{"id":12044,"date":"2023-05-24T13:39:18","date_gmt":"2023-05-24T17:39:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/americancompass.org\/?page_id=12044"},"modified":"2023-11-14T13:53:48","modified_gmt":"2023-11-14T18:53:48","slug":"foreword","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/americancompass.org\/rebuilding-american-capitalism\/foreword\/","title":{"rendered":"Foreword: What Happened to Capitalism?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
What has happened to capitalism in America? Businesses still pursue profit, yes, but not in ways that advance the public interest. Over the past 50 years, corporate profits rose by 185%. Wages rose by 1%. American industry lost its technological edge, from semiconductors to commercial aerospace to robotics. Investment stalled, so much so that the entire corporate sector became a net lender<\/em>, handing money back to financial markets faster than it tapped those markets for capital to invest. As American Affairs<\/em> editor Julius Krein has observed<\/a>, if $1 trillion in annual stock buybacks are to be taken at face value and \u201cthere are in fact no better investments to be made, \u2026 it calls into question the viability of the free market capitalist system itself.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Managers are supposed to be accountable to owners, but the latter\u2019s identity is no longer discernible. Most shares are held by passive funds, often on behalf of pension plans on behalf of retirees and taxpayers, or else overseas, often in sovereign wealth funds. Comparative advantage is supposed to allow a developed economy like America\u2019s to focus on the most advanced technologies, but the U.S. trade balance in advanced technology products has swung from a $60 billion surplus in 1992 to a $190 billion deficit in 2020. Innovation is supposed to drive productivity but, in the manufacturing sector, productivity growth has turned negative, with factories producing less per worker in the early 2020s than the early 2010s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Whereas 40 weeks of the typical male worker\u2019s income in 1985 could provide the middle-class essentials for a family of four, by 2022 he needed 62 weeks of income\u2014a problem, there being only 52 weeks in a year.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n The economic system\u2019s malfunction has dire human consequences. Whereas 40 weeks of the typical male worker\u2019s income in 1985 could provide the middle-class essentials for a family of four, by 2022 he needed 62 weeks of income\u2014a problem, there being only 52 weeks in a year. Nearly half of Americans report having fewer children than they want and, outside the most highly educated and compensated households, affordability is the most frequently cited obstacle. The average American can no longer expect to earn more than his father did at the same age. Poorer regions can no longer expect to catch up with wealthier ones. The bottom 50% of households had less wealth in 2019 than in 1989, though the top 10% added $29 trillion. Life expectancy is falling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In The Wealth of Nations<\/em>, Adam Smith described<\/a> conditions under which the private pursuit of profit advances the public interest. \u201cBy preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry\u201d and \u201cdirecting that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value,\u201d the capitalist \u201cpromote[s] an end which was no part of his intention.\u201d That is, if<\/em> capitalists see the expansion of domestic value creation as their best route to profit, then<\/em> the nation will benefit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The \u201cinvisible hand\u201d is an explanation of how capitalism can<\/em> work, not a promise that it will<\/em>. If the hard, capital- and labor-intensive work of extracting natural resources, raising agriculture, building infrastructure, and manufacturing products consistently offers a less attractive investment profile than developing a cloud-based application that might scale to millions of users in just a few years with just a few employees, capitalism does not work. If firms facing pressure to raise wages or improve conditions or otherwise invest in American workers can instead offshore production to foreign labor or bring that labor into America for \u201cjobs Americans won\u2019t do,\u201d capitalism does not work. If top business talent finds it can earn more money trading piles of assets in circles than making productive investments in the real economy, capitalism will not work. The market will deliver the profits, as America has learned, but also national decay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n * * *<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Rebuilding American capitalism is a quintessentially conservative task. Libertarians cannot understand the many supports that capitalism requires or countenance a role for government in supplying them. Progressives are disdainful of a system that leaves so much to private ordering and are eager to use public programs to provide whatever the market does not. Only conservatives have the necessary gratitude for what has worked before, preference for a free enterprise system that both grants liberty and imposes obligations, and comprehension of the need for institutions to shape market actors and constraints to channel productively their ambition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Conservatives value the unique ability of the free market to allocate resources efficiently and empower people to meet one another\u2019s needs, to limit the power of a central government and place it instead in the hands of those best positioned to take care of their own interests, and to evolve over time in response to real-world conditions rather than at a bureaucrat\u2019s whim.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n Conservatives value the unique ability of the free market to allocate resources efficiently and empower people to meet one another\u2019s needs, to limit the power of a central government and place it instead in the hands of those best positioned to take care of their own interests, and to evolve over time in response to real-world conditions rather than at a bureaucrat\u2019s whim. Markets are themselves institutions through which people develop informal codes and formal rules for cooperating and transacting more effectively. But conservatives also recognize that markets have drawbacks and limitations. The free market can reduce people to consumers and relationships to transactions. It prioritizes efficiency over resilience, and individual self-interest over the common good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Unfortunately, conservative economics was supplanted on the American right-of-center for the past 40 years by a market fundamentalism that saw capitalism as \u201cjust another word for economic freedom,\u201d in former Senator Pat Toomey\u2019s words. The task for policymakers, then, was simple. To quote Jack Spencer, vice president of the Heritage Foundation\u2019s Institute for Economic Freedom and Opportunity, \u201cWhy don\u2019t we look at a policy and just ask, does it expand economic freedom?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Conservatives relinquished any right to advance a positive vision beyond free individuals exercising free choice in the market, each presumably able to optimize his own life. The failure of families to form reflected merely a preference for other pastimes. \u201cAmericans have voted with their wallets,\u201d according<\/a> to Scott Winship, director of the American Enterprise Institute\u2019s Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility, \u201cfor more stuff, smaller families, and less time devoted to housework, raising kids, and investing in communities.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Underlying this blind faith in the market was an assumption stated most clearly by Professor Glenn Hubbard, chairman of President George W. Bush\u2019s Council of Economic Advisors: \u201cThe goal of the economic system [is] optimizing consumption.\u201d Thus, what Americans made, or whether America could make anything at all, did not matter. Michael Boskin, chairman of the elder Bush\u2019s Council of Economic Advisors, famously quipped, \u201cComputer chips, potato chips, what\u2019s the difference?\u201d Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, said of America becoming a manufacturing center again, \u201cwe cannot, and we should not want to be.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n These trends, actively cheered on the Right, contributed to rising inequality, slowing innovation, narrowing of opportunity, and loss of middle-class security.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n The accompanying agenda of tax cuts, deregulation, and free trade was well suited to an ideology of freedom disconnected from any conception of flourishing, but as economic policy it was a disaster for the nation. Globalization crushed domestic industry and employment, leaving collapsed communities in its wake. Financialization shifted the economy\u2019s center of gravity from Main Street to Wall Street, fueling an explosion in corporate profits alongside stagnating wages and declining investment. The decline of unions cost workers power in the market, voice in the workplace, and access to a vital source of communal support. These trends, actively cheered on the Right, contributed to rising inequality, slowing innovation, narrowing of opportunity, and loss of middle-class security.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As with any fundamentalism, this reality was reframed to fit a happy and coherent narrative. Any market outcome, no matter how socially corrosive, was the right one: Broad regions of the country experiencing economic decline was natural and beneficial \u201ccreative destruction,\u201d and a cue for left-behind residents<\/a> to \u201cmove to opportunity\u201d in a coastal city. Business talent flocking<\/a> to hedge fund and private equity paydays was \u201cefficient\u201d and reflected the \u201cenormous social value<\/a>\u201d created by financial engineering and trading assets in circles. If China\u2019s state-owned enterprises dump cheap products into the American market, pulling investment and expertise and supply chains across the Pacific in the process, American consumers could enjoy the bounty at the Chinese Communist Party\u2019s centrally planned expense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n