Contributor: The American experience is not one that fails

Spend five minutes listening to the most theatrical tribunes of America’s left — Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren or Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — and you’re likely to hear stories of a country on the brink of collapse, plagued by a fraudulent system that can only be fixed through hard-line government. Then spend five minutes with the New Right — including Vice President JD Vance, Sen. Josh Hawley and any number of nostalgics who yearn to restore the ideal America of the 1950s — and you’ll hear a lot.

They say the American experience is a failure. The economy is broken. Our society is deteriorating. Only the vast power exercised by the government can save us. For two camps that claim to despise each other, their worldviews are in fact identical.

The populist poles of the left and the right are now converging in what political scientists call “Horseshoes“As each moves away from the center, it approaches its opposite on the other side. Both distrust markets, both want to micromanage industry, both are protectionist, both romanticize the labor of production and resent the obstacles that come from open international competition. Both, in other words, are hostile to the core principles of the liberal economic order that made America prosperous.

Each side is accused separately. For the left, it’s corporations and rich people; For the right, it is immigrants and trade. But both sides insist that a bright future is possible only through top-down political control, and are unwilling to face the real danger: a government that’s already too big, spending money it doesn’t have and heading for a fiscal crisis.

In dispatch, Kevin Williamson Caught an important thing: Nostalgia is produced as easily as plastic trinkets, and it attracts the attention of adults who should know better. The fiction of the 1950s, driven by the New Right to push for a more traditional social and economic order, was not a pleasant one.

Instead it was an era of short life expectancy, high poverty by today’s standards, legal and de facto discrimination, limited economic opportunities for women and minorities, frequent persecution of gay Americans, and very few consumer goods, technologies, and amenities. In the sense that it was a golden age, economic realities and individuals whose rights and opportunities were severely limited were ignored.

The left’s narrative—that America remains fundamentally unfair and economically disadvantaged toward working families—is equally disconnected from empirical reality. Like Michael Strain and Cliff Essence Detailed recently In the free press, we live in the richest mass affluent society in human history. Real wages for ordinary workers are dramatically higher than they were two generations ago. After-tax incomes for the bottom fifth of the scale have doubled since 1990. The wealth of households in the poorest quarter of the United States has tripled. Consumption, the best measure of well-being, reached record highs.

These figures don’t deny that some people are struggling, but they do show that the dominant narrative of national economic decline is false.

Desperation is dangerous. When voters believe they are living through economic sustainability, they are ready to accept policies that create one: price controls, industrial planning, more trade barriers, more centralized economic management and political control over our lives in general. History books and contemporary accounts can tell you that these policies have failed everywhere they have been tried. America’s competition with them is part of the reason many people find fault with today’s economy.

There’s no denying that for all its long-term strength, most Americans could do a lot better. Housing costs are high and rising. Child care and health care is very expensive. Energy infrastructure is inadequate. Migration is mismanaged. These issues are real, but the cause is not capitalism, markets, or global competition—it’s mostly the obstacles created by government itself, at the state and local levels and in Washington.

Local zoning laws prohibiting construction where housing is most needed are widespread. Energy is expensive because permitting regulations block pipelines, transmission lines and modern generation capacity. Child care costs are driven up by regulations unrelated to safety or quality. Health care is complicated because federal and state policies are in place, distorting prices and limiting competition, while heavily subsidizing demand. Domestic products cost more because tariffs, adopted by the new right and left, raise the price of goods that American companies need to produce things competitively.

It’s much simpler than the far-left-new-right narrative would have us believe. If we want lower prices and more opportunity, we must shrink the size and scope of government, build more housing, allow reforms, expand energy capacity, liberalize child care regulations, remove tariffs and open the doors to more workers. These are supply-based solutions, evidence-based and compatible with a free and dynamic society. They need humility, not the grand vision of people who want to redesign the American economy in their own image.

Veronique de Rugy is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. This article was produced in collaboration with The Creators Syndicate.