Originally published at: Alexander Hamilton, Milton Friedman, and JD Vance's Refrigerator - 4Liberty Network
The JD Vance refrigerator story is where this whole debate over free markets really begins. The Vice President is politically correct about almost everything he’s angry about. But is he technically correct? In February of 2024, at a tech conference in Washington, JD Vance explained why he thinks economics is fake. “We have a 40…
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Donald Trump for all the talk of his being a “liberal” back in 2015/16 in his political bones was always a Republican. A Republican of the Theodore Roosevelt “Progessive” Republican and Rockefeller Republican New York tradition, no doubt, as opposed to the Goldwater-Reagan tradition, but still a Republican.
JD Vance in his political bones is an Appalachia Democrat. He is socially conservative, dovish on foreign policy, pro-Union, and left wing on economics, he isn’t a Republican.
This is why people shouldn’t compare Trump and Vance’s political journey’s and why they are fundamentally different as political figures.
Vance has the same problems with capitalism as your average DSA member and about the same level of understanding. He just wants to keep “muh young men” from being radicalized on social issues, which is what he believes will happen if capitalism continues to exist, NOT if the DSA takes over.
He wants to keep the 26 year old from voting for the Democrats not because it would usher in communistic ruin, he wants to keep the 26 year old from voting for Democrats because he wants to protect the existence of women’s sports and “the American family”. That might be pragmatic coalition building if he was still a Senator with some wacky views like Josh Hawley who was trying to get attention on his pet issues nationally. The problem is that he is currently the Vice President and actively wants to be President and the leader of the Republican Party.
In the Trump era, we were supposed to be done with RINOs who flip flopped and were only Republican because of (insert issue here). Instead in Vance, we are looking at a guy who switch parties tomorrow if said party reshuffled the ideological deck slightly.
And I’m strictly talking about his economic stances for this conversation, the subject of his character, who he is friends with, and his views on foreign policy are whole other conversations.
The DSA critique is about distribution, who gets the surplus. Vance’s critique is about production and formation, what kind of people a given economy produces. That’s a much older tradition, closer to Catholic social teaching than to Bernie, and it’s why Conn Carroll’s version of the argument is the strongest thing anybody has said on that side. Markets really do depend on habits and institutions that markets don’t generate on their own. Friedman never had a great answer for that.
The problem is the jump from that observation to industrial policy. If your worry is that whoever holds the wheel will steer the economy toward bad ends, the fix cannot be grabbing the wheel and hoping your guys hold it forever. Every lever Vance wants built gets inherited by the next administration. A federal stake in AI under a Republican is a Democratic slush fund four years later. That’s not a hypothetical, it’s just how the ratchet works.
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