“Rounding Up” is a newsletter rounding up various links, newsletters, and podcasts from the perspective of political reform. If you’d like to join this experiment, please subscribe.
The leading feature today looks at big-question pictures of political reform on the right, child-allowance policy, a few new journals, and the common good.
Tips? Comments? Questions? Drop me a line (through Twitter, email, etc.). Check out @fredbauerblog or fredbauerblog via gmail.
Thanks, as always, for reading!
What is conservatism? The Intercollegiate Studies Institute recently hosted a forum with 5 different speakers on the future of conservatism: Charles CW Cooke, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Daniel McCarthy, Bill Kristol, and Ross Douthat. Johnny Burtka moderated.
Building elites: Inspired by the adage of “personnel is policy,” Saurabh Sharma, Nick Solheim, and Jake Mercier have started a new organization to train those sympathetic to more populist-oriented policies: American Moment. The organization’s board of advisors includes Rachel Bovard, Saagar Enjeti, Ryan Girdusky, Josh Hammer, Terry Schilling, and JD Vance. The founders outline their vision here. Bonus content: An “American Canon” page with everything from policy analysis to Ernest Hemingway.
Chris Buskirk recently wrote a NYT op-ed arguing that there’s a generational divide among conservatives. He’s also starting a new newsletter. The first issue calls for the right to adopt a concrete policy vision: “advocate an agenda to remake America that makes it possible for the average person to get married, buy a house, have a few kids, and send them to school on a single wage. That’s it. If you can do that, you win and your party will govern for a generation - and will deserve to.”
A new issue of American Affairs is live. Sample articles: Jeffrey Funk on venture capital, Joel Kotkin on the American city, Paul Triolo on the PRC and semiconductors, Patrick Deneen on the meritocracy, and Blake Smith on Carl Schmitt.
A new issue of City Journal is up, too: Martin Gurri on contemporary journalism, Rafael Mangual on crime policy, and more.
The American Rescue Plan includes a one-year (mostly) universal child benefit, and pundits and policy analysts continue to wrangle over the implications of universal child allowances. Some—like Niskanen’s Sam Hammond—are jubilant about a possible policy revolution; others—like AEI’s Scott Winship—worry that a universal benefit would lead to some of the disappointments that plagued the Great Society.
In the New York Times, Oren Cass makes a case for expanding subsidies to working households and argues that work is a key social good:
A generous cash benefit disconnected from work can also be economically and culturally counterproductive. Work plays a critical role in people’s lives, as a source of purpose, structure and social interaction; a prerequisite for upward mobility and a foundation of family formation and stability. Communities in which labor-force dropout is widespread and widely accepted are not happy ones; a policy that sustains people in joblessness is not ultimately anti-poverty.
Will Wilkinson focuses less on the level of the household and more on the level of the child to argue that it is unjust to condition a family subsidy on whether or not someone in the household works.
Cass responds to his critics here.
Unbowed: Mickey Kaus remains unconvinced that child-allowance measures without work requirements are good public policy.
Speaking of: Researchers within Stockton, California recently ran a trial $500/month income supplement. They released a preliminary report finding that, over the short term, this supplement led to improved outcomes. (NB: Many critics of such a subsidy worry especially about the long-term implications.)
Build your own: At Niskanen, Robert Orr has pulled together a calculator to estimate the financial impact of various family-subsidy proposals.
Matthew J. Peterson distinguishes the common good from public goods:
For the American founders, before the rise of the social sciences, and for many younger thinkers on the American Right today, the common or public good means something else entirely. In the ratification debate over the adoption of the Constitution, for instance, the word “goods” was often used to describe physical items of trade, but the founders did not use the plural phrase “public goods” or “common goods,” and it is clear from context that the “public good” and the “common good,” etc., did not refer to physically distributable goods.
A sign of this is that when they used these terms, they referred to a single entity: the public good, or the common good, or the good of the whole, etc. In political speech today, however, we often speak of public or common goods, and the reason for this seems obvious: we often refer to material things as public or common goods that ought to be divided up in accordance with some notion of distributive justice. The fact that the participants in the ratification used terms that are not applicable to material goods, however, is precisely what makes those terms interesting as evidence for a very different underlying political philosophy.
Andrew Stuttaford surveys regulations, central banking, and more.
The tenure of censors and magistrates: David Bromwich looks at Milton on censorship and contemporary censorship movements.
Glenn Greenwald attacks a rising tide of anti-Substackism: “The real division here is between those who believe in a free internet, free discourse, free thought, and those who do not — between those who want corporate journalistic elites to control what people can say and think and those who do not.”
He’s back: Ryan James Girdusky—who literally wrote a book on national populism—has brought back his national-populism newsletter in 2021.
Spring is coming: Camille Pissarro’s Kitchen Garden with Trees in Flower, Spring: