Check out David Leonardt’s interesting piece at The New York Times:
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board has spent the last few months trying to boost Gov. Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign. It has called his legislative record “as impressive as you’ll find,” while touting Florida’s population growth and noting that the state’s age-adjusted Covid death rate is well below the national average. As DeSantis’s campaign has sagged, The Journal’s editorialists have offered him tactical advice for confronting Donald Trump.
After DeSantis released his economic plan last week, however, The Journal took a different tone. Its headline called the plan “unstable.” The editorial praised some parts of DeSantis’s agenda while criticizing him for favoring less trade with China, less immigration and federal action to ease student debt.
Even if the DeSantis campaign ends with a whimper, this argument among American conservatives is an important one. It will shape the Republican Party in the post-Trump era — however far away that may be — and, by extension, influence the country’s economic policy...
The Journal editorial page represents an outlook that dominated the Republican Party from Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s until Trump’s arrival in 2016. It favors an approach that’s variously described as laissez-faire, small-government and neoliberal. It includes light regulation, low taxes, cuts to government benefits and high levels of trade and immigration. Its patron saint is Milton Friedman, who argued that free-market capitalism is the best way to lift living standards.
The problem for the laissez-faire advocates is that many of their predictions have not come true.
Income growth for most Americans has been sluggish since the Reagan Revolution. Only the affluent have enjoyed healthy gains in income and wealth. Other measures of living standards look even worse. In 1980, life expectancy in the U.S. was typical for an industrialized country; today, it is lower than in Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea or any large country in Western Europe.
Read the rest here. Leonhardt notes that Nikki Haley has opted for Reaganism. So has Mike Pence.