always left out of the progressive narrative is when President Nixon “temporarily” suspended the dollar’s tie to gold. This represented a complete government takeover of the value of money. And because money is half of every transaction that happens anywhere in the economy, it’s hard to emphasize enough just how big a government power grab this was.
Taking full control of the dollar allowed the political establishment to supercharge the rackets they had been building up and carrying out since the Progressive Era—each designed to move as much of our money as possible into the pockets of well-connected companies.
It is no coincidence that most of the concerning economic trends people point to—corporate consolidation, economic inequality, the impossibility of maintaining a family on one income, the hollowing out of middle American communities—almost all go back to the 1970s.
Then, the 1980s saw the birth of bailout culture and the Greenspan Put, which ushered in an era of financialization. This was not some natural market transformation based solely on people’s preferences but a consequence of government policy. Then came the so-called free trade agreements of the ’90s—which were, in reality, government-brokered and government-subsidized trade agreements designed to benefit well-connected companies—all enforced by Washington-controlled multinational organizations.
But remember how the progressives present all this. The crony departments and regulations, the control the government now exerts over money, the artificial propping up of the financial sector, and the overall way Washington works with well-connected businesses to warp the economy— this is all labeled “capitalism,” “the free market,” “laissez-faire,” and “free trade.”
But it isn’t.
It’s cronyism, corporatism, interventionism, progressivism—there are plenty of names, but it is not a system where the government has nothing to do with the economy.
Calling what we’ve had for the last 40 years laissez-faire capitalism is simply a branding choice that is meant to mislead you so whenever the next economic crisis strikes, your immediate reflex is to conclude that the crisis only happened because you have too much economic freedom.
Young Americans and young right-wingers are absolutely correct to reject this awful status quo. But to really reject it, you first have to understand it. And it would be a major mistake for the Right to delegate their understanding of what’s gone wrong under the current system to their ideological opponents.
