Adam Smith spent 900 pages of the Wealth of Nations warning about one man of system in particular — the merchant who conspires against the public, the joint-stock company whose directors manage other people’s money, the legislature that hands the privileged their privileges. Mark Jamison’s recent National Review column reaches past all of that to find a different man of system to warn us about: anyone who thinks the government should own or control a large business, or that courts should be made subordinate to Congress. The DSA proposals he has in mind are real, and the worry about them is worth having. The interesting move in his piece is the one it doesn’t make — and the move it doesn’t make is the one Smith actually spent 900 pages making.
The piece’s strongest move is right. The Soviets couldn’t aggregate what millions of kitchens know. Prices do coordinate. Voluntary exchange does interesting work. Nobody who has read a serious history defends central planning, and I am not here to relitigate the gulag. Smith was a friend of liberty. So am I. The “man of system” warning is real. The piece is just wrong about which system he’s in.
The piece identifies “economic liberty” with the freedom of those who have capital, and assumes it produces prosperity for everyone. It does not. Smith’s baker doesn’t pick the day’s price; her boss does. Smith’s “employee who wants wages” faces, in most American labor markets, one offer from one employer in a town where the factory is the only employer. The “freedom to choose” the piece celebrates is the customer’s freedom. The customer has many bakers; the baker has one boss. Calling that voluntary exchange is not wrong. Calling it the same kind of freedom as the customer’s is wild. Smith’s cooperation is real — but it is cooperation among people who start from radically unequal positions. The man of system is real. He just usually wears a suit and a corporate lanyard, not a party badge.
The piece calls the welfare state “socialism.” Denmark is not a socialist country. Sweden is not a socialist country. Norway is not a socialist country. They are high-tax, open-market, private-property capitalism with strong unions, universal public services, and — in Norway’s case — a two-trillion-dollar sovereign wealth fund. The Scandinavian Social Democrats who built that model explicitly refused the Bolshevik fork in the road, codified in Sweden’s 1938 Saltsjöbaden Agreement, and have been very cross about being called socialist ever since. There is no country on earth where the central government owns the means of production and the result is broadly shared prosperity. There is also no country that has solved late-stage capitalism’s care, health, old-age, and housing problems without a substantial public welfare layer. Those two facts are not in tension. They are the same fact from different angles.
The piece’s strongest critique is real — that decisions get made on political connections rather than laws, precedent, and specific facts. That is a serious charge against court-packing and subordinating courts to Congress. Notice what is missing from the analysis: the corporate capture of regulatory agencies. The revolving door where the people who write the rules are the same people who go work for the firms they regulated. The settlement-by-press-release architecture where nobody goes to jail and the fine is the cost of doing business. That, too, is decisions on political connections. The piece’s coalition has spent decades calling that “regulatory uncertainty” or “the deep state” depending on which party is in charge. The piece doesn’t engage that.
The piece’s response to high rents amounts to: don’t be a man of system, let the market work. The market is working. The market is working very well, in fact, for the people who already own the buildings. Rents capitalize into higher valuations; debt reloads onto the next buyer; extraction goes up the chain. The American housing market is not failing because of rent control. It is failing because of the leverage-and-debt dynamic Smith spent the Wealth of Nations warning about — landlords loading buildings with acquisition debt, refinancing on the equity, walking away when the debt service eats the maintenance budget. The homeowners and small landlords aren’t the man of system. The institutional ones — Blackstone is the shorthand, but the pattern is the industry — are. Deregulation doesn’t address the mechanism. It just frees the man in a top hat to run the same playbook bigger.
Or take health care. The piece warns that “make it a human right” is the man of system talking. Fine. But the American health care market is not the free commercial society Smith described. It is a heavily regulated market where the regulations are written by the incumbents, the prices are negotiated by parties who cannot walk away, and the resulting bills are the bankruptcy of a quarter-million American families a year. Smith would have looked at that and called it the man of system. He would just have noticed the man wears an Aetna lanyard.
The American economy the piece defends as the free market is, in fact, a working collection of public options, co-ops, and member-owned institutions that already exist. Rural electric cooperatives — New Deal-born, member-owned — serve roughly forty-two million Americans across more than half the country’s landmass. The Bank of North Dakota has been profitable every year since 1919; nobody in Bismarck has ever been accused of building a gulag. Alaska has mailed every resident an oil dividend for forty years. ESOPs — Employee Stock Ownership Plans — hold more than two trillion dollars in retirement assets for roughly fifteen million workers, and have had Republican champions from Jack Kemp to John Delaney for decades. Credit unions serve well over a hundred million members. None of these require the government to own the means of production. All of them require the public to own something — the utility, the bank, the pension fund, the bargaining structure. The list of working alternatives is long, and mostly boring, and includes countries that have been quietly running them for decades.
What would Jamison actually build? Break up the hospital monopolies that price-gouge patients? Fund the antitrust division that has been hollowed out for forty years? Let the workers at a nursing home own the nursing home — the worker co-op model that has been running in the Bronx for forty years? Let the lower-paid employee own a slice of the firm through an ESOP, the bipartisan idea sitting in plain sight? Denmark makes it easy to fire you and impossible to lose your house. That is not socialism. That is the man of system getting out of the way of the people Smith was actually writing about.
The economy is a set of choices, not the weather. Jamison is making one. So am I. He can name the man of system he’s defending. I can name the man of system I’d dismantle. The piece was right about one thing: the man of system is real. He’s just wrong about which one he’s in.