Conservatives should understand something before the American voter is forced to explain it to us at the ballot box: an economy is experienced before it is measured. Economists can discuss growth rates, employment figures, productivity, investment, markets, and inflation until the average citizen’s eyes glaze over, but the working American conducts a considerably more primitive calculation. What did I earn, what did everything cost, and what remained afterward? If the answer to that final question keeps getting smaller, no political party should expect a statistical lecture to improve his disposition.
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Republicans understood this perfectly during the Biden administration. We correctly ridiculed attempts to convince Americans that an economy they experienced as painful was actually wonderful. Families watched grocery bills climb, housing become increasingly inaccessible, insurance premiums rise, and ordinary purchases begin to feel strangely luxurious. Washington responded with numbers. Americans responded with receipts. Conservatives rightly insisted that the receipt mattered, yet now that Republicans hold power, we should be extraordinarily careful not to develop the same convenient deafness we condemned in Democrats.
I am MAGA, but I am not interested in political sycophancy. If America First means anything substantive, it must mean that the economic interests of ordinary Americans take precedence over Washington’s perpetual congratulation of itself. A movement built largely upon working- and middle-class frustration cannot suddenly become offended when those same people complain about affordability. They did not join a movement merely to change the party affiliation of the people explaining why everything is fine.
Conservatism has traditionally offered a compelling economic proposition: work, save, build, own, provide, and leave something to your children. That proposition requires more than ideological elegance. It requires an economy in which ordinary people can realistically accomplish those things.
Homeownership cannot become an aristocratic privilege while Republicans preach the virtues of property ownership. Family formation cannot become financially irrational while conservatives lecture young adults about declining birthrates. Work cannot remain our moral centerpiece if a person working full-time increasingly believes stability is beyond his reach.
This is where Republican economic rhetoric often becomes frustratingly abstract. We speak fluently about markets while insufficiently discussing whether markets remain genuinely competitive. We condemn government dependency while tolerating corporate dependency upon subsidies, regulatory favoritism, tax carve-outs, and government contracts. We celebrate capitalism while occasionally defending arrangements that look suspiciously like socialism for institutions wealthy enough to hire lobbyists. There is nothing conservative about allowing enormous corporations to privatize profits while socializing risk.
A serious conservative affordability agenda should therefore begin with intellectual consistency. Government spending matters because Washington cannot endlessly manufacture money and debt without consequences. Energy matters because energy costs are embedded in almost everything Americans purchase. Regulation matters because compliance expenses eventually appear somewhere in the price of goods and services. Housing supply matters because no amount of motivational rhetoric can overcome arithmetic when millions of people are competing for insufficient housing. Healthcare matters because a supposedly free market in which consumers often cannot determine the price until after receiving the service bears little resemblance to any market Adam Smith would recognize.
None of this requires abandoning capitalism. It requires rescuing capitalism from its caricature.
Markets function best when people can enter them, compete within them, understand prices, own property, accumulate capital, and reap the consequences of both good and bad decisions. What Americans increasingly encounter instead is a peculiar hybrid system in which government regulates everything, subsidizes selected interests, protects incumbents, inflates asset values, accumulates debt, and then announces that whatever emerges should be called free enterprise. Conservatives should be the first people willing to distinguish capitalism from corporatism.
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The affordability problem also exposes an uncomfortable generational divide. Older Americans frequently tell younger adults to work harder, save more, stop wasting money, and purchase homes as they did. Personal discipline unquestionably matters, and financial irresponsibility has not disappeared. Yet conservatives undermine our own credibility when we pretend the economic terrain has not changed. A young family facing contemporary housing prices, interest rates, childcare expenses, healthcare costs, insurance, and education debt inhabits a different financial environment from someone purchasing a modest home several decades ago.
Acknowledging arithmetic is not socialism.
It is arithmetic.
Conservatives should be capable of telling a young man that he needs discipline while simultaneously asking why the starter home has become endangered. We can tell families to budget while asking why healthcare pricing resembles a confidence game. We can condemn reckless consumer debt while confronting a federal government that has transformed reckless borrowing into national policy. Personal responsibility and institutional accountability are not competing principles. In a healthy society, they reinforce one another.
This is also where culture and economics intersect. Conservatives correctly worry about marriage, fatherhood, fertility, community deterioration, and family instability, but economic conditions influence all of them. A civilization cannot make independence prohibitively expensive and then act surprised when dependency increases. We cannot construct an economy in which adulthood is perpetually delayed and then wonder why adults increasingly behave like adolescents.
Republicans approaching elections should remember that Democrats do not need to convince conservative voters to become progressives. They merely need enough frustrated people to conclude that voting changes nothing. Political movements often lose not because their opponents become beloved but because their supporters become disappointed.
That is why Republicans should welcome economic criticism rather than treating it as disloyalty. If grocery prices hurt, acknowledge it. If housing is inaccessible, address it. If insurance is crushing families, investigate why. If healthcare is financially absurd, stop pretending the only alternatives are government medicine or accepting the status quo. Conservatives should be sufficiently confident in our principles to apply them to actual problems rather than merely reciting them.
The America First movement promised something larger than partisan victory. It promised that Washington would once again notice the citizen who works, raises children, pays taxes, obeys the law, and asks primarily to be left enough of his own labor to construct a decent life.
That citizen does not need another economist telling him why he should feel prosperous.
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He needs prosperity he can actually afford.
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