New polling shows a majority of self-identified MAGA voters under 40 support state-run grocery stores, arguing that neither the Trump administration nor the broader institutions that shape public opinion are offering the kind of full-throated defense of free enterprise the moment requires. Dan Proft revisited comments Vice President JD Vance made months ago on a podcast, in which Vance argued that Trump has shifted Republican economic policy away from a Milton Friedman-style free-market approach toward what Vance called an American developmentalist tradition rooted in Alexander Hamilton, citing Trump’s openness to tariffs, industrial subsidies and even government equity stakes in companies. Proft pushed back on that framing, citing a Wall Street Journal piece from the Institute for Liberty’s Andrew Langer noting that Hamilton’s original tariffs were modest revenue measures suited to a young, war-debt-burdened nation, not a template for Trump’s approach, and that Jefferson and Madison opposed much of Hamilton’s program out of concern over centralized power. Proft also played a portion of Milton Friedman’s well-known explanation of how a simple pencil requires the voluntary cooperation of thousands of people worldwide who never meet, coordinated not by central planners but by the price system, as an illustration of why free exchange fosters both efficiency and peace.
Proft was joined by Jim Meigs, a free expression columnist for the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, to discuss the argument further. Meigs said he’d welcome an effort to get every American schoolchild familiar with Leonard Read’s pencil essay as a baseline lesson in economics. Turning to the phrase “late capitalism,” which Meigs has written about, he said the term is often used loosely by people with little serious grounding in Marxist theory to suggest that capitalism is in its final decline and due to be replaced by something better, even as those making the argument typically do so from the comfort of their own smartphones.
Meigs said the political landscape has scrambled in ways that would surprise past generations, noting that Trump’s instincts on tariffs and government ownership stakes echo a 1970s-style Democrat more than a traditional Republican, an approach he said is seductive to voters unfamiliar with how markets actually function. He cited recent CBS polling showing a majority of Democrats holding a favorable view of socialism against a much smaller share expressing positive views of capitalism, with the gap even wider among younger voters, attributing the trend in part to what he called a decades-long shift in how economics is taught, especially in higher education, where he said courses on Karl Marx now vastly outnumber those on Adam Smith or Milton Friedman.
Meigs traced the intellectual roots of “late capitalism” thinking to mid-20th-century theorists like Theodor Adorno, who he said were troubled that a comfortable, home-owning working class no longer had any appetite for revolution, prompting a shift toward convincing people that even their own prosperity was itself part of an oppressive system to be resisted. He said a similar kind of magical thinking now shows up on the right as well, in the tendency to compare real-world free-market policy against an idealized utopia rather than against realistic alternatives, and pointed to rent control as an example of a policy that feels appealing in the short term but discourages new housing construction over time, citing New York’s continued reliance on rent regulation under the current mayoral administration as a case in point.
Asked to respond to a listener who argued that free traders are comfortable being taken advantage of by trading partners, Meigs said the basic case for trade is straightforward: two parties who trade what they have in surplus for what they lack both come out ahead, even if it doesn’t always feel that way. He said he understands the case for targeted restrictions on countries like China for national security reasons or clear rule violations, but argued that treating all trade as a zero-sum contest between nations rather than a series of voluntary exchanges among individuals is a mistake shared by protectionists on both the left and the right. Meigs suggested that public attitudes shift considerably depending on framing, noting that people respond far more favorably to the idea of “economic freedom” than to the word “capitalism” itself, and argued that much of today’s “late capitalism” commentary amounts to a cultural pose rather than a serious economic critique.