JD Vance is wiser than his libertarian friends

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

A chemist, a physicist, and an economist are all stranded on a desert island with only a single can of beans to eat, but no can opener.

The chemist says, “We can build a fire, heat the can until pressure builds, and it will burst open.”

The physicist says, “We can calculate the angle and force needed and smash the can open with a rock.”

The economist says, “We can just assume a can opener.”

This joke came to mind when reading some libertarian meltdowns over Vice President JD Vance’s recent suggestion that the future of the Republican Party lay in a more Alexander Hamilton direction than a Milton Friedman direction.

Here is the exact quote, given to Michael Knowles, that set many libertarians off: “American economic policy on the Right is now much more Alexander Hamilton than it is Milton Friedman,” Vance said. “I do think fundamentally that Hamiltonian tradition is going to be what we see on the American Right and will dominate American conservative economic thinking for the future, which is not laissez-faire.”

For having the temerity to criticize Friedman, Vance was called a socialist by Reason’s Robby Soave, a “big-government RINO” by Unleash Prosperity’s Stephen Moore, and a “Bernie bro” by our own David Harsanyi. “Vance is an economic leftist who believes politicians can make better decisions about economic activity than individuals and businesses,” Harsanyi wrote. “It’s clear Vance doesn’t believe human flourishing and a free market system are compatible,” he continued.

But is Vance really an “economic leftist” who “doesn’t believe human flourishing and a free market system are compatible” just for saying he prefers Hamilton’s approach to economic policy over Friedman’s?

Some libertarians, such as Club for Growth President David McIntosh, denied Vance’s premise, questioning any distinction between Hamilton and Friedman. “With all due respect, Mr Vice President, you are dead wrong about both Milton Friedman and Alexander Hamilton,” McIntosh posted on social media in response to Vance’s statement. “Both of them promoted free markets as the way to make America Great.”

McIntosh is correct that Hamilton and Friedman shared some strong beliefs, including a core commitment to capitalism as the primary engine of economic growth. Both believed in secure property rights, sound public finance, and powerful financial institutions.

But they undeniably had their differences, too. While both were supportive of free trade, Friedman was far more absolute in its application. Friedman opposed all tariffs, subsidies, and industrial policy, arguing that markets allocate capital and labor more efficiently than politicians do. Hamilton, by contrast, explicitly defended government support for strategic industries in his 1791 “Report on the Subject of Manufactures.” He argued that tariffs, bounties, infrastructure, and other public measures could help infant American industries overcome foreign competition and reduce the nation’s dependence on Europe.

Was Alexander Hamilton a Bernie bro? I don’t think so.

And the difference between Friedman and Hamilton becomes even more stark when we turn to the most salient policy topic of the day: immigration. Friedman was essentially pro-open borders. He favored the free movement of people and believed immigrants increase economic growth, fill labor shortages, and improve their own lives through voluntary exchange.

Friedman did, to his credit, say, “You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state.” But libertarians prattling on about hopefully maybe someday in the future slightly reducing welfare benefits while literally millions of immigrants cross the border each year is cold comfort for working-class voters who bear the brunt of economic pain from mass migration.

Worse, Friedman was explicitly for illegal immigration, reasoning that, “It’s a good thing for the illegal immigrants. It’s a good thing for the United States. It’s a good thing for the citizens of the country. But, it’s only good so long as it’s illegal.”

Do our libertarian friends really believe that Friedman’s open border views are the future of the Republican Party? Do they share his assessment of illegal immigration?

Hamilton, by contrast, supported Federalist measures that raised the residency requirement for citizenship from five to 14 years and empowered the president to remove immigrants deemed dangerous. Writing as Lucius Crassus in 1802, amid a fierce partisan battle over immigration, he argued, “The safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common national sentiment; on a uniformity of principles and habits; on the exemption of the citizens from foreign bias, and prejudice; and on that love of country which will almost invariably be found to be closely connected with birth, education, and family.”

Compare this sentiment, expressed by Hamilton explaining why our nation should reject a Milton Friedmanesque mass-migration policy, to Vance’s explanation of why the Republican Party is turning back toward Hamilton and away from Friedman.

“In hindsight,” Vance concluded, “part of why Milton Friedman’s ideas made more sense in the 1980s is because they were being advocated in a country that still had a very rich and powerful institutional Christianity. And so being laissez-faire in a world where there are Christian guardrails on everything is a much different proposition than being laissez-faire in a world where globalized liberalism has become the sort of status quo of American elites.”

The libertarian response is that government should leave the formation of character to families, churches, and civil society. Vance’s answer is that economic policy inevitably shapes whether those institutions can survive: whether a young couple can afford a home, whether a town retains productive work, and whether citizens understand themselves as members of a nation rather than interchangeable units of labor and consumption.

The idea that the United States needs “a common national sentiment” and “a uniformity of principles and habits” closely connected with “birth, education, and family” is not unique to Hamilton. Nor is Vance alone in believing that republican government rests upon a common moral foundation.

The founding generation repeatedly made this same connection between republican liberty and the Christian character of the people.

John Adams warned that “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People” and was “wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Benjamin Franklin similarly observed that “only a virtuous people are capable of freedom,” adding that as nations become “corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.” George Washington made the point more cautiously but no less clearly in his Farewell Address: “It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.”

Hamilton, Adams, Franklin, and Washington all understood what Friedman’s more abstract economic framework assumes away: Free institutions and free markets do not sustain themselves. They depend upon a people shaped by common habits, loyalties, moral restraints, and institutions capable of preserving them.

THE REAL SCANDAL OF CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS IS WHAT IS LEGAL

No matter how much gross domestic product grows or corporate profits rise, if a nation’s families are not reproducing themselves into the future, then something is fundamentally wrong with our economic system. The public, on average, says they want 2.7 children. Thanks to high housing costs, low male wages, and a welfare state that punishes marriage, they are now having just 1.6, a number far below replacement level.

This is the point Vance understands and his libertarian critics do not. An economy is not healthy merely because a spreadsheet says it is growing. It must produce families, communities, citizens, and a nation capable of surviving into the next generation. Friedman’s theories may work beautifully if we assume strong families, shared morals, and secure borders.

But those are not assumptions policymakers are entitled to make. They are the can opener. Hamilton understood that a statesman’s job is to build one.