Earlier this month, prominent names in the conservative movement gathered in Washington, DC, for a conference on “National Conservatism.” Speakers included such luminaries as Tucker Carlson, Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance, John Bolton, Michael Anton, Rich Lowry, Yuval Levin, and Josh Hawley. Representing the academy were F.H. Buckley, Charles Kesler, Amy Wax, and Patrick Deneen. Other conservative writers and thinkers participated in panels. The two figures most associated with national conservatism — Yoram Hazony and R.R. Reno — spoke during the opening plenary.

Yoram Hazony‘s recent “National Conservatism” conference attracted controversy, some of it deserved. Arch interventionist and National Security Advisor John Bolton was one featured speaker, injuring the gathering’s promise of a shifting foreign policy consensus on the Right.

Imagine a social system in which those contributing to the welfare of others are rewarded for it, and those contributing more get access to more resources—so that they can serve us better. Such a system would generate ever more welfare, and for more people.

Then imagine an alternative system under which we institute a central force in society with the object to make sure resources are always equally distributed regardless of how they are used and whether they contribute to welfare.

In an earlier post, I noted Robert Nozick’s criticism of the view that the state may tax us because we are in part ‘social products’. Much of Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia reflects Rothbard’s influence, and this topic is no exception. As so often, Rothbard was there first, and Nozick did no more than restate his insights in more complicated fashion.

In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick argues that If people benefit you by their activities, you have no obligation to pay them for what you have gained. Nozick provides a well-known example to illustrate this point: “Suppose some of the people in your neighborhood (there are 364 other adults) have found a public address system and decide to institute a system of public entertainment. They post a list of names, one for each day, yours among them. On his assigned day. .

On July 11, 2019, before the Senate Banking Committee, the Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell said that the relationship between unemployment and inflation in the US has vanished. According to Powell,

After nearly six years occupying the top job in British monetary policy, Mark Carney is now less than a year from the end of his term as the 120th Governor of the Bank of England, and the UK government has formally begun the search for his successor.

Many critics of capitalism have given up trying to claim capitalism makes people poorer. Faced with so many obvious gains in the standard of living, and in reducing poverty worldwide, markets have won the economic debate over whether or not capitalism is the path to material riches.

But the doctrinaire anti-capitalists have other strategies. They’ve now branched out into blaming capitalism for a host of other social, ecological, and psychological ills.