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Mike Moschos's avatar

Well written and interesting! From the perspective of both myself and the specter of the United States' Old Republic, both the points of view expressed here are deeply in error. The Old Republic rejects both Warren’s vision and the current system because they are, in different ways, antithetical to its foundational principles. The Neoliberal Era, far from embodying free markets and competition, has brought centralized control and economic central planning disguised as deregulation. By dismantling local financial autonomy, removing capital flow inhibitors, and enabling corporate consolidation, installing near complete regulatory harmonization, this system has artificially constrained competition while concentrating power in the hands of large corporations, financial elites, and a technocratic bureaucracy. This centralization of decision-making, under the guise of “market efficiency”, is precisely why the Old Republic would have thoroughly rejected Milton Friedman. His vision, centered on profit maximization as the sole responsibility of business, accelerates monopolistic structures and erodes the decentralization and economic diffusion that generate true competition, dynamic local, regional, and national economies, greatly shrinks scientific and engineering research and development ecosystems, and diminishes both competition and innovation.

Warren’s proposal, while framed as corporate accountability, also consolidates control, albeit via a different path, through unions and federal bureaucracy, further centralizing authority rather than restoring economic balance through regional and local mechanisms. The Old Republic understood that government intervention could be necessary, but only in ways that diffused power, encouraged variability, and prevented elite dominance. Warren’s approach, like the system we have now, imposes top-down solutions that stifle innovation, limit regional autonomy, and replace self-governing communities with centralized oversight. Both visions ignore that prosperity stems from decentralization, local accountability, and competition rooted in dispersed decision-making: principles the Old Republic championed and which enabled economic and social dynamism for over a century.

Thus, the choice presented in this post, between Milton Friedman’s flawed centralization and Warren’s bureaucratic overreach, misses the alternative that defined America’s earlier success: a system of decentralized governance, regional autonomy, and truly competitive markets free from concentrated power, whether corporate or bureaucratic. The stakes, as the post rightly states, are about the soul of America’s economy, but both options represent forms of centralization that the Old Republic would oppose. The true path forward lies in rediscovering the balance, diffusion, and local variability that once defined the nation’s economic and political vitality.

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