When both flanks agree on the same mistake, the republic should worry

National Review notes something worth pausing over: the political left and the political right have lately converged on a shared premise — that some prices are, in themselves, morally wrong, and that the sovereign power ought to correct them. The left applies this logic to rents, drug prices, and groceries. The right applies it to imported goods, consumer credit, and foreign labor. The conclusion differs; the error is identical.

I spent years arguing, against considerable resistance, that the wealth of a nation does not spring from the mere abundance of its land or the piety of its people, but from the organization of its productive forces — credit, manufactures, commerce, and the price signals that coordinate them all. A price, freely struck between willing parties in an open market, carries more information than any bureau can generate. When the government declares a price wrong and proceeds to fix it, it does not abolish the underlying scarcity or surplus; it merely buries the signal under the noise of political preference.

This is not an argument against all government action in markets — I would be the last man to make it, having championed tariffs for infant manufactures, a national bank to regulate the currency, and an energetic federal hand in commerce from the very founding of the Treasury. The distinction is critical: policy that shapes the structure of markets — ensuring sound money, reliable credit, and a broad national market free of local monopoly — is entirely different from policy that dictates outcomes by naming a price politically permissible. The first enlarges productive capacity; the second substitutes the judgment of a cabinet secretary or a committee chairman for the distributed knowledge of ten million buyers and sellers.

What alarms me most in the convergence National Review describes is not the economic illiteracy, damaging as that is. It is the political dynamic underneath it. When both parties compete to punish prices they dislike, the mechanism of competition shifts from who can best enlarge the productive base to who can most convincingly perform outrage at the market's verdict. Manufacturers, creditors, landlords, importers — all become villains to be disciplined rather than producers to be harnessed. Public credit suffers; investment retreats; the national industrial sinew weakens precisely when foreign rivals are strengthening theirs.

The recommendation is straightforward, though I confess it is not fashionable in this climate: distinguish, carefully and publicly, between market structure and market outcomes. Enforce antitrust where genuine monopoly has replaced competition and rendered price signals fraudulent. Use the tariff and the industrial subsidy, if you must, to build up strategic manufactures — I have always favored this, and I do not recant it. But resist, with every argument available, the bipartisan temptation to declare that a price freely reached is a price politically impermissible. That road leads not to justice but to shortage, black markets, and the quiet death of the commercial republic both flanks claim to be defending.