Samuel Gregg in Public Discourse:
Over the past six years, there has been an eruption of disputes on the American right about the place of markets in modern conservative thought and policy. ...
These discussions have underscored to me two things. The first is that these conservatives are asking legitimate questions which merit considered responses. Second, however sympathetic I am to their worries, these conservatives’ critiques of markets and their proposed remedies are insufficiently cognizant of some important realities.
Actually, the history of conservative discontents with capitalism long antedates the last six years. I addressed this rich history in my essay Conservative Critiques of Capitalism. I concluded that:
Postwar conservatism in the United States was a somewhat rocky marriage of traditionalists, libertarians, and, later, neoconservatives, united mainly by a shared opposition to communism. Given a seemingly binary and existential choice between Western capitalism and Soviet Communism, American conservatives opted for the former. Yet, despite Frank S. Meyer’s famous fusionism project, the preexisting fault lines persisted. With Communism off the table as an existential threat, the rupture of such a contingent unity along those fault lines may have been inevitable. The task ... is to revive what is best in those traditions and to turn them to the task of reforming capitalism into a practical but humane way of organizing the economy.
Since I jumped ship from The Republican Party to The American Solidarity Party, I've been increasingly exploring Distributism as an alternative. G.K. Chesterton is a good place to start.
