By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, August 19, 2026
Forgive a little institutional and collegial
salesmanship. The first edition of Michael Warren’s new newsletter, Next
Right, is out. You can read it here
and sign up for it here.
The headline of the first edition: “Brian Kemp Doesn’t Apologize for Free
Markets.”
I’m not going to punditize about the newsletter—yet—but I
thought it might be interesting to use it as a jumping-off point.
So, obviously, we should talk about the Dupont Circle
farmers market, a popular haunt for many of D.C.’s hipsters, bougies, and other
folks who, I think it’s fair to say—with no aspersions intended upon them or
upon the outgoing governor of Georgia—are not what you’d call part of Kemp’s
core constituency. I haven’t done any polling or canvassing, but I’m fairly
confident that supporters of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are at
least overrepresented among its patrons. That’s just my guess, based on the
various Bernie bro T-shirts, NPR tote bags, and ideologically redolent hats
worn by folks buying baked goods, organic produce, empanadas (so many
empanadas!), and macrobiotic teas and the like.
Now that I live nearby, many Sundays, I walk down to the
market to provision for breakfast, which I bring back home so the Fair Jessica
and I can yell with our mouths full at the Sunday shows.
The market opens at 8:30 a.m. But many vendors get there
hours earlier to set up. Customers get there early, too, lining up to get the
first pick of the various offerings and waiting for the starting bell. That’s
not figurative. No one is allowed to buy or sell anything until 8:30, when a
woman walks through the stalls ringing a cowbell.
Freshfarm, the nonprofit company that runs the market, is
very clear about this rule: “Don’t shop before the bell rings. Opening times exist for
a reason. They give market staff, farmers, and producers time to set up and be
prepared, leveling the playing field for everyone. Trying to shop before the
opening bell is the farmers market equivalent of banging on a store’s locked
door at 8:55 a.m. when it doesn’t open until 9:00 a.m. Not a great look.”
I don’t love Freshfarm’s list of “Dos and Don’ts” for
shoppers. It’s got a nannyish lifestyle nudgery tone to it. “Don’t bargain,” it
tells us. “Farmers price their goods based on what it actually costs to grow,
harvest, and haul everything to market. Prices are set and displayed
accordingly. Farmers have no interest in haggling, and pressing the point will
only make everyone uncomfortable.”
“Don’t complain about prices out loud. If something costs
more than you expected, use your inside voice.”
I thought this was America.
Still, I’ve been noodling on that starting bell. Is it
fair? Is it free (market)? I can see it both ways. On one hand, it prevents
merchants with more entrepreneurial initiative from meeting a market demand. If
you’re willing to get set up early, why shouldn’t you be able to meet the early
rush?
Of course, a more “laissez-faire,” first-come,
first-served policy would give an advantage to sellers closer to D.C. Some
vendors drive from far-off Pennsylvania or West Virginia. Others hail from
closer locations in Maryland or Virginia. Shorter distances mean lower fuel
costs and later start times for nearby vendors, which is already a competitive
advantage in terms of both labor costs and overhead.
I don’t want to do a Harvard Business School case study,
so I’ll skip ahead.
If you think about it for five minutes, having a uniform
start time is more “fair,” but it’s less free for both buyers and sellers.
Obviously, it’s not a very big deal. No one is compelled to buy or sell at the
market, and Freshfarm is free to set up whatever rules it wants, within certain
limits. Letting it set the rules of the game and “level the playing field,” as
it puts it, is another kind of fairness and freedom.
The reason I bring this up is to simply illustrate a
point. The free market—however you define it, and boy, do definitions vary—is
an artificial or “social” construct. The Dupont Circle farmers market is a
small construct sitting within a larger one. The District of Columbia gives
Freshfarm permission to close off streets. It provides police protection. It,
along with federal law and the Constitution, creates the conditions that make
the whole thing possible.
There are libertarians and anarchists who might roll
their eyes at this. Just make it legal to sell what, when, and where you want
and let the spontaneous order of markets handle the rest. I’m sympathetic to
some of the philosophical instincts behind such complaints. But the starting
bell is a creation of the spontaneous order, too.
I certainly think D.C. would be much better off if it
moved more in the direction of the libertarians. But there’s really no escaping
the fact that markets—free, partly free, or heavily regulated—rely on the state
for their existence to one extent or another. If a vendor starts selling at 8
a.m., they’re in violation of their contract. Who, in the end, enforces that
contract other than the government?
Public markets and private enterprise.
Indeed, the history of public markets is a fascinating
(to me) story of government intervention, mostly for the good. For thousands of
years, public markets were the result of government policy. From ancient Rome
to medieval Europe to the Progressive Era, public markets have been a government
program of sorts. Heck, the Soviet Union probably would have collapsed in its
infancy were it not for Vladimir Lenin’s New Economic Policy, which allowed peasants to start
selling stuff for profit.
In late 18th- and early 19th-century
Philadelphia, public markets were a vital source of commerce. But they were
heavily regulated. Prosperous customers were allowed first dibs on the wares
and produce. Then, two hours after opening, another bell would ring, and
“hucksters” were allowed to buy stuff and hawk it on the street. “Huckster”
back then was still a bit of a pejorative, in a snobby class sense, not the
more “grifter” connotation it has today. American hucksters were poor,
disproportionately female, and black, and bought stuff and then resold it at a
profit, sort of like the free-range umbrella sellers in New York City ($2 when
the sky is clear, $20 when it rains). The restrictions on hucksters led to a
satirical updating of the War of 1812 slogan “Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights”
to “Free Trade and Hucksters’ Rights.”
This sort of huckstering, buying goods only to resell
them at a profit, was disparaged and despised by elites for millennia. In
medieval Europe, the guilds wanted to protect their monopolies, and hucksters
and entrepreneurial middlemen screwed up their business plans. The powers that
be kept such things at bay until the liberal reforms of the Enlightenment
started to kick in.
Justus Möser, a German jurist and defender of the old
guild system, is considered by many to be the founder or greatest defender of
German conservatism during the Enlightenment. When I call him a conservative, I
mean it. But the integral moral order he was trying to protect against the
pernicious rise of “liberalism” included a rigid guild system and even serfdom.
If I’m being too subtle, this is not my conservatism and it’s not American
conservatism.
Möser was fine with commerce, if it was confined to
artisans and guilds made up of decent citizens of “noble birth” (he railed
against “bast–ds” being admitted to guilds). He was an anti-globalist in that
he detested the rise of international trade. He saw cross-border trade as
destabilizing traditional customs and roles—and he was right! Indeed, Möser was
a defender of tradwives centuries before Instagram.
Möser, Jerry Muller writes in his indispensable The Mind and the Market:
argued against
weekly local markets on the grounds that they would draw women and children
away from the ‘bourgeois tranquility’ (bürgerlichen Bequemlichkeit) of
the home and into the marketplace, where they would chat and waste money on
snacks and pleasantries, while ignoring their household duties. Once again, the
market was portrayed as the destroyer of custom and tradition.
Möser’s argument was a forerunner of J.D. Vance’s
obsession with cheap goods undermining his nostalgic vision of industrial
America. “Fashion”—Möser’s disparaging term for consumer desire for better
products—became “the great pillager of provincial towns.”
The people Möser hated the most were traveling salesmen,
the hucksters who bought fancy new wares in the cities and brought them in
wagons to the hinterlands. Beating the Frankfurt School Marxists by two
centuries, Möser argued that such peddlers made provincials crave novelty and
fashion, turning “luxuries” into fake necessities. The peddlers—mostly
Jews—were undermining the “good morals” of the peasantry, who should be content
with the same wares the guilds churned out for their parents and grandparents.
“What were these pernicious but tempting goods to which
the peddler exposed unsuspecting peasants and their wives?” Muller asks. “Silk
kerchiefs, linen from Flanders, leather gloves, wool stockings, metal buttons,
mirrors, cotton caps, knives, and needles. These are what the defenders of
customary consumption regarded as luxuries.”
I don’t want to shock anybody, but Möser’s contemporary
Adam Smith saw things differently. He regarded prohibitions on
internal commerce in general, and particularly the buying and reselling of
goods, especially grains for profit, as superstitious folly. “The popular fear
of [such practices] may be compared to the popular terrors and suspicions of
witchcraft,” he wrote. Such regulations hampered the distribution of goods and
services where they were needed, by trying to outthink the market. Oh, and
Edmund Burke, the titular father of Anglo-American conservatism, agreed with him,
successfully pushing for repeal of regulations on middlemen and other
resellers.
So what’s the point of all this?
Well, a lot of things. First, there’s a lot of talk of
the common good these days. Commerce and trade are integral to the common good.
And as silly as I think J.D. Vance, the DSA, and their various defenders can be
in their preferred economic policies, we should concede that nobody disputes
this. All of the disputes from Möser or Lenin to Smith and Burke or the DSA and
Vance are about where you draw the lines. I think making life more affordable
is an indispensable component of promoting the common good.
Second, it’s just worth pointing out to the culture
warriors of the left and right that commerce has been a central part of our
culture for a very long time. The founders, after all, thought commerce was
central to their way of life, and launched a revolution in no small part
because of that view.
Third, on the left there’s a lot of dumb
talk out there about how anything “good” the government does is evidence
that “socialism” is good. So therefore the government should take over more
sectors of the economy to do more good/socialist things. Publicly financed
roads and police forces are, in their telling, “socialism” (the police thing is
particularly weird, given that the socialists have, until recently, vowed to
defund the police, which would result in more private police).
On the new right there’s a lot of similar—though not
identical—talk about how the “common good” is best served by the government
overruling the free market toward some preconceived notion of superior economic
and cultural arrangements. J.D. Vance’s grudge against the dollar as the
world’s reserve currency is grounded in a producerist theory of political
economy. The little people don’t need cheap toasters, my people need jobs in expensive
American toaster factories. Or something. What both views share is the belief
that the job of the government is to outthink the market.
Another interesting similarity: Both sides have a bizarre
notion about unfettered capitalism. For Vance, Tucker Carlson, et al., that’s
what we had until the Trump era. For the DSA crowd, that’s what we have now.
Both perspectives are preposterous.
What both views miss, or at least overly dismiss, is that
belief in the free market is not at war with the idea of a good government or a
common good. Again, the free market—however you define it—needs some government.
But the role of government is to create the conditions necessary for a free
market, not to dictate the outcomes of the market. The “level playing field” of
the Dupont Circle farmers market is a useful analogy.
The philosopher Michael Oakeshott distinguishes between
two kinds of “association.” In a civil association, people are bound together
by common rules but not by a common purpose. In an enterprise association,
people cooperate to achieve some shared goal. Baseball provides a useful, if
imperfect, analogy. The Yankees, Dodgers, Reds, et al., are enterprise
associations: Each organizes itself around the purpose of winning. But the
rules under which they compete have something of the character of civil association.
Major League Baseball sets rules that apply to all the teams and penalizes
violations, but—at least in principle—the rules do not specify which team
should win. Each team pursues that goal for itself. If the league starts
manipulating those rules to ensure that certain teams win, it ceases merely to
establish the conditions of competition and begins using its authority to
pursue a substantive outcome.
The American constitutional order and its understanding
of the market are supposed to be closer to a civil association. It’s not
“morally neutral.” The rules reflect some profound moral commitments, but the
rules are supposed to be universal and fair to everyone.
Donald Trump cannot grasp this idea. He takes stakes in
companies and picks winners and losers for self-serving reasons. Vance’s
theories have more philosophical heft, but they amount to the same thing. The
Democratic Socialists’ vision is even more cockamamie. If they ran Major League
Baseball, more diverse teams would probably get extra points. But what they all
share is the idea that the market isn’t something you set up to do what markets
do; it’s something you manipulate for a desired result. That’s because they all
share the idea that the nation is an enterprise association. I don’t think
that’s a terrible conception in some circumstances—again, we’re all in the
line-drawing business. We all want what’s best for America. During World War II
there was nothing wrong with talking about America as a unified enterprise
fighting for victory.
But the American conception of the common good isn’t
predicated on everyone and everything working together toward a single goal
like we’re in a total war. The American idea of the common good is enmeshed
with the moral conviction that liberty is a prerequisite of the pursuit of
happiness. The founders understood that a consensus that satisfies everyone’s
individual definition of the good is impossible. So, they wrote a constitution
that defined the common good as a playing field that lets people and communities
pursue their own definitions of the good. There are limits. You can’t
murder or rob your way to your own personal definition of the good. But within
the rules, you can do, say, buy, sell, worship, however you want.
In this sense, the free market of goods and services is
just an outpost, like the Dupont Circle farmers market, of a larger market of
even more meaningful choices—where and how to live, what to think, believe, and
say.
If the people running the government at any particular
moment don’t like what that larger free market produces, that’s too bad.
Barring some really, really, really good (legal, constitutional, and
democratically agreed-upon) reason, there’s supposed to be nothing they can do
about it save argue against it at election time or in a court of law. Indeed,
the primary job of the government is to protect the liberties of the people to
do what they want and live how they want, not to make them want the right things.
And no one should feel obliged to apologize for that.
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