The Next Republican Agenda

[Valin]

Washington Examiner:

Column: How to strike a balance between populism and free enterprise

Matthew Continetti

Nov. 4 2016

 

One of the most important speeches of the 2016 election was delivered in Utah in June to an audience of ultra-rich Republicans that included Mitt Romney. The speaker was Edward Conard, who joined Bain Capital after graduating from Harvard Business School in 1982 and worked in private equity for twenty-five years before retiring to become, of all things, a pundit.

 

Conard thrives in debate. His first book, Unintended Consequences, was a revisionist history of the mortgage boom and bust as well as a defense of tax-cutting and high CEO pay. His second, The Upside of Inequality, was published in September. (The Washington Free Beacon had an excerpt from it here.) Conard’s style is direct and bracing, and what he has to say is grounded in decades of experience in the real world of investment and finance. He has been wildly successful. There is no question that he is an elite. Which makes what he told his peers all the more important.

 

Supporters of free enterprise, he acknowledged, have a problem that is larger than Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. The problem is that the success of an information economy that values skilled and highly skilled labor creates a political backlash. And the reasons for this backlash are the very things that make the system prosperous.

 

Here is how it happened. The industrial economy was constrained by limits on capital and labor. That is no longer the case. “There’s a near infinite supply of labor now and there’s a near infinite supply of capital.” What constrains the information economy is rather a lack of “properly trained talent” and an unwillingness to take risks.

 

(Snip)