The Importance of Political EconomyConservatives must distinguish between the science of economics and the art of political economy.
James Vitali
May 1, 2023
The right can often be guilty of blurring the lines between what has been described as the science of economics and the art of political economy. If economics is the descriptive study of the way people organize resources and goods, then political economy refers to the normative exercise of establishing what ends we want economic policies to help secure. The two can and ought to be mutually supportive: understanding how markets work in practice can improve our use of free enterprise to advance societal interests. Yet certain sects on the right have for some time made economic policy responsible for determining normative questions, and in so doing have impoverished our ability to think about the plurality of political ends we might want to pursue.
Many conservatives in the Anglophonic world are beginning to rediscover this vital distinction between economic policy and political economy, and this has instigated a rich debate about the market and its role in society. Yet there is a risk that conservatives making this distinction are exposed to the charge that they simply do not understand economics, and thus that they cede the right to talk with authority about the economy to those who think the only end worth pursuing is the efficient functioning of markets. It is vital that a conservative political economy demonstrate mastery of the descriptive laws of economics even as it directs economic policy to specific human ends.
For the economist, the market refers to a collection of overlapping systems, procedures, and conventions by which goods and services are exchanged. But for the conservative, markets also constitute one of society’s most important institutions, and perhaps the one that they have most consistently defended over time. Their case for defending markets, though, is not the one frequently attributed to them by the left. Conservatives do not revere free markets because they are ends in themselves, nor do they believe that the value of markets is solely contained in the extent to which they champion the unfettered freedom of the individual. Primarily, conservatives defend markets because they sustain and support political communities.
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The free operation of markets also raises the question of equality. In any free society, a degree of inequality is to be expected. Individuals themselves—their industry, their talents—are unequal in important ways, even if equal before the law, and conservatives recognize that life is defined by a degree of contingency and chance that humans cannot eliminate completely. Conservatives tolerate a degree of inequality because they are committed to the idea of individuals as responsible moral entities who will necessarily experience life in different ways. Yet conservatism does not contend that inequality is thus necessarily the fault or the desert of the less-well-off.
Conservatives become particularly concerned about inequality when it begins to threaten the cohesiveness of the political community. Excessive inequality might jeopardize the sense that economic rights are tied to responsibilities that undergirds the very legitimacy of markets. States afford expansive rights to economic actors in the form of things like limited liability for companies, while providing them the infrastructure to trade and conduct business. When market actors extract from communities, when they fail to invest in the people and places from which they derive their custom, when they vitiate the capacity of states to secure their citizens, or when they make judgements on our behalf that ought to be made through the political process by elected representatives—then they erode the linkages between rights and responsibilities, and in so doing cease to serve political order.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-importance-of-political-economy/
