Irving Kristol famously wrote in 1978 that we might offer “two cheers for capitalism”—an insight borrowed from E.M. Forster’s similar suggestion about democracy. The phrase is a call for restraint among supporters of free-market economics. Kristol himself said he and his fellow neoconservative intellectuals had learned to respect “the power of the market to respond efficiently to economic realities while preserving the maximum degree of individual freedom.” But he also urged conservatives to consider where and how unencumbered markets failed to deliver and to consider that some intervention—limited and narrow—could be healthy. Thus, two cheers, but only two.
What was once a warning to temper unbridled conservative enthusiasm for the free market might now be repurposed as a call to arms for advocates of market economics. Witness one detail from the New York Times‘s report on Donald Trump’s speech to Carrier employees in Indiana Thursday, where the Republican president-elect praised the heating and cooling manufacturer for its post-election decision to keep around 1,000 jobs at its Indianapolis factory from being outsourced to Mexico.
