No, Government Should Not Be Pro-Business
A Crisis Dispatch
It is entirely inappropriate for a government to be pro-business. The entire notion of a pro-business government is corrupt in the first instance. Business is a thing that happens inside government. It is the thing made possible by the laws and norms a government establishes. The purpose of a government in a republic is to represent the interests of the people. Whether those interests involve business is up for debate inside the republic’s institutions. If so-called libertarians think that is statism or socialism, they have stopped knowing what the words mean.
I want to slow down on that opening, because I think the people who will reflexively reject it will reject it for reasons they have not examined, and the unexamined reasons are the entire problem.
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The polity is logically prior to the markets that operate within it. This is not a controversial claim in the history of political theory. It is the foundational claim of nearly every serious tradition that has thought carefully about what governments are for. Aristotle made it. The Roman jurists made it. The classical liberal tradition from Locke through Madison made it. Even Hayek, who is sometimes invoked as the patron saint of pro-business government, made it — The Constitution of Liberty is explicit that the rule of law and the framework of property rights are prior to and constitutive of the markets that operate inside them, and that the framework’s coherence cannot be reduced to whatever the markets, at any given moment, would prefer.
The framework is the polity. The polity is what establishes the laws under which contracts are enforceable, the property regimes under which ownership is meaningful, the regulatory structures under which exchange is possible, the courts under which disputes can be adjudicated, the currency under which value can be measured, the schools that produce the literate workforce, the infrastructure that makes commerce physically possible, the public-health architecture that keeps the workforce alive, the police and military that prevent the framework from being overrun by force. Business does not produce these conditions. Business operates inside them. The conditions are the polity’s work.
To call a government pro-business is to commit a category error. The government cannot be pro the activity it makes possible, because the pro presupposes the activity is something the government could be in some other relation to — neutral, opposed, indifferent. The government is in none of those relations. The government is the framework within which the activity is what it is. A chess board is not pro-bishop. The board is what the bishop moves on. The bishop is one piece among others operating on the board. The board’s job is to be a board.
When a government declares itself pro-business, it is announcing that it has confused itself with the contents of its own framework. The confusion is the corruption. The corruption is what the announcement is.
The libertarian who hears this as statism or socialism is making a specific philosophical error that is worth naming, because the error is the same error the vulgar left makes in mirror form, and the mirroring is the diagnostic.
The vulgar left says: the polity should be reorganized to align with the proletariat’s relation to the means of production. The mode of production determines the moral landscape. Workers are the foundational human category. The workers’ relation to capital is the central political conflict. Government’s job is to advance the workers’ interests in this conflict.
The vulgar right says: the polity should be reorganized to remove constraints on the entrepreneur’s freedom to manipulate matter. The market is the foundational human institution. The entrepreneur is the foundational human category. The entrepreneur’s relation to regulation is the central political conflict. Government’s job is to advance the entrepreneur’s interests in this conflict, which usually means getting out of the entrepreneur’s way.
These two positions are mirror images of each other. They disagree about whose manipulation of matter is foundational. They agree that the manipulation of matter is what is foundational. They are both materialist in the precise philosophical sense — they both place economic activity in the moral firmament of civilization, and they both treat the polity as an instrument of that firmament rather than as something else, something prior, something that grounds the whole arrangement.
This shared materialism is what blinds both vulgar forms to the classical liberal insight. The classical liberal does not place economic activity in the foundational spot. The classical liberal places the polity itself in that spot — the structured framework of co-citizens working out together what kind of place they want to live in, with economic activity as one of the things that occurs inside the framework alongside many other things. The classical liberal can therefore see, as the vulgar materialists cannot, that pro-business government is a category error. The classical liberal can also see, as the vulgar materialists cannot, that anti-business government would be the same error in reverse. Neither is what a republic is supposed to be. Neither is what a republic is for.
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The deeper question is what the polity is grounded in, if not in economic activity. This is where the materialism of left and right reaches its limit and the older tradition has resources the materialism does not.
The older tradition says the polity is grounded in love. Not in the sentimental sense of the word, the soft sense, the sense the materialists are correct to dismiss when they encounter it deployed without philosophical seriousness. In the older sense, going back to Augustine and earlier — love as the relational stance through which one consciousness recognizes another as a participant in the shared field of meaning. Love as the foundation of philia, the friendship Aristotle thought was the prerequisite for political community. Love as the substrate of co-citizenship at scale, sustained across distance and time by the institutions the polity establishes for the purpose. Love as the answer to the question of why the people in the polity should care about each other rather than treating each other as means or as obstacles.
This sounds metaphysically heavy because it is. The materialist alternatives are also metaphysically heavy. They are just heavy in ways their adherents have stopped noticing, because the materialism has become the default and the alternatives have to be argued for. The classical liberal tradition, when it is doing its work honestly, is willing to argue for its foundation rather than pretending it does not have one.
We do not live to make stuff. We love our kin and our communities. We want to find friends who share our interests. This is not naive. This is the point.
The polity is the structure that allows us to do these things at scales beyond what kinship and direct acquaintance can sustain. The polity is what allows the love that grounds family and friendship to extend, in a thinner but real form, to the millions of people we will never meet but who share with us the framework within which our lives unfold. The polity is the architecture of generalized reciprocity. The polity is the way humans answer the question of how to live together with strangers across centuries and continents. The polity is what makes civilization, in the meaningful sense, possible.
Business happens inside this. Family happens inside this. Friendship happens inside this. Education happens inside this. Religion happens inside this. Art happens inside this. Sports happen inside this. Cooking happens inside this. Sex happens inside this. The whole of human activity happens inside the polity, and the polity is not in service of any of these things specifically. It is in service of the conditions under which all of them can occur in their proper relation to each other and to the love that grounds them all.
This is what the libertarian who calls not pro-business equivalent to socialism has lost. They have lost the framework-versus-content distinction. They have collapsed the polity into one of its contents. They have, without realizing it, accepted exactly the materialist premise the vulgar left operates on, and have arrived at the mirror-image conclusion. Their libertarianism, in this corrupted form, is not the recovery of classical liberal thought. It is the inversion of the vulgar left, with the same materialist metaphysics underneath, applied to a different favored subject.
A real classical liberal does not want a pro-business government. A real classical liberal wants a government that secures the framework within which business, alongside many other activities, can occur in the proper deliberation about which activities should be encouraged or constrained in which ways at which moments. The deliberation is the political content. The deliberation is what republics exist to host. Pro-business government forecloses the deliberation by deciding the answer in advance. Anti-business government would foreclose the same deliberation in the opposite direction. Both are anti-political in the deepest sense — both have removed from the polity the power to deliberate about what the polity wants to be.
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The accusation of socialism directed at this argument is doing specific rhetorical work that is worth pausing on.
In the contemporary American debate, socialism has come to mean almost anything that would constrain capital’s prerogatives — minimum wage laws, environmental regulation, antitrust enforcement, labor protections, consumer-protection requirements, public-health mandates, the entire architecture of the regulatory state that has been the actual operating reality of every developed liberal democracy for a century. The word has been weaponized to produce a binary: either you are for unconstrained capital, or you are a socialist. The binary is what the materialist right needs in order to maintain its position, because the binary obscures the actual question, which is how the polity should structure the framework within which capital operates.
The polity has always structured the framework. Capital has never operated without a framework, anywhere, in any era of history. The framework is constitutive of capital, not external to it. There is no version of capital that exists prior to or independent of the polity that establishes the conditions for its existence. Free market capitalism is a phrase that, taken literally, describes nothing that has ever existed. Every market that has ever existed has operated inside a framework of laws, norms, customs, and enforcement mechanisms that the polity established and maintained. The question has never been whether to have the framework. The question has always been what shape the framework should take.
When a libertarian invokes socialism in response to the claim that government should not be pro-business, the libertarian is doing one of two things. Either they are claiming that the polity should not establish the framework within which business operates — which is incoherent, because there is no business without a framework, and someone has to establish it. Or they are claiming that the polity should establish the framework but should establish it in a specific way that aligns with the interests of capital — which is precisely the pro-business government this Dispatch is rejecting. There is no third option. Either the polity establishes the framework, in which case the framework is up for democratic deliberation, or someone else does, in which case the someone else is the actual sovereign and the polity is a fiction. The libertarian who calls the deliberative answer socialism is, without realizing it, arguing for the second option. They are arguing that the framework should be established by capital itself, with the polity reduced to the role of executor of capital’s preferences. This is not classical liberalism. It is a specific form of oligarchy that classical liberals have spent four hundred years arguing against.
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The classical liberal tradition I am defending here is not a centrist tradition. It is not a moderate tradition. It is not a both-sides tradition. It is a substantive metaphysical commitment with specific political consequences, and the consequences are sometimes left-coded and sometimes right-coded in the contemporary American frame, but the underlying commitment is neither left nor right in the materialist senses those terms have come to carry.
The commitment is to ordered liberty. Order, in the sense of the framework — the laws, the institutions, the deliberative architecture, the rule of law that gives the framework its durability across time. Liberty, in the sense of what the framework makes possible — the activities of free co-citizens working out together what kind of place they want to live in, including what they want to do with the economic layer of their common life. The order is what allows the liberty. The liberty is what the order is for. The two are not in tension. The two are the same project named from different angles.
This is the project the materialist traditions of left and right cannot see, because both have placed economic activity in the foundational spot and have collapsed the framework into the contents. The vulgar left collapses it toward the workers’ interests. The vulgar right collapses it toward the entrepreneurs’ interests. Both have lost the framework. Both have, in losing the framework, lost the polity. The polity is what neither materialism can recover from its own premises, because the polity is the layer above the layer both materialisms have committed to.
A government that announces itself as pro-business has joined the vulgar right in this collapse. A government that announces itself as anti-business would join the vulgar left in the same collapse. A government that understands itself as the framework within which co-citizens deliberate about all the activities of their common life, including economic activity, including but not limited to economic activity, has not joined either. That government is doing the classical liberal work. That government is what a republic is supposed to be.
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We do not live to make stuff. We love our kin and our communities. We want to find friends who share our interests.
The republic is the mechanism through which we can all go about this in an ordered way. Ordered liberty. Liberalism.
It is beautiful because it is what humans are for. The materialist traditions that have eaten so much of contemporary political thought have lost the ability to see this, because they have placed something other than what humans are for in the foundational spot, and the foundational misplacement propagates through every downstream commitment. Pro-business government is one of those downstream commitments. The category error at the foundation produces the category error in the policy frame. Naming the foundation makes the policy frame visible as the error it is.
A government should not be pro-business. A government should be the polity. The polity is what humans build to do what humans are for. Business is one of the things humans do inside what they have built, and the question of how the polity should structure the conditions under which business occurs is one of the questions the polity is supposed to deliberate about, with the deliberation kept open and not foreclosed by an executive declaration that the answer has already been decided in capital’s favor.
The libertarians who hear this as statism or socialism have stopped being liberals. They have become something else — partisans of a specific economic class, dressed in the vocabulary of a tradition that, in its serious forms, would have refused them. The tradition is not theirs. The tradition is older and wider than what they have made of it. The tradition is what this Dispatch is for.