James Freeman is rebranding corporatism as free enterprise. That is the load-bearing operation of his October 9 Best of the Web column in the Wall Street Journal — a piece the editorial page presents as philosophical inquiry and which is, on the evidence, a vocabulary drill. I drafted memos shaped like this one in the cable years. Not on this subject — the subjects were different — but the architecture is the same: concede the inconvenient fact early, in one clause, so the reader’s guard comes down, and then never let it back into the room. The column deploys about six distinct techniques across its length. What follows walks through them in order, as they appear.

“Nearly halfway through the second Trump presidential term, it’s still not easy to define a governing philosophy. The president’s economic policy features historic tax and regulatory reform to unleash markets along with heavy-handed tariffs and industrial policy that restrain them. Call him what you will, Donald Trump is no ideologue. The president’s odd mixture of governmental restraint and federal intrusions may explain why the American economy is enjoying solid but not spectacular growth.” — paragraph 1

The concession-then-drop operates here through a single sentence of honesty that buys the whole column. Read what that sentence does. It hands the reader the invalidating fact outright: tariffs and industrial policy restrain markets. It even supplies the evaluative word, “heavy-handed.” Then the column’s remaining job is to make sure that fact is never weighed, never costed, and never mentioned again. In operator terms this is the load-in: you put the object on the table in front of the audience, tap it once so everyone registers that it’s real, and move your hands. Everything after that is misdirection, and the misdirection is licensed by the tap.

The opening also runs the No-True-Scotsman move WSJ §4.7 catalogues. A hybrid policy that contains both libertarian and nationalist elements is redefined as “not ideology,” which lets the column defend the libertarian elements under the cover of the nationalist ones without paying the cost of either. We used to write this exact opening in the cable years when a Republican administration was doing something the page’s audience found uncomfortable — the disclaimer was always “he’s no ideologue; he’s just doing what works.” The disclaimer is the con. It licenses the column to take the administration seriously without taking the administration’s philosophy seriously, and the asymmetry between the two is what the disclaimer is built to hide.

Underneath the whole paragraph runs the frame-engineered relabeling. “Unleash markets” treats markets as caged animals that the administration is liberating; “red tape” treats regulation as administrative string; “commandments” treats bureaucratic rule-making as religious decree. The deregulatory register is rehearsed — the same vocabulary the editorial board has been deploying since the Reagan-era supply-side turn, with the Luntz 2002 environmental memo as the documented precedent. The opening also performs the multiple-audience-targeting work WSJ §4.3 catalogues: the populist reader gets the “unleash” / “red tape” / “commandments” register; the wealthy reader gets the “solid but not spectacular growth” reassurance that nothing structural is at risk; the political-class reader gets the “no ideologue” disclaimer that licenses continued support without requiring philosophical commitment. The four-audience execution is structural — every reader gets a message calibrated to their capture state, and the messages do not have to be consistent with each other.

Cui bono, put plainly as the question it is: protection has beneficiaries, and a column that classifies the tariffs out of the category “economic policy” before counting never has to name them. If the tariffs were in the count, the reader would have to ask who they protect and at whose expense. The column’s structure exists so that question never forms.

The shell game, in one line: the tariff goes on the table in sentence one, and by sentence three it’s back in the box.

“On the plus side of allowing individuals to make free choices, the Trump administration continues to show a beautiful and historic reluctance to impose new federal rules upon the citizenry. And when Trump officials do issue new rules they are often simply to repeal the misguided rules imposed by his predecessors, so even his new rules often cut red tape.

Wayne Crews writes at the Competitive Enterprise Institute with a quarterly update on Washington rule-making: […] Among regulations deemed economically significant, Mr. Crews assesses that this year Trump officials have issued more than twice as many deregulatory rules as regulatory ones. This beautiful activity ramped up in the just-completed quarter, with deregulatory actions outnumbering the burdensome kind by more than four to one.

This is simply not what federal bureaucracies normally do. The Washington machinery typically issues all kinds of expensive commandments every year. When it comes to formal federal rule-making, no president since Ronald Reagan has been so determined to avoid telling us what to do. So much for authoritarianism.” — paragraphs 2–5

Frame-engineered relabeling — WSJ catalogue §4.1, with Bandura’s euphemistic labeling running underneath — shows up here in the vocabulary, and it is worth reading twice: “beautiful and historic,” “beautiful activity.” That is not the editorial page’s register. That is the subject’s register. The column is nominally auditing a president, and it is doing so in the president’s own superlative grammar, which is exactly what the “don’t say X, say Y” memo was for: adopt the seller’s word so the buyer stops hearing a description and starts hearing an advertisement.

The deregulatory count from Wayne Crews at the Competitive Enterprise Institute is the “study shows” ledger move WSJ §4.5 catalogues. CEI is a credentialed libertarian think tank whose Ten Thousand Commandments project has been producing this metric since the 1990s; Crews is the project’s director and the metric is his product. The piece uses CEI’s metric as the spine of a “study shows” framing in which the metric is treated as not-at-issue and the metric’s institutional home is treated as not-at-issue. The source-citation pattern WSJ §3.6 documents — aligned sources cited by name and credential, contrary sources absent — runs cleanly here: the metric’s libertarian provenance is part of the citation’s authority, not a complication of it.

Then advantageous comparison lands the closing line of the stretch: “no president since Ronald Reagan has been so determined to avoid telling us what to do. So much for authoritarianism.” The yardstick is one metric — the number of formal rules issued. Measured on that yardstick, Trump is second only to Reagan. The reader is then invited to close the file on the authoritarianism question with a sentence, not an argument. Notice what the yardstick excludes. A tariff is not a rule-making. An industrial policy is not a rule-making. A government stake in a private company is not a rule-making. Every one of the president’s market-restraining instruments falls outside the measuring device, and the measuring device was chosen by the writer. He picked the ruler before he picked the verdict. Judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree and the tree wins every quarter.

The piece then deploys the metric to license a sweeping conclusion the metric does not actually support. “Authoritarianism” is being defined unilaterally as formal federal rule-making volume — which excludes the tariffs the opening paragraph already names, the government stakes in private companies the next paragraph will name, the deployment of federal law enforcement on civilian populations, the weaponization of DOJ against political opponents, and every other vector of authoritarian conduct that does not happen to register in the CEI count. This is goalpost-shifting from the Bad-Faith Catalog: the standard for “authoritarianism” moves to the metric the page can meet, and the original critique is then dismissed on the page’s own terms. The piece also runs four of the standard moral-disengagement moves in three sentences — the moves every cable producer had memorized and could identify on sight: “beautiful activity” paints the deregulation as aesthetically virtuous, “burdensome” recasts the regulation as weight on the producer, “expensive commandments” frames the regulation as religious imposition, “Washington machinery” relocates the cost from the policy to the system. The deregulatory count is the receipts the column needs to license the vocabulary, and the vocabulary is what operators recognize across the greenroom from any cable show on the same beat. The piece is not measuring authoritarianism. The piece is performing the absence of authoritarianism. The measurement is the performance.

The ruler, once chosen, is also the column’s defense. A piece written this way is written to be defended: if a reader files a complaint about the missing tariffs, the writer points to the metric — rule counts, formal rule-making, the CEI tally — and calls the rest an ideological objection. The yardstick is the receipt the operator keeps for the argument he never had to make. That is why the meter matters more than the verdict. The verdict is the headline; the meter is the lawyer.

“Such swamp things certainly deserve scrutiny. Over at the Cato Institute, Tad DeHaven and Chad Smitson have been cataloging the disturbing trend of the government taking stakes in private companies. […] Wise Trump regulators should issue rules preventing foolish Trump officials from making government a partner in private businesses.” — paragraphs 6–7

This is the most useful paragraph in the column, and not for the reason its writer intended. Here, on equity stakes, the column says no to Trump. It calls the policy “disturbing,” it files it under “swamp things,” and it prescribes a rule to stop it. The column is capable of disagreement with the president it is profiling. It has demonstrated the capacity on this page, in this piece.

Which converts the tariffs’ absence from a habit into a choice. The instruments the column objects to are the ones that cost it nothing to object to. The instruments it declines to count are the ones a free-market column would have to explain. There’s a name for the small, safe objection that licenses the reader to trust the whole: it’s the token no, and every operator deploys it exactly this way — concede the fight you weren’t going to win anyway, and bank the credibility for the fight you were never planning to have.

The Cato line is a permission citation: it lets the column look serious about the critique without engaging the critique. The “wise Trump regulators should issue rules preventing foolish Trump officials” line is a tell — it tells you which side of the policy the column wants to win. The Cato footnote is the cost of admission. The “wise Trump regulators” line is the cover charge. The column pays both, and the price of admission is the critique the column is allowed to claim it is making.

The deficit-double-standard pattern WSJ §4.4 catalogues, run across two policy registers instead of two fiscal regimes, is the structural move. The libertarian critique of the nationalist turn is held in reserve to deploy against the next Democratic administration; the nationalist turn is held in reserve to deliver the policy outcomes the libertarian critique cannot deliver. The column wants both registers because the column wants both policies.

A column that reserves its criticism for safe targets is not auditing the presidency. It is curating its own credibility. The selection of objections, not their existence, is the move — and a careful reader notices not that the column said no once, but that it said no only where the no was free.

He can say no to Trump. He said no to this. He just never had to about the tariffs, because the tariffs were never in the count.

“Americans Still Love Free Markets […] New polling results from Gallup at first blush seem to carry only the bad news of rising support for ideas that have caused misery around the world. The survey firm says that 43% of Americans have a positive view of socialism, compared with 55% with a positive view of capitalism. So capitalism still beats socialism, but the margin has been shrinking in recent years. More encouraging are the results when Marxist terminology is abandoned. Gallup finds that an overwhelming 77% of Americans have a favorable view of free enterprise.

For advocates of individual liberty, this is not just about using words that poll well. It’s about accurately describing the ideas that animate a thriving society.” — “Americans Still Love Free Markets” section and closing paragraph

The relabel-to-the-better-number move — §4.1 again, with an origin story attached to license it — is the column’s cleanest set-piece. Let me concede the honest half first, because it is real: word choice matters, “free enterprise” and “state capitalism” are not the same object, and “capitalism” does carry a history of use that a careful writer might want to steer around. I have made this exact argument. The vocabulary fight is a real fight.

But watch what the concession is asked to carry. The poll with the flattering number becomes the accurate one; the poll with the unflattering number gets reclassified as contaminated by Marxist terminology. The reader is instructed that the 77% is what Americans really think and the 43% (the socialist result) is what Americans think when a word has been poisoned by the Marxist associations the column wants retired. Both headline numbers are real. Only one of the two competing terms gets designated the true reading, and the designation is made by whichever term the column needs to retire.

When a competing term polls higher, the lower-numbered term is the problem — and the higher-numbered term gets designated the accurate one. The relabel scam: accuracy moves to wherever the highest number lives.

The piece is now in plain text. The vocabulary swap the rest of the column performs in coded euphemism is here recommended explicitly: abandon “capitalism” for “free enterprise” because the latter polls 22 points better. The “Marxist terminology” framing is a definitional sweep — the term with the higher unfavorable rating is treated as a Marxist conspiracy, which licenses abandoning it. The Gallup polling data is the receipts for the swap, and the swap is the Luntz playbook in plain text.

This is the load-bearing move of the column. The vocabulary drill that the editorial board has been running since the 1990s on regulation, taxation, antitrust, labor, and every other policy lever the page cares about — the euphemism layer, the Luntz-tested frame, the polling-calibrated terminology — is here performed on the term that contains all the others. The piece is recommending the same operation it executes. “Capitalism” is the term the column’s preferred coalition has been losing ground with; “free enterprise” is the term that polls well; the column recommends the swap. The 2002 Luntz environmental memo recommended “climate change” over “global warming” because polling showed the former was less alarming; the same playbook, opposite direction. The piece is doing in the open what the WSJ board normally does in coded vocabulary, and the polling is the receipts the playbook has been citing for thirty years.

The “accurately describing the ideas that animate a thriving society” line is the framing that lets the swap be presented as philosophical rather than as marketing. The piece is asking the reader to credit the term with the accuracy the term is being chosen to produce. The 77% favorable view of “free enterprise” tells you Americans like the term; it does not tell you they like the policies the term is being deployed to defend. The piece collapses the distinction deliberately. The collapse is the con.

Here is what the column actually defends, taken together. It defends the deregulatory count. It defends the Cato footnote that lets the column look serious. It defends the polling data that licenses the vocabulary swap. It defends the closing line that uses the metric to dismiss the critique. It does not defend “free enterprise,” because the polling only establishes that the term is popular, not that the policies the term is used to cover are. The brand is the argument. The brand is what gets voted on. The brand is what gets sold.

So here is the column, taken together, under the method it taught me in the deregulatory-count paragraph. Freeman’s rule is that a word can be disqualified from a survey by association, and the honest reading is the one untainted by the taint. Apply his rule to his own piece: the column’s headline asks what Trumponomics is, and the answer it supplies is a definition of economic policy from which the protectionist half has been removed by association — removed because associating it would spoil the number. Take his poll. Ask a reader straight, with no word poisoned in advance: do you have a favorable view of a free-market column that counts every deregulatory rule and not one tariff? He already knows what the second number would be, which is why he wrote the column this way instead of polling it.

Accuracy would require the tariff to be in the sentence. It’s in the first paragraph. It never appears again. And yes, the defender will reach first for that sentence. Yes, the column mentions the tariffs. So let’s be clear about what that line does and does not do. It buries the inconvenient fact in a subordinate clause, inside an enumerative sentence whose main clause is the deregulation thesis. The reader who scans the page — and most readers scan the page — registers the deregulatory assertion and never registers the buried aside. That is not the rebuttal to this critique. That is this critique, performed on the page. Mention in passing is the structural move, not its refutation. The column does not suppress the tariff. It demotes it. The demotion is what the counting is built to hide.

The freest market this page defends is the market for excuses, and its best customer is the writer who bills you for the audit while leaving half the books in the truck. The Luntz playbook was the playbook; the polling data was the receipts; the vocabulary swap was the swap. The piece is not more honest for being explicit; it is more efficient. The same drill, fewer layers.

— Phukher Tarlson