I’m old enough to recall a time when conservatives seemed to have some affection for the free market and freedom generally. But the memory is fading fast. If the Clinton-dominated, post-Cold War years of the 1990s conjured up the prospect of a conservative/populist uprising against the welfare-warfare state, our own times of Bush-dominated nationalism seem to have underscored a vast and growing chasm between the interests of freedom and the rule by the GOP and its ideological underpinnings of American conservatism.
As if to make the point even clearer, today the editor of a new list of the best conservative books tells the Washington Times: “I don’t consider a pure free market to be conservative.” Because Pope Leo XIII was “not in favor of an unfettered private economy,” he says, we shouldn’t be either. He is right, of course, that conservatism and free markets are incompatible; Mises and Hayek said as much. As for Leo, he was better on economics than his reputation would suggest; in any case, JPII has made it clear that Catholic Popes do not purport to speak infallibly on economic systems. This Woods paper needs a wider distribution.
