“We who live in free market societies believe that growth, prosperity and ultimately human fulfillment, are created from the bottom up, not the government down. Only when the human spirit is allowed to invent and create, only when individuals are given a personal stake in deciding economic policies and benefitting from their success — only then can societies remain economically alive, dynamic, progressive, and free. Trust the people. This is the one irrefutable lesson of the entire postwar period contradicting the notion that rigid government controls are essential to economic development.”
—Republican President Ronald Reagan, September 29, 1981
“I don’t want them moving out of the country without consequences,” Mr. Trump said, even if that means angering the free-market-oriented Republicans he beat in the primaries but will have to work with on Capitol Hill.
“The free market has been sorting it out and America’s been losing,” Mr. Pence added, as Mr. Trump interjected, “Every time, every time.”
—The New York Times, December 1, 2016
Of course even Reagan was not a free-market absolutist. But he consistently paid rhetorical tribute to it. So it comes as something of a surprise that Vice President-elect Mike Pence– one of the nation’s most conservative governors– no longer feels the need to do so.
It seems that after nearly a century of Republicans framing the difference between the GOP and the Democrats as one of “free enterprise” versus “socialism,” the nation’s top Republican has effectively shifted the debate to how the government will regulate the economy and for whose benefit. Whether more traditional Congressional Republicans like it or not.
Which is fine. Bring it on.