Not since Lincoln and Douglas can we remember a call to a national election debate like that which President Trump has been sounding in respect of socialism. He laid this marker in his State of the Union speech, vowing that America would never be a socialist country. He picked up the theme in his speech at CPAC, offering a taste of how the issue will sound in the campaign now gathering.
The director of the National Economic Council, Lawrence Kudlow, also at CPAC, made a more formal call to a debate. “Our opponents,” he warned, “are proposing to overturn America’s success.” Between the Green New Deal, ending private health insurance, and taxing the rich, Mr. Kudlow reckons, Democrats are proposing essentially “state control — a state government control of the entire economy.”
What Mr. Kudlow asked for in return is a battle of ideas over the Democrats’ socialism. “I want it challenged, I want it debated, I want it rebutted, and I want to convict socialism,” Mr. Kudlow said. To his audience, which included hundreds of activists and members of the conservative intelligentsia, Mr. Kudlow put it this way: “I want you to put socialism on trial. That's what I'm asking you to do today.”
How we wish Friedrich Hayek were alive for the coming campaign. He wrote, in “The Road to Serfdom,” a template for the debate ahead. Published in 1944, his book illuminates why state control of the economy always leads to a loss of liberty. He helped us see why, as we like to put it, political liberty and economic liberty can’t exist the one without the other. They are but warp and woof in the fabric of freedom.
The importance Hayek attached to debate we glimpsed first hand. On a trip between Hong Kong and New York, we’d stopped off to see him on the Coast (as Sun-style refers to California), where he was spending a semester. We had stopped off to meet him and to ask him about a book we were reviewing on development economics. That turned out to be but the first course.
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05.07.2025