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A Conservative Primer for Conceptualizing Political Economy on the Humane Scale
by Ryan Setliff

"To live within a just order is to live within a pattern that has beauty. The individual finds purpose within an order, and security—whether it is the order of the soul or the order of the community. Without order, indeed the life of man is poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
—Russell Kirk

Diseconomies of Scale: Dismembering Leviathan by Donald W. Livingston

“Free trade,” like “free love,” is a beguiling abstraction that hides more than it reveals. Absolute free trade would be an exchange of commodities between two people without the coercive intervention of a third party. But economic exchange is always embedded in a cultural landscape of noneconomic values, which impose restraints. Blue laws prevent trade on Sundays, medieval Christendom prohibited charging interest on money, and some think no decent society could legalize the sale of or firearms. If someone disagrees with these restraints, it is because he rejects the moral ideals they express, not because he favors “free trade.” Within the restrictions imposed by usury laws, trade flourished in medieval Europe; indeed, it gave rise to the practices we call “capitalism” today. Those who value liberty may seek to minimize these constraints, but economic relations cannot exist outside of noneconomic restraints.

Today in history marks the two hundred and twenty-ninth anniversary of Henry Clay’s birthday. Clay was born in Hanover County, Virginia on April 12, 1777. Clay was a founder and key leader of the Whigs and the National Republican Party in the United States, though he got his start in politics as a Democrat. Clay was admitted to the bar in 1797 and commenced practice in Lexington, Kentucky. He rose to become a prominent U.S. Senator for Kentucky by the 1830s, and he gained considerable prestige in the eyes of many historians for his role in the Missouri Compromise of 1820 as a Congressman. According to Carl Schurz, a German émigré, professed national revolutionist, and a Union general, Clay was said to be a political success because: