After former President Donald Trump selected market skeptic Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) to be his running mate, many are asking if Republicans still believe in free markets. However, it is just as important to ask if they ever did.
When Trump ran in 2016, he bucked the Republican consensus around free trade and was more willing to embrace populist ideas on economic issues. However, with a few exceptions, he governed as a fairly traditional economic conservative.
Vance, on the other hand, has a fundamentally different vision. He praised the work of Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Lina Khan, despite her “anti-innovation, anti-tech, anti-big business, and anti-consumer agenda,” as Reason put it. He has supported raising the minimum wage to as high as $20 per hour, worked on a populist banking bill with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and expressed interest in partnering with “the Bernie Bros.”
To be fair to Vance, he is simply more direct about his disdain for markets than many others on the Right.
No Republican has ever had a perfect record on supporting pro-market solutions to economic problems. The “Old Right” of President Calvin Coolidge and Sen. Robert Taft (R-OH) was often in favor of high tariffs. Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon were friendly to New Deal and Great Society programs, while President Herbert Hoover laid the groundwork for the New Deal in the first place.
President Ronald Reagan arguably had the best performance, but even his administration had a poor record on the national debt. More recently, during the 2008 financial crisis, President George W. Bush said he “abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system.” The list goes on, but the point is that Republicans have a tendency to talk about capitalism a lot more than they govern like capitalists.
The way in which anti-market policies have found their way into GOP politics has changed throughout the decades, but that does not mean they should be celebrated. The fact remains that free-market capitalism has been the most effective economic system in history and one of the greatest forces for good in the world. While Republicans may have historically failed in the specifics, they have recognized that at least getting close to true capitalism is the goal.
Moving forward, pro-market Republicans need to distinguish themselves from the “crony capitalists” who have supported subsidies, tariffs, and corporate welfare to favor businesses at the expense of consumers. Being “pro-business” is distinct from being “pro-market,” but many Republicans have conflated the two.
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Voters are often swayed by rhetoric that promises handouts instead of promoting personal responsibility, so it is inherently difficult to make free markets a popular pitch. Republicans need to focus their efforts on explaining the problems with government interference in the economy instead of simply ceding that issue to the Left.
Advocating progressive economic policies should be viewed as a violation of conservative principles, whether it comes from the “establishment” or not.