The Economic Nationalist
Welcome to The Economic Nationalist, dedicated to the old country, the American republic, the land of the free, the home of the brave, the United States of America. This blog is a home for patriots who feel deeply that America is much more than a mere creed, who believe that America is a nation, the ancestral home of a mighty people; whose forebears fought and bled and tamed the land, tilled soil hallowed by heroes’ blood, built, brick by brick and stone by stone, the greatest civilization the world has seen since the glory of ancient Rome. If the clang and clatter of Rome’s fall sound a warning in your ears, then maybe this blog is for you.
The Economic Nationalist is a conservative blog. For better or for worse, the adjective conservative means many things to many people, so we shall have to define the word here more precisely if we are to use it sensibly; yet the word is not easy to define. Edward Leigh, rejecting the notion that conservatism can ever be summarized in a single sentence, presents conservatism in five distinct facets: Faith; Tradition; Enterprise; Nation; Family. To Leigh, conservatism consists of none alone of the five, but rather of a prudent, subjective balance between the five. It is the balance itself, more than the things balanced, which constitutes conservatism in Leigh’s view. This blog unreservedly adopts Leigh’s view.
In the United States today, the Republican Party stands more or less for conservatism — imperfectly, but still — in four of Leigh’s five facets. In the facet of Enterprise however the Republican Party is missing the essential conservative element of balance, without which, in Leigh’s and this blog’s view, Enterprise as such is not really conservative.
We Americans share a growing, instinctive sense that something has gone seriously wrong: our factories are shutting down as the shelves at Wal-Mart overflow with goods imported from China, and we do not rest easy with this. The Wall Street Journal too easily persuades itself that we Americans do not quite grasp the economist’s basic argument: that production is theoretically maximized when goods and services are produced at the greatest comparative advantage. Well, we do grasp the argument. We detect however a certain ideological fanaticism underlying it, a fanaticism which reduces the lives of real people to mere numbers in some formula, which treats a mathematical differential equation as though it were a sacrament; the theory underlying it, a dogma. We remind the Journal that America is not an economy with a nation but a nation with an economy, and that the lowest possible prices at Wal-Mart are not the only national good to be sought. Now, to be clear: the blessing of low prices is something we are very grateful for, but we also care about the degree to which America remains self-sufficient as a nation, and we stand unimpressed by the mockery too many economists turn against us when we raise this point. We wonder: if the federal government to operate must raise some revenue in one way or another, and if the revenue must come from the substance of the American people in one way or another, then what exactly is so wrong in reducing the income tax and making up the shortfall by means of a tariff? The United States historically grew from a collection of thirteen agrarian colonies into the world’s leading industrial power under a system of tariff protection; why not again today? We suspect that the Journal’s reflexive opposition to tariffs results not from the love of a people but from the love of an equation, which equation, the economists persuade themselves, benefits the people, because the equation says that it does. If so, and if the economics profession purposely overlooks real experiences and real data which tend to contradict the equation, then we ask, how professional is that?
The Wall Street Journal and the economics profession are beginning to forfeit credibility with us. If their theory is broken, then it is up to them to fix it, not to make excuses for it or to lecture us on it.
This nation is a people, with real roots and a real history, who in the wisest places deep in their hearts seek balance, rejecting ideology in all its forms. If they reject the idea that General Motors ought to exit the economic stage when it cannot compete and win toe-to-toe against Toyota according to WTO rules, there is a deeper wisdom to this rejection, an inherent conservatism, a balance: a denial of the idea that one good — the international free market — always and everywhere trumps all others. Pat Buchanan calls this view economic nationalism.
It is this which gives this blog its name.
The blog however is about more than economic nationalism as such. It is about conservatism of a deeply traditional kind — a conservatism which names pride, the Great Destroyer; which affirms Aristotle’s Golden Mean, whereby virtue typically is found at some point between two opposite vices. If the blog feels the flood of imported goods a threat to the nation, then how much more the flood of imported people? The intersection of race and immigration is one of the great issues of our time, for though Americans have welcomed immigrants of all races, at no time did white Americans consent to become a minority in their own land. The blog wants to be clear: any citizen of the United States, of any race, can be a good American; however, collectively race has immense consequences, which, though fashionable to overlook, this blog will not ignore.
The Economic Nationalist is pleased to publish in a time in which Political Correctness finally has acquired a name, by which that evil can be identified and rejected as such.
So, welcome to the blog. The Economic Nationalist will not have many readers yet, so your early comments are welcome and appreciated, starting now.
Howard J. Harrison
The Economic Nationalist