Category: Michael Novakhov – SharedNewsLinks℠

If one theme unites the Roberts Court’s work in administrative law, it is a counter-reformation that recenters the Constitution’s basic architecture for the administrative state. Congress is to legislate; the president and his subordinates are to execute within a hierarchical, accountable executive; and courts are to exercise independent judgment in interpreting the laws. That settlement, grounded in the Constitution’s Vesting Clauses, animates a series of linked doctrines returning power to the institutions to which the Court believes the Constitution originally entrusted it.

The Roberts Court’s vision for the separation of powers points toward a stricter nondelegation doctrine. Delegation is Congress’s practice of permitting agencies to regulate conduct under broad authorizations that allow the executive substantial policy choice. These delegations have included authority to regulate in the “public interest” without further defining that term or directions to an agency to pursue an objective stated at a high level of generality, such as promoting public health, without indicating how much harm is consistent with protecting the public health. Such broad delegation threatens to make the executive the lawmaker by giving over to that branch the essential policy choices the Constitution entrusts to Congress.

The Supreme Court’s only current limitation on delegation is that Congress must have articulated an “intelligible principle.” And it has applied this test so leniently that it has never struck down a delegation since the New Deal. The “intelligible principle” test now plays much the same role for congressional delegations that rational‑basis review plays for state legislation—a toothless screen that projects oversight while failing to enforce constitutional limits.

The Framers recognized that the legislative power was the most important of all the powers delegated in the Constitution, because it was the only federal authority that could directly affect their domestic liberty. Legislative power—prescribing rules that bind private conduct—belongs only to Congress, and for good reasons. That assignment channels lawmaking through a deliberative, laborious, publicly accountable process. Justice Neil Gorsuch’s dissent in Gundy v. United States articulates this structure crisply: Congress must make the policy decisions; the executive may “fill up the details” or find facts that trigger rules Congress has created. That is the Constitution’s path to stable rules, fair notice, and political accountability.

While I cannot fully defend the originalist case for limiting the delegation doctrine here, my frequent co-author, Michael Rappaport, does so in “A Two-Tiered and Categorical Approach to the Nondelegation Doctrine,” proposing a two-tier framework. For domestic regulation of private rights—most of the stuff of administrative law—he proposes a categorical bar on delegating policymaking discretion. In contrast, he proposes a more lenient standard where history and structure counsel executive flexibility, as in appropriations, foreign and military affairs, and territorial governance. He grounds the strict rule for domestic regulatory affairs in text, history, and structure—especially the private/public rights distinction and James Madison’s insistence that laws provide details, definitions, and rules. The executive in the strict tier is limited to genuine interpretation, fact-finding, and application. On this view, the current doctrine abdicates Congress’s duty precisely where liberty most requires legislative judgment.

The fact is that modern government is administrative government, and delegation has been its lifeblood.

Nevertheless, the Roberts Court has made less progress for its basic vision on delegation than in other separation-of-powers domains. That is so even though, in Gundy v. United States, three justices—Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Thomas and Gorsuch—favored tightening the doctrine, and a fourth, Justice Alito, concurred in the judgment while signaling openness to reconsideration. A plurality upheld the statute only because Justice Kavanaugh did not participate and Justice Barrett had not yet joined the Court.

For instance, last term in FCC v. Consumers Research, the Court reaffirmed the intelligible principle test with only Justices Thomas and Gorsuch dissenting. In the opinion for the Court, Justice Elena Kagan reasoned that Congress provided a clear, intelligible principle in §254 of the Act, directing the FCC to promote universal service through specific goals such as equitable contributions, affordability, and access.

What are the obstacles to the reinvigoration of a constitutional non-delegation doctrine, and how might we surmount them?

Reliance

The principal problem is that revising the delegation doctrine would implicate vast reliance interests and generations of precedent in a way that could create a regulatory vacuum. The “intelligible principle” line has long permitted capacious grants that agencies have used to build the basic architecture of federal regulation. Overruling that settlement would endanger a large number of administrative delegations in environmental, consumer protection, and other areas of regulatory law.

The fact is that modern government is administrative government, and delegation has been its lifeblood. Under the authority of these delegations, the federal government has issued hundreds of thousands of pages of regulations. In the recent case of FCC v. Consumer Research, for instance, the Court raised concerns about past delegations even when refusing to overturn the application of the intelligible principle test to a much narrower class of legislation that delegates taxing power to agencies.

In an analogous situation, Judge Robert Bork dismissed suggestions of overruling modern commerce clause doctrine as an invitation to chaos, even as he doubted these precedents as an original matter. The Court has largely left that jurisprudence intact, trimming at the margins by holding that Congress may not directly regulate non-economic activity (United States v. Lopez) or compel private parties to enter commerce as a predicate to regulation (NFIB v. Sebelius). These decisions act more as symbols—signaling the Court’s power is not plenary—while declining to interfere with any substantial regulation in the United States code.

The Court’s revival of the classical structure of the executive and judicial power does not create the same danger of overturning legal frameworks that have elicited substantial reliance in statutes enacted under the Commerce Clause and in delegations administered by the executive. In reasserting the president’s appointments and removal authority and a hierarchical appointments structure within the executive branch, the Roberts Court has reordered the executive’s internal chain of command rather than unsettling the external substance of federal regulation. For instance, none of the decisions requiring that principal officers have greater control over their inferiors struck down any substantive regulation.

To be sure, decisions like Seila Law v. CFPB and Collins v. Yellen, which permit presidential removal of agency heads, are more politically controversial. Nevertheless, they also do not change substantive regulation, as the court has consistently severed the offensive removal provisions from the rest of the regulatory statute. Moreover, while these blows against agency independence infuriate many professors in the legal academy, those outside the professoriate and the beltway hardly notice the change. For good reason, as much literature suggests, so-called independent agencies do not yield different results from those over which the president exercises direct control.

The Federal Reserve—the one agency about whose independence the public may care—is the exception that proves the rule. There, the Supreme Court in Trump v. Wilcox has already suggested a distinction to preserve its independence, stating that ”the Federal Reserve is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States“

Major Questions

Another obstacle to fundamentally restructuring delegation is a doctrinal innovation of the Roberts Court itself. It has already applied a “major questions” doctrine that achieves important goals of a tightened delegation doctrine—greater congressional accountability and reduced discretion for agencies—without disturbing long-established regulations issued under broad delegations.

The “major-questions” (better called the “major-powers”) doctrine operates as a shadow substitute for a full-blown revival of non-delegation. The doctrine functions as a clear-statement rule, requiring Congress to “speak clearly” before assigning agencies authority to decide matters of vast economic and political significance. By demanding clarity on delegation, the Court nudges the legislature to make major policy choices while leaving the underlying statutes in place. That structure implements the constitutional separation of powers indirectly, precisely because layers of precedent preclude a revival of the direct enforcement of the originalist non-delegation doctrine. As Justice Gorsuch memorably put it in Gundy, when one doctrine cannot perform its intended work, “hydraulic pressures” shift the task to others; here, the major-powers doctrine carries much of the load that non-delegation would otherwise bear.

Crucially, this shadow doctrine achieves many of non-delegation’s objectives without inviting the chaos that would follow from striking down swaths of the US Code or destabilizing entrenched regulatory regimes. In several major-questions cases, the Court has focused on novelty, prescribing skepticism of any agency claim to have discovered “unheralded” power in an existing statute. Thus, the doctrine screens for new, abrupt expansions of authority rather than retroactively invalidating settled programs. Thus, the older precedent of Utility Air expressed skepticism when an agency discovers in an old statute the power to regulate “a significant portion of the American economy.” Alabama Association of Realtors v. OSHA and NFIB v. OSHA pressed the same point: eviction moratoria under a rarely used 1944 provision and a nationwide vaccine mandate untethered to workplace hazards were both “novel” claims of “vast” significance requiring unmistakable congressional authorization. West Virginia v. EPA then consolidated the doctrine, insisting that a mere “plausible” reading of “best system of emission reduction” could not support a new, grid-wide generation shifting absent a clear statement from Congress.

Prospective overruling mitigates reliance costs while putting the Constitution on a glide path back to its original meaning.

Moreover, because the major-powers rule leaves the statute intact and simply remands high-salience choices to Congress, the political branches can ratify or revise delegations prospectively; the reliance interests that a revived non-delegation doctrine would undermine remain largely undisturbed. In short, the doctrine restores accountability for major policy to the legislature, restrains agency self-aggrandizement, and does so incrementally, thus moving the law toward original structure without detonating past actions of the administrative state.

But the major questions doctrine’s effectiveness as a shadow doctrine may shore up the status of the delegation doctrine, even if it is the administrative state’s most substantial distortion of the constitutional separation of powers. For instance, Justice Kavanaugh relies on the presence of the major questions doctrine in his Consumers Research concurrence as a reason to accept the majority’s application of the intelligible principle test for the delegation doctrine. Thus, one problem with doctrines created by the “hydraulic pressures” mentioned by Gorsuch (rather than those compelled by a formal reading of text) is that they may lessen the pressure for more substantial course corrections even when justified.

Prospective Overruling

Is there a way to restore a stricter nondelegation regime without disturbing the vast network of statutes and regulations built on more permissive doctrines? Rappaport and I have defended a concept—prospective overruling—that, when applied to delegation, offers a disciplined way to do just that. Prospective overruling mitigates those reliance costs while putting the Constitution on a glide path back to its original meaning.

In a case squarely presenting the issue, the Court would announce the governing standard: Congress must make the policy choices; administrators may implement the law and find facts. In subsequent cases, future delegations would then have to conform to that rule. Existing statutes, however, would remain enforceable, creating a safe harbor for preexisting delegations and the regulations issued under them. The virtue of this two-step is that it would apply the original meaning to a single, recent enactment rather than to numerous statutes enacted over a lengthy period, thereby minimizing reliance costs while reestablishing the proper separation of powers.

The contrast with retrospective overruling underscores why prospectivity is the sounder course. If a stricter delegation rule were applied to the past, Congress would face enormous pressure to replace, in short order, a sprawling body of law—an institutional task made harder by both the sheer quantity of provisions to review and the strategic behavior that inevitably attends omnibus renegotiation. By contrast, prospective overruling leaves no regulation under a current delegation vulnerable to immediate invalidation; it channels change through ordinary legislative time, allowing Congress to transition one statute at a time, with notice of the constitutional standard that now governs.

Prospective overruling also encourages Congress to develop practical institutional responses consistent with the new constitutional framework. Legislators can choose to write more determinate statutes that they prefer, however, to empower expert agencies. They can then instead require that major rules obtain fast-track legislative approval before taking effect, thus ensuring that elected representatives, not administrators, make the ultimate policy choices. Congress can also build advisory capacity, such as its own regulatory advisory units, to inform those more specific choices. By putting Congress on notice and giving it time, prospectivity reduces the reliance of both individuals and governments while re-anchoring delegation in the Constitution’s original design.

The Roberts Court has already reclaimed much of the Constitution’s design for executive and judicial powers without disturbing settled administrative programs. The delegation doctrine remains the outlier. By tolerating broad grants of policymaking discretion, it allows Congress to shed the hardest choices and invites presidential lawmaking through rulemaking. A measured, prospective overruling of the “intelligible principle” test would correct that anomaly. It would preserve reliance while restoring accountability so that rules binding private conduct are again made by Congress, in public, through bicameralism and presentment. That is not a revolution but a return to the constitutional structure that promotes enduring liberty.

Ever since the horrifying Hamas terror attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, Western reporting on the roots of that attack and the Israeli government’s response to it has suffered from serious misunderstandings. In While Israel Slept—borrowing from John F. Kennedy’s first book, Why England Slept, and, more directly, from Winston Churchill’s 1938 collection of speeches, While England Slept—two prominent Israeli journalists, Yaakov Katz and Amir Bohbot, set out to correct those misunderstandings. While their opening chapters focus on the immediate context of Hamas’s surprise attack, later chapters explore the deeper roots of that unpreparedness, going back over two decades before. Katz and Bohbot provide the closest thing to a definitive account of the events of 2023 and its causes—even if some prescriptions in their conclusion are debatable.

The biggest error in much of the reporting on Israeli policies over the years leading up to the attack portrays the Israeli government, usually under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as excessively warlike and unsympathetic to the needs of Gaza residents. To the contrary, the authors demonstrate, Netanyahu and his fellow ministers erred by turning a blind eye to the preparations Hamas leaders had been making for war against Israel for at least a decade, accumulating billions of dollars in cash and shipments of materials to construct an elaborate network of tunnels along with an ample supply of drones, rockets, and other weaponry. 

Desperate to avoid major conflict, Israeli leaders, including Netanyahu (and for less than two years the ostensibly “right-wing” Naftali Bennett and his “centrist-liberal” successor Yair Lapid), engaged in what political analysts during the Cold War called “mirror imaging.” That is, just as Cold War “doves” like Jimmy Carter’s secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, allowed themselves to believe that Soviet leaders, just like their American counterparts, aimed above all at peace and prosperity, successive Israeli political and military leaders supposed that Hamas leaders, too, wanted prosperity and stability. Accordingly, Israeli leaders believed major financial aid and even “dual-use” tunnel-building equipment would divert Hamas from any aggressive intentions, allowing them to focus instead (as the Israelis did) on advancing their people’s economic well-being. 

In addition, both Netanyahu, who had previously called for the complete “dismantling” of the Hamas regime, along with his far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, came to regard the regime as an “asset” in that its existence would prevent any moves towards a “two-state solution” to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. That is, given Hamas’s widely recognized status as a terrorist group, in contrast with the Palestinian Authority (which governed the West Bank and engaged in negotiations with the outside world), no responsible parties would press for a unified Palestinian state.

In effect, the authors observe, for years Israeli authorities paid “terrorist blackmail” by facilitating the transfer of funds to Hamas from assorted Western “charities” and especially the Gulf States in an attempt to delicately “balance” weakening Hamas and elevating the prosperity of “the average Palestinian.” “Consecutive governments … believed that improved conditions in Gaza would lessen Hamas’s incentive to go to war,” ignoring “the fact that Hamas was a genocidal terrorist organization” that fired nearly 5,000 rockets into Israel in 2014 alone, while infiltrating killers through its attack tunnels.

When Israel did experience major military attacks from Gaza and elsewhere during those years, the government sought to respond in the most limited manner possible. Even the two terrifying Intifadas of 1987–93 and 2000—terrorist attacks massacring hundreds of Israeli civilians—were met with Israel launching rockets into the adjacent territories, but without any major ground incursion. (The main response was the construction of a defensive wall around Israeli territory.) And subsequently, in response to the 2006 kidnapping by Hamas of a single young Israeli soldier, Gilead Shalit, Israel (under Netanyahu) agreed in 2011 to release 1,027 prisoners, including the future leader of the October 7 attack, Yayah Sinwar. Shortly after the 2014 attack, when presented by a special intelligence unit with a plan to “deal a devastating blow to Iran and its proxies,” Hezbollah and Hamas, Netanyahu “hinted that he did not want wars to continue endlessly” and preferred to assist Qatar’s plan for financing Hamas operations.

Meanwhile, as the authors note, Hamas leaders, above all Sinwar, spent years carefully studying Israelis’ mentality. During his twenty-two-year prison stint for murdering four (actually, he boasted, twelve) alleged “collaborators,” Sinwar learned to speak Hebrew fluently and read books by former Israeli prime ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Rabin as well as the “revisionist” Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky. At the tactical level, meanwhile, many Gazans acquired detailed knowledge of the Israeli territory they would invade in 2023 thanks to the authorization by the tough-talking Bennett for up to 14,000 Gaza residents to obtain permits to work in Israel. Sinwar himself, having learned of Israelis’ reluctance both to incur casualties themselves (as in Shalit’s case) and to inflict them on civilians, took care to surround himself during his travels around Gaza “with children on his lap or holding them in his arms,” making them his “personal human shields.”

The demonstrations against the judicial reform bill may have helped encourage Hamas to strike when it did, though the long-planned attack would have occurred eventually.

But Israeli leaders themselves do not bear sole responsibility for their lack of preparedness against a major terrorist attack. As Katz and Bohbot observe, Ariel Sharon’s withdrawal of forces from Gaza in 2005 was made under pressure from the George W. Bush administration, so as to refute “claims that the Jewish state was still occupying” the territory. Subsequently, when Israel responded to the construction of tunnels into its territory and its rocket launchings by undertaking Operation Cast Lead, its “first large-scale ground offensive into Gaza since” the 2005 pullout, the government, against the advice of defense minister Yoav Gallant, halted the operation only two weeks later “to start building a relationship” with newly elected US President Obama. Although Americans then “promised to create a mechanism” to “curb the smuggling of weapons” into Gaza, “nothing was done.” Had Cast Lead been allowed to continue into the heart of Gaza City, former Israeli political and military officials later maintained, “the Hamas regime might have been toppled,” and replaced by “the more pragmatic Fatah,” which governs the West Bank under Israeli supervision and had signed the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords. 

None of this background, however, can excuse the multitude of Israeli errors that allowed the October 7 attack to succeed. Back in 2016, as the authors recount, the country’s “hardline” defense minister, Avigdor Lieberman, distributed a “top secret” assessment of the situation in Gaza to Netanyahu and the heads of the Israeli armed forces and of military intelligence, which urged launching a pre-emptive strike against Hamas before the group could capture an Israeli town along with numerous hostages. The document also revealed Hamas’s “long-term strategy,” including a buildup of its military force by 2020 (as occurred) and plans for a “multifront campaign” by numerous terrorist groups (along with “attacks on Jewish targets worldwide”), aimed at destroying the Jewish state by 2022. But Lieberman’s assessment was ignored.

I shall not review here the egregious tactical mistakes that military leaders made in response to the utterly unexpected October 7 attack—exemplified by their disregard of the warnings issued by (young, female) military border watchers who conveyed warnings of unexpected, suspicious events transpiring in Gaza in previous days. (The young women were all killed.) However, once the invasion was recognized as such, Israeli military members and even civilians displayed numerous examples of heroism and tactical cleverness that enabled Hamas’s defeat. The authors single out some nine “meticulously executed operations,” including the elimination of several Hamas military and political leaders and “the remarkable pager and walkie-talkie attack” of 2024 that killed dozens and wounded thousands of Hezbollah operatives, signaling “Israel’s resurgence.” Perhaps most importantly, the authors—in agreement with John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at West Point’s Modern War Institute—refute the libelous charges of “genocide” hurled at Israel by emphasizing that it achieved victory, against an enemy that hid underneath schools and hospitals, “in a way not seen before in the history of war, taking unprecedented steps to minimize the loss of civilian life.”

Among the authors’ concluding recommendations, some seem more meritorious than others. The wisdom of their call to reform Israel’s intelligence system to promote the exchange of diverse opinions and the sharing of information among the government and military leadership is unarguable. Similarly desirable for Israel is the adoption of “a preemptive strike policy” to prevent its enemies “from reconstituting their capabilities once the high-intensity stage of war is completed” (a timely lesson for the immediate present). On the other hand, their blaming “the Netanyahu government” for introducing in January 2023, a “controversial judicial overhaul” that divided the Israeli public, thereby offering Israel’s enemy an opportunity “to accelerate and deepen Israel’s distress” (this per a private letter from intelligence officials to the cabinet and prime minister) is unfair. Although the Israeli public was stirred by the media to protest the proposed overhaul as undemocratic, a look at the proposal demonstrates that it was more, not less, democratic than the system it would have replaced. 

What is not widely understood in the US is that since Israel, unlike this country, lacks a written constitution, Israel’s highest court has claimed the right to strike down whatever legislation it pleases if it fails to meet the standard of what a court majority deems “reasonable.” Moreover, whereas all federal judges are chosen by elected officials, a majority of Israel’s supreme court are selected through a process of co-optation. That is, they are chosen by a nine-member Judicial Selection Committee consisting of three sitting Supreme Court Judges, two cabinet ministers, two Knesset members, and two representatives of the Israel Bar Association. In sum, of the selection committee, only four members are elected legislators, while five belong to the legal establishment. It is this system that Netanyahu sought to democratize. And as the authors acknowledge, “the opposition often refused to entertain [even] middle-ground solutions.” The demonstrations against the judicial reform bill may have helped encourage Hamas to strike when it did, though the long-planned attack would have occurred eventually.

Netanyahu’s conduct of his nation’s foreign and defense policies, as Katz and Bohbot demonstrate, was sometimes deeply flawed (albeit in a manner shared by his rivals, Bennett and Lapid, when they were in office). Nonetheless, before one blames Netanyahu for “dividing” his country at a time of grave danger, one should consider the following recollection by Lapid in September 2024—almost a year after the Hamas attack—of his coalition’s aims before and after the war’s onset:

Whenever it has been necessary so far, we knew how to march the 56 Knesset members of the opposition into the Knesset plenum and vote the right way or work together in committees to do what needs to be done. I’m telling you, for the sacred cause of overthrowing this horrible government of ours, we will be very functional.

Calling the defeat of one’s country’s “horrible” government a “sacred” quest hardly sounds like the language one would expect from a loyal opposition amidst a country’s war for survival. (Fortunately, Lapid adopted a more conciliatory tone at the Knesset session where the recent peace settlement was formally announced.) But that Israel will continue to stand in need of a spirit of unity, regardless of which party governs, is indicated by the following statement issued by Hamas on the day that President Trump announced the ceasefire agreement: “We emphasize our determination to continue with the resistance in all its forms until our rights are achieved—first and foremost the removal of the occupation, [Palestinian] self-determination, and the establishment of an independent [Palestinian] state with full sovereignty with Jerusalem as its capital” (emphasis added). 

Halloween was the favorite holiday of Russell Kirk, modern American conservatism’s founder. As much as he enjoyed trick-or-treating and other spooky festivities, October 31 meant something even more profound to him. Kirk believed All Hallows’ Eve serves as a reminder of what Edmund Burke called the “eternal contract of society” that exists between the living and the dead.

It is altogether fitting and proper, then, that Kirk devoted much of his literary efforts to a classic American genre: the ghost story. Although today he is primarily remembered for his historical and political writings, his haunted tales have been hailed as masterpieces by everyone from Madeleine L’Engle to Stephen King. Once, the Count Dracula Society even gave Kirk its highest honor for gothic fiction—and a flowing black cape he was known to wear on occasion. Kirk himself saw his ghost stories as “experiments in the moral imagination,” illustrations of the enduring truths about the human condition and the connections between the visible and invisible worlds.

One of his best stories, “Ex Tenebris,” uses both fright and humor to demonstrate the folly of central planning. Although Kirk was no simpleminded libertarian ideologue, he understood that freedom was among the “permanent things” conservatives ought to preserve and enjoy. As a defender of tradition and order, he opposed all rationalistic attempts to level society according to abstract ideals. “Ex Tenebris” is a parable of that conservative insight, and a perfect yarn for Halloween.

The story opens with a description of a battered town in the English countryside, Low Wentford. Abandoned by nearly all except an old widow, Mrs. Oliver, its cottages have fallen into disrepair and ruin. A government planning officer, Mr. S. G. W. Barner, full of the “progressive aspirations of planned industrial society,” plots to completely remake the village by tearing down all the cottages and even Low Wentford’s disused parish church, All Saints. “Yes, that wreck of a church must come down, with what remained of Low Wentford,” Barner thinks to himself. “Ruins are reminiscent of the past; and the Past is a dead hand impeding progressive planning.” He turns out to be more right about the dead hand of the past than he could ever know.

The first stage in Barner’s scheme is to chase away all of Low Wentford’s residents. By the time the story begins, he has compulsorily transferred nearly all of Low Wentford’s elderly residents into council housing more suited to his modern sensibilities. All, that is, except Mrs. Oliver—she still clings to her “little red-tiled cottage,” its garden, and the derelict parish church, despite Barner’s best efforts. Even more than the gentry class, Mrs. Oliver represents to S. G. W. Barner the “repudiated social order” of traditional, rural life. She is the greatest threat to all his plans—or so he thinks.

To force poor Mrs. Oliver out of her home, then, Barner turns to the local baronet, Sir Gerald Ogham, who sold her the cottage in the first place. But Sir Gerald is no ally to Barner’s progressive plans. “Let a decent old woman keep her roses,” he says, “Why do you whirl her off to your jerry-built desolation of concrete roadways that you’ve designed, so far as I can see, to make it difficult for people to get about on foot? Why do you have to make her live under the glare of mercury vapor lamps and listen to other people’s wireless sets when she wants quiet? Sometimes I think a devil’s got inside you, Barner.” Ogham may have been a poor and unserious steward of Wentford House and its village, but he still possesses a glimmer of the noblesse oblige a central planner like Barner utterly lacks.

Despite this opposition, Barner is undeterred. He would never sacrifice his dreams of a progressive future in steel and concrete for the kind of humane concern this aristocrat displays for a tenant. And so Barner schemes to use eminent domain to finally force Mrs. Oliver into government housing, and justifies it to himself and others by claiming it is for her own welfare. But even a man like Barner can become impatient in the midst of bureaucracy’s slow grind. He resorts to bullying tactics, essentially trying to harass Mrs. Oliver out of her home. “Mr. Barner was a cheerless man,” the narrator reports, “and he frightened her.”

 Kirk deployed the eerie to help us understand just how thin the veil between the visible and invisible worlds is.

But Barner’s boorish tyranny is not the only frightful force in Low Wentford. When Mrs. Oliver is tending to the graves in the derelict churchyard one evening, a somewhat ominous stranger appears and announces that he is her vicar, Abner Hargreaves. As the story continues, Kirk slowly reveals that Hargreaves is the ghost of a Victorian priest who may have murdered an aggressive village atheist generations ago. Before committing suicide, Hargreaves left instructions that he should be buried in the north end of the churchyard “with other murderers and perjurers and suicides, that burn forever.” His shade is doomed to linger for his sins.

Mrs. Oliver, however, seems not to fully understand that Hargreaves is an emissary from the invisible world beyond the grave. Chilling as his presence is, she takes a certain comfort from it. His stern and passionate talk reminds her of an older breed of ministers who really believed in heaven and hell, not just earthly utopias. Mrs. Oliver eventually confides in Hargreaves about Barner’s harassment campaign and general wickedness—at which point Hargreaves abruptly leaves their tea to take action.

In a truly creepy vignette, Hargreaves supernaturally contacts Barner via telephone and summons him to All Saints to settle the matter of Mrs. Oliver’s cottage once and for all. Barner expects to meet a sentimentalist who simply cannot bear the sacrifices necessary for a brighter future. “Leave sociology to trained minds, Mr. Hargreaves,” he says, “I see you have not the faintest conception of the essentials of planning.” Barner possesses all the arrogance of expertise, but altogether lacks any sense of true charity. Like all central planners, he simply dismisses “the memories of childhood” and “the pieties that cling to our hearth, however desolated” as mere sentimental impediments to progress.

To Barner’s horror, though, there is nothing sentimental about Hargreaves’s fury. After preaching at him with the intensity of an Old Testament prophet, imploring repentance, Hargreaves determines that S. G. W. Barner will never yield. So, with a ghoulish smile, he takes him by the throat—and kills him.

Unlike the antagonist, Kirk’s tale ends happily enough for Mrs. Oliver. The council abandons Barner’s levelling scheme and indeed commits to restoring some of Low Wentford’s ruined buildings. Mrs. Oliver is free to tend her garden, bake her scones, and sweep the churchyard’s gravestones. Perhaps even Hargreaves—who no longer appears to Mrs. Oliver—achieved some measure of redemption by protecting her from the callousness of Barner’s progressive plans.

The moral lessons of “Ex Tenebris” are quite clear—it would almost be too didactic, were it not for Kirk’s skill at weaving a tale and the fantastical ghostly trappings he gave it. In the first place, the story illustrates the desiccated character of central planners like Barner. Drunk on government power and dreams of a progressive utopia, these tinkerers and schemers completely disregard actual human concerns as they seek to implement their rational innovations. Kirk’s contempt for this sorry human type is as obvious as it is righteous.

In other words, Kirk knew that progressive central planning’s assault on freedom was ultimately an assault on the human spirit itself. He did not believe that society was a machine to be engineered and run by master mechanics. Nor did he believe that society was some kind of organism destined for evolution. Rather, as he explained Edmund Burke’s views in The Conservative Mind, Kirk understood that society is “a spiritual unity, an eternal partnership, a corporation which is always perishing and yet always renewing.” Technocrats like Barner are too given to the mechanical or organic analogies for society, and fail utterly to see that governing by raw power is so much more destructive than the kind of natural and humane love that Mrs. Oliver represents.

The truth of the spiritual unity between the living and the dead is also at the heart of the second lesson of “Ex Tenebris,” namely, the supreme worth of a moral imagination rooted in the wisdom of our ancestors. Kirk certainly believed that hauntings and spirits were real, but he also used ghostly images to help readers understand his conservative philosophy. “As a pious act,” he opens his first book, “I summon up John Randolph from among the shades.” Like Hargreaves became a kind of spectral guardian for Mrs. Oliver, Kirk believed that great conservative minds such as Randolph or Burke could guard their inheritors against the evils of our times. As his friend and mentor T. S. Eliot put it, “the communication / Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.”

Just as this insight about inherited wisdom informs Kirk’s nonfiction, it also sets his gothic tales apart from many lesser entries in the genre. Kirk deployed the eerie to help us understand just how thin the veil between the visible and invisible worlds is. “These tales of malign spirits were written by a man of Christian virtue, possessed of faith, hope, and charity,” he wrote in one essay on a friend who also wrote ghost stories. “If, as I trust, they disconcert you—why, that will be a salutary dread, cheerfully imparted by one who knew that a holy fear is the beginning of wisdom, and that perfect love casts out fear.” Much the same can be said for Kirk’s fiction.

“Ex Tenebris” is only one of dozens of stories, most recently collected in a volume titled Ancestral Shadows. From the metaphysical mystery of “Saviourgate” to the shocking (yet redemptive) violence of “There’s A Long, Long Trail A-Winding,” these stories are so much more than supernatural thrillers—each is a profound illustration of the moral imagination, something we desperately need in our troubled times. And for that reason, there is perhaps no better way to celebrate Halloween than to take up and read Russell Kirk’s ghostly tales.

All three respondents to my article have offered thoughtful glosses that propel some of my propositions forward in useful and productive directions.

First, Richard Morrison adds an important dimension that I overlooked, namely, that regulation—and especially environmental regulation (which repeated studies have shown to be the most expensive kind of government regulation)—has imposed large deadweight losses that have significantly reduced net social welfare. Even if you are a true believer in Pigouvian economics, it ought to be comprehensible that when you are wasting money (i.e., failing a cost-benefit test), you are wasting resources. But for most environmental advocates, the only unlimited resource is other people’s money. To be sure, some left-leaning environmental scholars understand this at last, such as Cass Sunstein, for example, but note how much of the activist left hates him for it. We’ve paid a high price for this deep economic ignorance.

Morrison raises a salient question with a wonderful phrase I wish I had thought up: Kuznets Populism, in which the public’s revealed preference of rising opposition to aggressive environmentalism should be understood as part of the general “populist” disgust, both here and abroad, with incompetent managerial government. As Morrison rightly points out, environmentalism was one of the earliest examples of the slow divergence of elite opinion of the “professional managerial class” (PMC) from popular opinion that has overtaken many domains of public policy. Early environmental policy landmarks delivered genuine environmental gains, albeit often at high costs and with little regard for bureaucratic bloat.

We have long exceeded the point of diminishing returns for many legacy regulatory regimes, but are still inventing new programs without the underlying cause that can justify them. My favorite current example is the bike lanes that have gobbled up street parking and traffic lanes in American cities from coast to coast (even in Texas). As an avid cyclist in my younger days, I appreciate bike lanes, but was the explosion of bike lanes in the last decade because of a groundswell of popular demand for them—or yet another utopian affectation of the PMC? (Guess who provides the leading cost-benefit template for bike lanes: The World Bank.) They seem like a perfect example of what Morrison rightly describes as a policy in which “people have no direct influence on how such policy is made.” Surface street bike lanes are a nice amenity for DoorDash delivery riders and the ghost of Murray Kempton, but they likely have net negative externalities. (The studies offered in their defense are quite shoddy.)

While there are positive developments in American law regarding bureaucratic government underway just now, the PMC is unlikely to yield its entrenched power and privilege easily. And Morrison is right to worry about the possibility of a statist populism making the kind of symmetrical mistakes that fueled their indignation in the first place. Eco-protectionism is already occurring, to name one way the PMC might successfully sabotage sensible reforms.

Allowing the environment to become a near-monopoly of the left hasn’t quite been suicidal for conservatism, but it has been bad for … the environment.

Ironically, the best prospects for sensible environmental stewardship in the next generation might be in developing nations that decide to ride the “Kuznets Wave,” and figure out how to find the equilibrium point that maximizes human well-being and environmental health. Among other things, developing nations may avoid the political fixation with “equity” and “environmental justice” that have come to distort American environmental policy further, and stick to issues where genuine scientific expertise is needed.

Allan Carlson’s reflections leave me scratching my head a little bit. He aligns on the right side of the old saying, “Think globally, act locally”—a shorthand disposition whose origin is unclear. Most of the time, when you saw this bumper strip on a Volvo or on protest rally signs, it meant the opposite—think locally, but freak out about the planet and demand eco-revolution! Or at best, a virtue-signal. A consciously place-based environmentalism, as Roger Scruton explained most persuasively in his excellent 2012 book How To Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism, marries local knowledge with responsibility, and will depoliticize many environmental problems.

Carlson is right to raise the question about whether land privatization will further favor the billionaire class, though I think this is a question of proportion. There aren’t that many billionaires who can buy up a significant area of public land in the aggregate. Local concentration is a different matter, such as in Montana and Wyoming, as Carlson mentions. To be sure, Ted Turner angered local cattle ranchers when he acquired his 116,000 acres outside Bozeman 30 years ago, depressing cattle prices by dumping the entire existing herd on the market all at once to make room for his buffalo ranching project. His buffalo restaurant plan hasn’t gone especially well, but his ranch restoration is a determined effort to restore the land to its native, pre-Columbian condition, with reintroduction of native plants and species and removal of non-native species. This project employs dozens of wildlife biologists and botanists, expending considerable resources toward this goal. I’d rather have billionaires doing this than meddling with America’s K-12 education system, and I think most of the billionaire mega-land barons intend to follow good land conservation practices. (I do know of some egregious exceptions.)

Moreover, while good statistics are hard to come by, I think private land trusts like the Nature Conservancy hold more private land than the billionaires. Not all of their practices are sound; the Nature Conservancy in particular often transfers private land it acquires back to the federal or state government, and there have been credible allegations of corrupt dealings over the years, such as acquisitions of open space conveniently adjacent to the vacation homes of … billionaires! But their stewardship of the TNC-owned 62,000-acre Santa Cruz island off the California coast is a solid example of ecosystem restoration that is likely beyond the capacity of the state or the federal government to achieve.

But from this salutary focus on what he calls “smallholders” of “the middling sort,” Carlson defaults back to the global focal point that is wrecking environmentalism: climate change. He chides me for not identifying anyone I describe as “climate fanatics” or “climate hysterics,” making me wonder whether Carlson has stopped taking in the news from the mainstream media (which I can’t decide is grounds for criticism or praise). Has he missed the climate activists who throw tomato soup at priceless artworks, glue themselves to roadways, and attempt to block airports? “Fanatics” might be a mild term to describe them, but I lack the knowledge of a clinical psychologist necessary to offer a worse one, unless it is “cult.” As for the mainstream media and much of the academic establishment, I could fill a file cabinet with receipts of figures appearing routinely in the prestige press like Bill McKibben, Tim Flannery, Elizabeth Kolbert, Naomi Klein, etc., whose climate claims depart from the scientific conclusions of the IPCC by several standard deviations. Just to cite one favorite example: Naomi Oreskes, a tenured Harvard professor, called James Hansen a “climate denier” because of his support for nuclear power. James Hansen! (And the ubiquitous use of “climate denier” ought to be a sign that something is seriously wrong with climate advocacy.) It takes some kind of fanaticism to say something that insane. The politicians are worse. Governor Gavin Newsom likes to blame every wildfire in California on climate change, even though every professional forester in California, not to mention several peer-reviewed studies in the mainstream scientific literature, conclude this is unfounded. I’ll retreat to “demagogue” if “fanatic” is too strong for Carlson.

Carlson says “recent research in and on science may help clarify matters here,” and indeed it does. But I’m doubtful he’s read it since he brings up the by-now 15-year-old controversy on what Exxon knew and when it knew it. To be sure, even the mainstream media is failing to report that the latest IPCC report has significantly dialed back its long-range warming forecast, though it did so in an indirect way to obscure this fact. (It’s the RCP 8.5 scenario dispute for the wonks reading along.) One person who seems to have actually noticed this is John Kerry. In 2021, Kerry’s standard climate change stump speech claimed, “Currently, as we’re talking today, we are regrettably on course to hit somewhere between 3, 4 degrees at the current rate.” But by 2023 Kerry’s numbers changed: “We’re currently heading towards something like 2.4 degrees, 2.5 degrees of warming on the planet.” Give Kerry some credit for “following the science,” as we are so often urged to do.

Carlson’s argument approaches a variation of the non-sequitur at the heart of climate change discourse for a generation: because climate ruin is ahead, current renewable energy must be affordable and practical! He doesn’t quite go this far, but misses the point or fails to respond to my main argument, which is that regardless of what anyone thinks future climate risk is, our current climate policies are unserious and ineffective. I agree with Carlson that doing nothing is not acceptable, but in fact, decarbonization proceeds apace, except without a splashy White House lawn signing ceremony that provides the only frisson environmentalists ever enjoy. (Fun fact: the 2009 Waxman-Markey climate change bill set 2020 emission reduction targets that the US accomplished several years early, even though the bill never passed, and the Obama backup “Clean Power Plan” never went into effect.) Meanwhile, Science magazine in August published a study of 1,500 climate policies implemented between 1998 and 2022 across 41 countries. It concluded that only 63 had a significant effect on emission reductions.

Jonathan Adler’s contribution makes some of my arguments better than I do, which is no surprise, since I have two rules about anything Adler writes in this domain: 1) Never disagree or argue with Adler; 2) If you disagree with Adler, see Rule Number 1. There is one aspect of his reflections I want to amplify—the political malpractice of most conservatives and Republicans on environmental policy. He does not put it quite that bluntly, but I will. Back in 1970, National Review editorialized that “it would be political suicide to concede [the environment] to the Left.” Allowing the environment to become a near-monopoly of the left hasn’t quite been suicidal for conservatism, but it has been bad for … the environment.

The environment for Republicans is like national defense for Democrats—an issue they don’t like, study, or make a policy priority.

Here, the nub of the problem is a non-sequitur unique to conservatives. It has become the default position to reason that because we dislike costly and centralized bureaucracy, environmental problems must therefore be phony, or even a “hoax.” To be sure, many environmental problems have been overestimated or deliberately exaggerated, from acid rain, deforestation, soil erosion, resource depletion, bee colony collapse, various toxic threats, the population bomb, etc., but that does not mean they are phony or insignificant. And the environmental policy record of most Republican Administrations is quite good, only Republicans seem not to know this or how to talk about it (or usually both). The environment for Republicans is like national defense for Democrats—an issue they don’t like, study, or make a policy priority.

I have a small dog in this fight. Back in 2015, I wrote a long memo on energy and environmental issues for the “Reform Conservatives” movement. Remember them? We could be—and were—accused of being “big government conservatives,” but at least we didn’t advocate for trade tariffs or government ownership stakes in industry. My memo included these suggestions, beginning with an inauspicious paraphrase of Jimmy Carter:

Conservatives need to get over their inordinate dislike of environmental issues. … There is one good reason for conservatives to engage environmental issues more seriously: The environment is much too important to be left to environmentalists. They just make a mess of things and have a stale playbook: more bureaucracy, political control over people and resources, and lawsuits. A sensible environmentalism is a naturally conservative issue. … To the extent that conservatives devote considerable attention to the necessity and the means of conserving “social ecosystems,” we should be equally up to the task of offering creative ideas for conserving physical ecosystems. …

Conservative office holders need to shed defensiveness about the environment and adopt exactly the reverse attitude with assertive confidence: we can do a better job of environmental protection than liberals and centralized bureaucrats. 

The Reformicon movement was shortly swept away into the dustbin by someone unexpected, and hasn’t been heard from since.

But then I picked up the 2016 Republican Platform a year later, and came across this:

Conservation is inherent in conservatism. As the pioneer of environmentalism a century ago, the Republican Party reaffirms the moral obligation to be good stewards of the God-given natural beauty and resources of our country.

The environment is too important to be left to radical environmentalists. They are using yesterday’s tools to control a future they do not comprehend. The environmental establishment has become a self-serving elite, stuck in the mindset of the 1970s, subordinating the public’s consensus to the goals of the Democratic Party. Their approach is based on shoddy science, scare tactics, and centralized command-and-control regulation.

Seems like someone was paying attention after all. Alas, there was no GOP platform in 2020, and the stripped-down 2024 platform makes no mention of the environment at all. There are a couple of small but serious efforts within Congress to revive the older, less-ideological approach in search of newer and better ideas, but I agree with Adler: There needs to be a lot more.

Deep in the dark corners of any artist’s being, there is both myth and reality. The two are intertwined, creating new and different meanings. He himself has the potential to embrace either one or both at the same time, but after death comes for the artist, it is often the myth and the legend that remain alive, while the reality is forgotten and displaced. 

Truth is often stranger and more horrific than fiction. The life of Edgar Allan Poe is one of those instances. Poe—the American writer who has left such an indelible mark and impact on American literature and culture; Poe—a child forgotten and abandoned; Poe—the master of horror stories; Poe—the sensitive, melancholic, and tormented alcoholic; Poe—the man who desired order rather than horror and chaos; and Poe—the man who appreciated humor. 

There are many sides to Edgar Allan Poe that, unsurprisingly, go beyond the famous daguerreotype photograph of a mustached man, with penetrating eyes and ruffled dark hair. Along with the raven (based on one of his most famous poems, The Raven), that image of Poe is what everyone sees today. Poe is on coffee mugs, magnets, socks, notebooks. He remains popular with both people and scholars.

Beginning with silent cinema, every decade in cinematic history has seen the making of film adaptations of his stories, be it Universal Studios’ films with Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, Roger Corman’s Poe cycles, or, even more recently, Netflix’s The Fall of the House of Usher. Poe has captivated us in both his life and death. We cannot look away from his stories of terror because in them we see ourselves, our desires, our frailties. But who is Poe? Has he ever revealed himself? That dark image of Poe is only one small part of the man who gave us the tales of darkness.

A Bostonian in Virginia

Poe’s life is a mystery unto itself. In an autobiographical note, he stated that he was born in 1811, but this turns out to be untrue. In fact, Poe was born on January 19, 1809, in Boston. His parents, David Poe Jr. and Elizabeth (Eliza) Arnold Hopkins Poe, were both actors. Edgar was the second child, having an older brother, Henry, and a younger sister, Rosalie. 

Tragedy seems to have followed young Edgar right from the beginning. Although both of his parents were very much active in the theater, it was Eliza, a beloved actress with a beautiful voice, who was admired and widely sought. David usually received bad reviews, often described as wooden and talentless. He abandoned his wife and three children in 1810 for reasons not exactly known. Young Edgar thus had no fatherly presence in his life, and was cared for by a carousel of people while his mother supported the family with her acting career. Not all of his caretakers were admirable; an elderly nurse, for instance, had a peculiar and nasty habit of plying the Poe children with gin and laudanum, just to ease her “pain” of taking care of them.

Poe was generally justified in his criticism, as becomes clear we look back on his book reviews. The writers he found to be mediocre have not stood the test of time. 

Although David Poe Jr. did not die in Edgar’s presence, his abandonment was still a death of sorts. Tragedy struck again when Eliza became sick with tuberculosis, dying on December 8, 1811, at age 24. It is assumed that Poe’s father died three days after Eliza in Norfolk, Virginia, so the children were truly orphaned. Eliza’s death and his father’s abandonment were a sadness that followed Poe all his life. Years later, in a letter to a friend, he would write: “In speaking of my mother you have touched a string to which my heart fully responds. To have known her is to be an object of great interest in my eyes. … I have many occasional dealings with Adversity—but the want of parental affection has been the heaviest of my trials.”

About a week before Eliza died, Richmond’s Enquirer printed an announcement: “To the Humane Heart.” 

On this night, Mrs. Poe, lingering on the bed of disease and surrounded by her children, asks your assistance and asks it perhaps for the last time. The Generosity of a Richmond Audience can need no other appeal.

The Poe children were separated and adopted into various families. For Edgar, that “Generosity” came from Frances “Fanny” Allan, who often helped Eliza while she was alive. Edgar was taken in by Fanny and her husband, John. (Edgar’s middle name comes from the Allan family.) Right from the beginning, Fanny gave Edgar plenty of affection, and somehow understood the boy’s inherent sensitivities. John, on the other hand, did not share her love for Edgar. In fact, he never officially adopted Edgar, and never considered him, even symbolically, a son. Years later, when John died, he provided for all of his children in his last will and testament, including the illegitimate ones. But he didn’t leave a penny for Edgar. Poe, on his side, remained salty with his foster father. In his adult letters to John, he would constantly ask for money while throwing in the occasional insult. 

Whatever difficulties they had later in life, it is undeniable that Fanny’s early death and John’s rejection of Edgar as an adopted son had another depressing impact on Poe. Feelings of abandonment and the fear of being alone would prove to be Poe’s constant companions. Paradoxically, however, it is these fears that illuminated Poe’s essence as a man and as a writer. If he had become a “Gentleman of the Letters,” or “Lord Byron” (as he aspired to), and if he had all of the financial means he desired, perhaps he wouldn’t have written the horror stories for which he was known then and now.

“The Tomahawk Man”

Poe made his strongest mark on the American and European imagination, during his lifetime and beyond, with tales of horror. But that was not the only thing that occupied his mind. In fact, for most of his life, he worked as a magazine editor and critic, and unlike other writers of his time, he made a living solely from writing.

Because of that, he often oscillated between prosperity and destitution. But he never sacrificed the quality of his work. He demanded excellence from himself and others, and was a merciless and unapologetic critic of other writers. This earned him a nickname, “The Tomahawk Man.” Poe was generally justified in his criticism; however, as becomes clear when we look back on his book reviews, the writers he found to be mediocre have not stood the test of time. 

The question of how he went missing and then ended up in a tavern in Baltimore, semiconscious, wearing what appeared to be someone else’s clothes, only to die a few days later in a hospital, has spawned many different theories. 

At the time, a practice of “puffing” was common in the magazine and book industry. Reviewers were either paid or promised mutually positive reviews (“puffing” up the writer regardless of his talent), and Poe hated this with great passion. Sometimes, his intellectual integrity and passion for truth made him enemies, but he couldn’t care less. As Mark Dawidziak points out in his book, A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe, “Poe was taking his stand as a critic, demanding that American literature be nurtured and encouraged by being held to the highest possible standards.” He wanted to go beyond British literature and show the world that American literature is unique and has a rightful place in the literary tradition.

It is not entirely known what Poe’s political leanings were, but one thing we know is that he abhorred mixing political opinions with art. When American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow added an anti-slavery commentary to his work, Poe spoke out very firmly and aggressively against this choice of expression. This stance speaks to those of us who see that art has intrinsic value, as does beauty, and we should not bend it in any way to affirm certain political or ideological positions.

Masks of Madness and Horror

Edgar Allan Poe ushered in many different literary genres. Without C. Auguste Dupin (a detective in many of Poe’s stories), there would be no Sherlock Holmes. Without fantastical voyages and theories about the universe, there would be no Jules Verne. Both Arthur Conan Doyle and Jules Verne gave Poe credit for this. 

He wrote many genres, partly because he needed money. Still, it was clear that he had a particular attraction to horror stories, the thing he is most known for, most greatly appreciated by regular readers, scholars, critics, and aspiring writers. What Poe brought into the horror genre is the complex relationship between natural and supernatural. It is the psychology of the human mind and its obsessions and madness that we find fascinating. We are forced to look in the mirror and reckon with the “mad man” within. 

In Poe’s short story, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” we are faced with an unreliable narrator who is trying to convince us that he is not mad while describing a murder he committed. “True!—nervous—very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease has sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily—how calmly I can tell you the whole story.”

Poe draws us in immediately, yet should we listen to the words of someone so irrational, so unstable? But we can’t look away. This isn’t a story about getting mired in specific events but about the complexity of the human mind and the salvation of the soul. 

In “The Masque of the Red Death,” Poe shows us the inevitability of death. It entails Prince Prospero, who invites equally wealthy guests to his castle to avoid the “Red Death” (Poe is most likely referring to the cholera or tuberculosis epidemic). In an effort to pass the time, he hosts a masquerade ball, but there appears to be one guest who was not invited, masked as “The Red Death.” The prince cannot avoid the figure, however hard he tries, and he dies when confronted. His guests also die. The Grim Reaper will come, and we cannot play games. We are mortal. 

The Mysterious Death

Any biographer will run into difficulties with the veracity of his or her subject’s life. Some things remain shrouded in mystery simply because we cannot know any person fully. Poe’s death is even more mysterious than his life. The question of how he went missing and then ended up in a tavern in Baltimore, semiconscious, wearing what appeared to be someone else’s clothes, only to die a few days later in a hospital, has spawned many different theories. 

Following Poe’s death, the obituary written by his literary rival, Rufus Griswold, created an image of Poe as a scoundrel, an alcoholic, a mad and perverse man, much like his characters in stories. But this was never the case. Even Poe’s drinking habit was a problem only sporadically, though his on-again-off-again struggles with alcoholism did surely lead to more depression, anxiety, and a sense of deep personal failure. The obituary somewhat ruined Poe’s reputation, but many of his friends came forward and vociferously spoke out against the lies Griswold wrote. 

Edgar Allan Poe—the man beyond the mysterious darkness we know him for—left an indelible mark on American literature. He was and is sui generis. It is thanks to his stories that we know that the macabre is closer to our souls than we think, and that the line between the natural and supernatural, rationality and madness, sacred and profane is often perilously thin, yet deeply human. 

The relief of suffering is a noble enterprise, but in contemporary Britain, the creation of a new bureaucracy is even nobler, or at any rate easier. 

The next bureaucracy to be created is the office of a personage who will be called the Voluntary Assisted Dying Commissioner, himself to be a former High Court judge or person of equivalent rank (and salary). Naturally, he will need a staff, and his staff will need a staff: there is no point in being a chief without Indians. 

This new position is required by the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) bill that will soon pass into law. This bill is perfectly drafted to create more employment than it will relieve suffering. Although the ostensible purpose of the bill is to assist terminally ill people who wish to end their own lives, it will, in reality, be either dangerous, because its provisions and safeguards are so cumbersome that they will be ignored, or ineffectual, because the same measures are so lengthy to comply with that few people will benefit from the passage of the law. Most people will die before the forms can be properly filled in.

The bill states that persons over the age of 18 who are reasonably expected to die in the next six months from physical illness (the bill makes no mention of suffering) may apply for assisted suicide. Two doctors, independently of each other, must assess patients to assure themselves that they have a settled desire (undefined in the bill) to die, that they understand the alternatives, and that they have not been coerced in any way. 

Clearly, whether a patient has a “settled” rather than an impulsive or short-lived wish to die is not the work of an afternoon or a single short interview. Investigation of whether a patient is under undue influence of any kind, if taken seriously, is likewise not the work of an afternoon, and indeed can be quite lengthy. 

Under present conditions, obtaining an appointment with a doctor can also be more than the work of an afternoon. Moreover, it is now quite rare for any doctor to have the kind of intimate knowledge of his patients that will allow him to make quick judgments as to the requirements laid down in the bill. Doctors in England are now like the river in Heraclitus’s famous dictum: it is difficult to consult the same one twice. The framers of the bill seem to have been under the impression that general or family practice is carried out as it was sixty years ago, when a family doctor might have been presumed to know not only his patient, but his patient’s family and other circumstances. To find a doctor with such implicit knowledge would now be difficult, and to find two impossible. 

Moreover, even if they could be found, their knowledge would not, according to the provisions of the bill, by itself be sufficient. Only those doctors with certificated training in the assessment of mental capacity to request assisted suicide, and similarly certificated training in the recognition of physical, psychological, and financial abuse, would be permitted to sign forms attesting a person’s eligibility for assisted suicide under the law. 

While no doctor is obliged under it directly to take part in assisted suicide, he is obliged to point a patient who requests it in the direction of someone who will: to become Pontius Pilate.

But what is this certificated training, and who provides it? Here is an opportunity for entrepreneurs of a new bureaucracy to set up training schemes. Who is to pay for them? The doctors themselves, in which case, will they want remuneration for signing assisted suicide certificates? That, surely, would be very sinister. The government, via taxpayers?

The patient must make two declarations of desire for assisted suicide. The bill does not state how far apart in time they must be, but after the first, there is to be a cooling-off period of seven days, and after the second, such a period of fourteen days, as if assisted suicide were a hire purchase agreement. 

Once the two doctors have signed the certificates, they must pass them on to the office of the Voluntary Assisted Dying Commissioner, or his deputies, who must ensure not only that they have been filled correctly, but that the information they contain, such as that the patient requesting assisted suicide has not been coerced in any way, is veridical: in other words, the Commissioner must carry out the same investigations as the doctors. 

That is not the only duty of the Commissioner: he must report annually on the working of the bill. Even with artificial intelligence, the report will require human labour, probably that of a dedicated department. 

Some of the provisions of the bill are sinister. While no doctor is obliged under it directly to take part in assisted suicide, he is obliged to point a patient who requests it in the direction of someone who will: to become Pontius Pilate. Moreover, doctors are specifically permitted under the bill to mention it to patients who have not thought of it themselves: “Have you ever thought of shuffling off this mortal coil, Mr. Smith? We can help you.”

The bill also makes provision for so-called “advocates” for people, such as those of low IQ, who can explain the whole bureaucratic procedure to them, which they might otherwise not be able to understand. Such advocates will be paid (but of course will need professional training). 

Naturally, there will be pressure to extend the provisions of the bill. Why limit the relief of suffering to the last six months of life? If it is suffering that you wish to relieve, it would be far more logical and efficient to intervene earlier, perhaps even years earlier. 

As it presently stands, and as it most likely will pass, the bill will aid few to die, at least if its provisions are taken seriously. Ex hypothesi, the patients have only six months to live; three weeks of that will be taken up by cooling-off periods; obtaining the certificates from doctors will take several weeks (unless, as is possible, a paramedical sub-specialty of euthanasiasts is created). 

On the other hand, the bill will have created a bureaucracy, however many or few the beneficiaries, and bureaucracies rarely disappear for lack of work to do. Indeed, they are more likely to tout for business than disappear of their own accord, just in case anyone should question their right to exist. 

The purpose of a bloated state is to create work for itself, not to relieve suffering.

Courts are now being asked to decide how we should govern artificial intelligence. In Florida, a judge recently let a tort suit proceed under strict liability after a mother alleged that a chatbot built by Character AI encouraged her fourteen-year-old son to take his life. The sorrow is undeniable. The legal stakes are broad because strict liability holds a party liable for harm caused by a defective product or an abnormally dangerous activity, regardless of fault—that is, without requiring proof of negligence or intent.

If this decision is affirmed and becomes the first in a wave of strict liability claims against AI developers, it could reshape our emerging AI ecosystem, heavily favoring the seen harms and against the unseen benefits of artificial intelligence. First, it underscores the caution with which courts should approach emerging issues in AI because of their ramifications for the development of AI, an essential public good, including for our national security. Second, it highlights a foundational defect in the modern expansion of tort law: the tendency to focus on the visible victim while ignoring the silent mass of beneficiaries.

No one understood the mistaken impulse behind strict liability better than one of the greatest friends of liberty France has ever produced—the economist Frédéric Bastiat. He famously argued that it was necessary to distinguish between the seen and the unseen to achieve sound public policy. The broken window may generate work for the glazier, he observed, but it destroys the wealth the shopkeeper might otherwise have used elsewhere. Likewise, a chatbot’s harmful output is seen, while many potential benefits will go unseen. These could include easing the burden of everyday tasks, providing life-improving services, and—insofar as they often refer users to prevention resources—perhaps even averted suicides. For instance, studies of old age homes have shown that such interaction with chatbots reduced loneliness and caused more engagement with other residents. To ignore these benefits when assessing legal liability is both economically myopic and morally obtuse.

Strict liability for AI might appear attractive because it promises compensation for visible harm. But in practice, it reflects an epistemological arrogance—a presumption that courts can know all they must to weigh the full consequences of imposing faultless responsibility. As a result of this presumption, strict liability could make society worse off by discouraging the deployment of AI systems that are, on net, vastly beneficial due to their behind-the-scenes impact in specific cases.

This chatbot is designed not to give advice but to emulate human conversation—a kind of artificial companion. In a few cases, such as this one, the chatbot may have provided damaging content. But how many struggling users have found solace, distraction, or even life-saving comfort from interacting with such systems? We do not know. And we are unlikely ever to know. Courts deal in the seen, factual narratives. They cannot reliably quantify the unseen benefits—including the number of suicides that may have been prevented by interaction with the technology.

Moreover, the risk of strict liability will deter others from making useful AI products. If even after taking reasonable care, one can still be held liable for one’s product, there is less reason to innovate in product design. The unseen victims become those who would have benefited from innovations that never launch or arrive years late: patients denied therapies, commuters without safer transport, consumers missing cheaper energy, all of which will come from an AI start-up. Sound policy must price residual risk without suppressing experimentation. The fault standard does a better job of this because it holds a company liable only if they could have reasonably made the product safer.

Proponents of strict liability argue that such risks can be managed: perhaps AI companies can defend themselves by showing that their systems generate net benefits. But this analysis would turn liability into a kind of calculus that courts are ill-suited to perform. Can a judge or jury meaningfully weigh the emotional toll of a single visible suicide against the diffuse, statistical uplift experienced by millions of unseen users? In a courtroom, what is concrete will almost always dominate what is abstract.

To put this more formally, proceeding case by case and bound by rules of evidence, judges and juries face a serious knowledge problem. The information needed to measure those gains is dispersed across time and users. It is thus better revealed by iterative engineering, markets, or agencies capable of sustained cost–benefit analysis than by a single verdict. Comparative institutional competence counsels epistemic humility. Courts should punish proven negligence, but resist strict‑liability schemes that require them to feign omniscience about the unseen and, in doing so, throttle the decentralized discovery process that makes society safer and more prosperous.

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) raise the same issue. By one serious estimate, self-driving cars are already safer within their scope of operation. Human drivers are typically held to a negligence standard. Why should their successors face a more punitive rule?

Strict liability places a regulatory moat protecting the concentration of AI in a few, big tech actors who can self-insure.

One answer from liability proponents is that AI products are opaque and unpredictable—black boxes whose decisions we cannot fully understand or control. This might make it difficult for plaintiffs to prove negligence, so strict liability becomes necessary to ensure compensation. But this seems an exaggeration. If there is something that AV programming could do systematically, better software architects should be able to suggest it in expert testimony. If we want more safety on the roads, we should not deter innovation that self-driving vehicles represent. Moreover, AV vehicles not only deliver safety but also improve the quality of life for many, as those who once drove can work and play instead.

There is another reason not to impose strict liability on AI systems now. AI should be understood as a kind of public good—even the essential public good of modern times. The premise of President Trump’s recent executive order on AI is that the government should facilitate the development of AI for the long-term flourishing of its citizens. First, the nation that wins the AI race will have an enormous national security advantage. The strongest competitor in this race, moreover, is Communist China, a totalitarian regime that is now our chief ideological and geopolitical rival. Second, AI, being a general-purpose technology, will accelerate research for other public goods. Better AI will likely lead to a wide range of scientific breakthroughs. For instance, it will help address the problems of climate change both by accelerating new forms of clean energy and by making more efficient use of energy.

Progress in AI is incentivized by the profitable innovations it generates. Since strict liability will impose costs on those innovations, it will depress the production of this essential public good. Judges should also hesitate before imposing such costs, particularly when a democratically elected president has declared AI a national priority. In short, America’s geopolitical competitors are not holding back their AI deployments for fear of liability exposure. We should not hobble our own nation by overextending tort.

And consider that we already limit tort liability in domains essential to other public goods. For instance, the First Amendment protects much harmful speech, even if it is false and offensive, because the law recognizes that the broader good of free expression outweighs its dangers. In fact, we impose not strict liability but the most forgiving standards, even more lenient than negligence, for public figures. Unless driven by malice, even lies create no liability. The public good of intense democratic debate influences the restrained nature of the liability for libel under these circumstances.

Strict liability invites a troubling overreach in legal design. If we are to internalize all risks of AI, even those not due to fault, what principle will contain the scope of liability? Any AI system embedded in public services, education, or consumer products may generate unintended harm. The more AI is used, the more likely some incident will occur. Yet if the net effect is to reduce harm overall, strict liability becomes an engine of risk-aversion.

It will also have a particularly deleterious effect on startups, where much AI innovation comes. They cannot self-insure against the risks that strict liability imposes. Strict liability places a regulatory moat protecting the concentration of AI in a few, big tech actors who can self-insure. That kind of legal regime is not in the interest of either innovation or lower prices for consumers.

The better path is to apply fault-based standards. Thus, developers should be held accountable for genuine negligence. If a chatbot was deployed with known flaws, if guardrails were ignored or disabled, then fault-based liability is entirely appropriate. But we must not blur the line between failing to prevent harm and being responsible for it by default.

And when AI systems serve public functions with uncertain risks and dispersed benefits, we might consider alternative compensation schemes—modeled on vaccine injury funds or no-fault insurance. These instruments separate the question of fault from the goal of victim compensation, without chilling technological progress.

Law cannot heal grief, but it can refuse to let grief write the rules. The loss at the heart of this case is tragic, but strict liability would turn anguish into a tax on technologies whose benefits are yet largely unseen. Judges should punish negligence, not faultless innovation. New rules governing AI should reflect epistemic humility about the judicial capacity to evaluate its benefits, particularly when those benefits include advancing a national public good.

To say that we live in strange economic times in America is perhaps the understatement of the decade. Whether it is proposals to establish price-floors for certain goods, the Federal Government acquiring shares in specific companies, major US corporations being told by the same Federal government to keep open factories identified as surplus-to-needs, or on-again off-again changes in tariff policy, I find myself wondering what will be the next move that, only a decade ago, many people across the political spectrum would have described as, at best, economically dubious.

By “strange times,” however, I do not mean that advocacy of interventionist policies is suddenly de rigueur in American politics. For, even during the supposed dominance of market liberalism from the 1980s until roughly 2008, interventionist ideas and policies were never comprehensively vanquished. The rhetorical embrace of free markets during Republican and Democratic presidential administrations did nothing to stop the relentless expansion of the Code of Federal Regulations throughout those three decades. Nor was there ever a shortage of Democrats and Republicans who supported various expressions of industrial policy in this period.

Rather, the oddness that I have in mind is less about today’s bipartisan turn to dirigiste policies than the attitudes underlying this shift. It is one thing to be an interventionist because you strongly believe in neo-Keynesian macroeconomics. It’s quite another to support interventions because you effectively reject economics as an established social science in favor of what the British economist and civil servant, the late David Henderson (1927–2018), described in his 1985 Reith Lectures as “Do-It-Yourself Economics” (DIYE). Later published as Innocence and Design: The Influence of Economic Ideas on Policy, Henderson’s reflections on DIYE from forty years ago provide us with invaluable insights concerning the chaotic conduct of economic policy in the present.

Wrong on Everything?

This widespread repudiation of economics—and, by extension, economists—was on full display in a recent Financial Times interview with former US Trade Representative, Robert Lighthizer. Lighthizer has long been a critic of what he denotes as “the theology of free trade.” But when asked in the interview about the relationship between tariff increases and the type of price-rises that disproportionately affect poorer Americans, Lighthizer’s response far exceeded his usual spirited denunciation of free trade. Economists and their “studies,” he exclaimed, “are all malarky! … It’s like they’re the College of Cardinals, you know, interpreting the virgin birth? Economists have been wrong on everything!”

Wrong on everything—that’s quite a statement. And like such all-encompassing claims, it immediately runs into problems. There is plenty of evidence to prove that economists have in fact been right, for example, to state that trade liberalization generally bolsters economic growth, or that protectionism facilitates cronyism.

But the deeper significance of Lighthizer’s comments goes beyond these specifics. His off-hand remarks are indicative of the mindset presently driving US economic policy—one which parallels David Henderson’s description of DIYE.

In his Reith Lectures, Henderson detailed how he first encountered DIYE as a young economist working in HM Treasury in the late 1950s. In later life, Henderson became a convinced market liberal, but at the time, Henderson notes, he and his Treasury colleagues were Keynesians to a man. It wasn’t, therefore, any a priori commitment to free market economics that alerted Henderson to the major differences between the outlook of professional economists and what he calls the “economic ideas” (which he labels as “innocence”) he regularly encountered in other government departments. A broadly educated man, Henderson perfectly understood that civil servants in the Foreign Office or ministries like Defense or Education had to think about questions that went far beyond the economic calculus. Still, he was shocked at how much “innocence” masquerading as “economic ideas” abounded in Whitehall.

By “economic ideas,” Henderson meant thoughts that “have a strong intuitive appeal, so strong that it may not even cross the minds of those who hold them that any alternative could exist.” The difficulty with such ideas, he stated, is that they are generally “not supported by any reference to published work, or to the results … of professional economic inquiry.” According to Henderson, this absence of any interest in economic theory and its supporting empirical apparatus (what he calls “design”) as well as “the informality and lack of system which go with it” was characteristic of “the collection of beliefs and perceptions” that constitutes DIYE.

Soap Opera Economics

DIYE’s problems, however, involve more than simply an absence of intellectual rigor. As a young Treasury official, Henderson recalls, he found that whenever he and his Treasury colleagues raised points at interdepartmental meetings that reflected some basic economic principles and mountains of supporting evidence, DIYE invariably reared its head. In part, Henderson believed, DIYE functioned to deflect economic critiques of the pet schemes of ministers and civil servants as well as the agendas of different interest groups whose rent-seeking priorities often dominated government departments like manufacturing or agriculture.

Henderson, however, also identified three “dispositions” underpinning DIYE, all of which should be familiar to us today. He gave these inclinations the nomenclature of “soap operatics” because they resembled, in his words, “the script of a soap opera both in its crude assumptions and in its failure to reflect the complexities of real life.”

In what way is America less American because millions more people work today in the services sector than in manufacturing?

The first disposition listed by Henderson is the fallacy of “manifest economic destiny”: the idea that France, for example, simply must have a large agricultural sector if it is to be truly France, or that the United States is somehow diminished as a nation if the number of people working in the manufacturing sector shrinks.

Today, it is not hard to find senior US government officials speaking this way about manufacturing in America. But in what way is America less American because millions more people work today in the services sector than in manufacturing? Or, to take another angle: what is un-American about the fact that people generally gravitate towards the services sector because of the higher wages typically paid in service industries compared to manufacturing?

The manifest economic destiny motif is closely related to another disposition, which Henderson designates as “structural snobbery”: the notion that some economic “activities are to be desired and favored for what they are, and others which, if not positively undesirable, can be seen to be lacking in dynamism or otherwise less worthy of esteem.”

One example would be the insistence that the autoworker who labors every week in a factory in Ohio is doing something inherently more valuable than the financial analyst who spends her day before a computer screen at a trading desk in Manhattan. But two questions immediately arise. First, who makes these types of determinations? Second, on what basis do they make such judgments?

Henderson noted in his lectures that “it is simply taken for granted that well-informed observers” (political leaders, activists, union officials, etc.) can easily make these assessments. But, he added, by what criteria can they do so? What precisely makes physical labor inherently better than desk work? Or vice versa? Trying to answer such questions involves any number of highly subjective valuations that make definitive responses elusive.

The third soap operatic characterizing DIYE is described by Henderson as “essentialism.” This concerns the belief that “the outputs and activities of an economic system can be usefully divided into two broad categories, essential and inessential, the distinction between which must be apparent to any experienced person.” If something is considered essential, it is deemed worthy of tariff protection, subsidies, export-controls, and various forms of industrial policy.

In populist times, however, the choice to bear witness to unpopular truths is often the difference between chaos and civilization.

But how does one identify what constitutes essential? Essential can be a very elastic term, and privilege-seeking business leaders and their political enablers are very proficient at producing rationales for why their product is somehow essential for the United States’ very survival. And even if a specific good is identified as truly essential, that by no means automatically implies that it must be supplied entirely by domestic producers, no matter what the costs and trade-offs. It may, for example, be more efficient to source any number of food products from abroad from countries that are close allies or geographically proximate to the United States, especially in peacetime.

Henderson does not deny that certain goods may well become more critical during crises than others. He even maintains “that it may well be worthwhile to incur some extra cost at the margin to achieve a higher degree of security.” But, Henderson cautions, the costs are invariably much higher than one expects, and the policies themselves always bring their own problems.

Take, for instance, the US shipbuilding industry. In the wake of World War I, the Jones Act was signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson. Its purpose was to maintain adequate US domestic shipbuilding capacity so that America would always have enough ships and merchant mariners available for service in wartime or national emergencies. To realize this goal, the Jones Act specified that all ships moving goods between American ports had to be mostly American-made, majority American-owned, majority American-crewed, and American-registered and flagged.

Yet, as the economist David Hebert points out, the protection from foreign competition that the Jones Act provided to US domestic shipbuilders massively increased the costs of shipbuilding in America. Over the past century, this has helped undermine national and international demand for US-made ships. This is one reason, Hebert states, why the United States presently produces a mere five ships each year, is short of mariners, and has just four shipyards. Such are the effects of essentialism.

DIYE, Planning, and Populism

There is, however, one entity that benefits from DIYE. The embrace of manifest destiny logic, sectoral snobbery, or essentialism inevitably magnifies the government’s role in economic life.

If you decide, for instance, that 1) it is America’s manifest destiny to produce steel, whatever the cost; 2) that the making of steel is inherently more worthwhile than working in the financial sector; and 3) that domestic steel production far in excess of what the US economy demands is essential for America’s well-being, then you have no option but to turn to the state to try and make these things happen. That in turn necessitates increased government intervention, more government spending, and a larger government bureaucracy to administer such activities.

In other words, DIYE translates into boom times for interventionists of all political stripes. That helps to explain why economists who challenge manifestations of DIYE are often ignored or, in more recent years, labelled “market fundamentalists.” For, as Henderson pointed out, sound economic theory and its supporting evidence get in the way of those who invoke some version of DIYE to justify interventionist policies, not least by revealing those “unseen” effects that many people don’t want to see.

This doesn’t mean, Henderson cautions, that the “design” of economics is somehow complete. Like any natural or social science, economics is in a constant state of development, and that process often involves verification, reverification, and ongoing corrections to the design. Henderson himself was also fully aware of the limits of economics. “Economics is not the whole of life,” he stated, “nor is economics a purely technical exercise.”

In an age, however, where DIYE is rampant throughout America, it becomes even more incumbent upon anyone who thinks that good economics has useful contributions to make to public debate and the formation of public policy to insist upon its ongoing saliency. That means a willingness to be unpopular in many circles. In populist times, however, the choice to bear witness to unpopular truths is often the difference between chaos and civilization. Therein may lie the economist’s prime vocation in our DIYE world.

Leo Strauss, a University of Chicago scholar of political theory, and Frank Meyer, the mastermind of the fusion of liberty and tradition that guided so many on the American right from Barry Goldwater through Ronald Reagan, certainly read the mail sent between them.

Until now, nobody else did. Their letters sat untouched until I came upon them in an Altoona, Pennsylvania, warehouse during research for The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer. They pertain as much to 1941 as to 1961, so their saran-wrapped quality strikes as appropriate—and keeps the missives fresh for our times.

“We had lunch with Leo Strauss, who turns out to be an enormously charming man,” Meyer wrote Willmoore Kendall in June 1961. “Somehow I had had this impression that he would be dourly Germanic, but I find him most sympathique. And a great mind.”

Strauss came up in conversation between these and other National Review editors periodically in 1961. Strauss and Meyer, who would meet in the Bay Area that spring and in Chicago during the fall, exchanged the bulk of their correspondence that year. Of the 17 letters between the University of Chicago professor and the National Review literary editor in the latter’s papers, 11 date to 1961.

“I can think of no living political philosopher whose judgment I value more than yours,” Meyer wrote Strauss on March 12, describing himself as “greatly indebted to your work.” Strauss, in turn, read Meyer’s articles in National Review, a magazine to which he subscribed, and his books.

They shared several common denominators. German-Jews—Strauss, a refugee from the upheaval of the 1930s, and Meyer, the descendant of refugees from the upheaval of the 1840s—they each drifted from their ancestral faith. They received Rockefeller Foundation research grants in England during the early 1930s. Marxist professor Harold Laski, a patron of both, played a crucial role in their moves from the United Kingdom to the United States. For Strauss, he introduced him to American academics and helped him gain employment. For Meyer, whom he had helped obtain entry to the London School of Economics, he set off a chaotic chain of events that ultimately resulted in his deportation by informing an LSE colleague of the student’s libel against him. Meyer, as a Stalinist activist going through the motions as a University of Chicago graduate student for four years following his 1934 return to the United States, terrorized the school’s president, Robert Maynard Hutchins. The following decade, Strauss joined the school’s faculty and became the Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor. Crucially, Meyer and Strauss fell on the right of the ideological spectrum of intellectuals during a time when conservatism marked one as outside the mainstream of elite opinion.

Just as Meyer’s life as a committed Stalinist on two continents shaped his view, Strauss’s exit from Germany, the homeland where he lived the first 32 years of his life, shortly before the Nazis seized power, naturally shaped his.

This heretofore hidden correspondence centered on another common denominator: hatred of totalitarianism.

In a January 1961 letter, Strauss called attention to the Russian government’s quasi-official critique, which curiously dispensed with customary Marxist jargon, of Boris Pasternak’s 1957 novel Dr. Zhivago. Meyer concurred in regarding it as extraordinary. Dr. Zhivago did not read as forcefully anti-Communist as, say, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. This truth explains Meyer’s discomfort with the novel and possibly makes it a rare example of Strauss’s Persecution and the Art of Writing in action.

Strauss, in an in-person conversation, touted the virtues of Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington. Meyer responded by mail that “your judgment of Senator Jackson gets a bit of objective confirmation” in the Democrats’ opposition to aid to Yugoslavia, the ostensibly non-aligned but still very Communist country.

Meyer sent Strauss a copy of his 1958 article that favorably assessed the brief but intense senatorial career of Joseph McCarthy. “Better by far the rough-hewn truth,” the article judged, “than a sophisticated … apology for error.” Repeatedly therein, Meyer described the ideology that McCarthy stood against as “evil,” a word exiled from the lexicon of many intellectuals but not by the two correspondents. This shared disdain for relativism served as a magnet that brought them together.

Strauss described himself as “grateful” for the McCarthy piece, “with which I am in entire agreement.” Meyer responded, “I am very happy that you did not find anything to quarrel with in my interpretation of the McCarthy phenomenon.”

Even this small talk, such as it was, focused on Communism. The letters were exchanged, after all, during one of the frostier parts of the Cold War. The meat of their correspondence, though certainly encompassing Communism, goes beyond this one tributary of totalitarianism. It does so not in a way that fixates on current events; instead, it examines the philosophical underpinnings and ramifications of modern tyranny. The conversation flows in directions to include Nazism and variants within Communism. A what-came-first-the-chicken-or-the-egg quality colors the discussions that ultimately focus on Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.

Strauss and Meyer engaged in an ongoing epistolary and in-person conversation in 1961. Despite these letters only now reappearing after more than six decades lying dormant in file cabinets and moving boxes, the dialogue remains quite alive. The consistent subject? Big Evil.

By the end of January 1961, Leo Strauss expressed his appreciation for one of Meyer’s books, published at the beginning of that month, that he had devoured upon receipt.

The Moulding of Communists struck almost as an anthropological exposition of the folkways of the Communist cadre, that contradiction in terms that described the elite who ran a party that preached equality. Meyer, lording above most of his comrades in his 14 years as a Communist, strangely removed himself, names, and dates from The Moulding of Communists. He identified dozens of party members in his testimony before courts and committees, yet kept names out of his book.

A hypothetical memoir that might have included tales of his cause célèbre deportation from Great Britain when he drew such backers as future prime minister Clement Attlee and philosopher Bertrand Russell, his “peace” work under future East German dictator Walter Ulbricht, and down-with-the-ship loyalty to deposed American Communist leader Earl Browder might have been a bestseller. Meyer instead depersonalized The Moulding of Communists. Nevertheless, a curiosity with the mysterious world of Communists, even in a post-McCarthy America, generated positive reviews and strong sales. This intrigued audience included Leo Strauss. He appreciated Meyer for writing about Communists without disparaging them. He delivered a jaw-dropping confession to the former Stalinist that partly explains his eagerness to engage with Meyer: he had never personally known any Communists.

“Having always loathed communism and never having known directly any communist,” he wrote Meyer, “I was particularly impressed by what you say about the Communist conception of ‘subjectivity,’ of their understanding of the soul in general and of the inadequacy of the current psychologies in understanding the communists.”

“Subjectivity,” in the party context, refers to one’s individualistic impulses that overwhelm the good of the collective. In criticism sessions designed to bring about the ideal Communist, chastisement inevitably came via that Marxist swear word: subjectivity.

While Communists did not believe in souls, Meyer points to a process of a soul-sucking “psychosurgery” that stunts the person so that he or she might more effectively serve the greater power.

Strauss’s reference to psychologies, too, remains vague enough to possibly refer to numerous parts of the book. For instance, Communists regarded personal difficulties as the result of social, rather than individual, contradictions, which fostered a hostility toward mainstream psychotherapy, as well as difficulties for mainstream psychotherapy to understand one moulded by the party.

The Moulding of Communists, in contrast to the correspondence, molded. Even upon its 1961 release, it seemed dated. Unlike Meyer’s evergreen follow-up, In Defense of Freedom, The Moulding of Communists today perhaps fits most comfortably on a curio-shop shelf.

What specifically grabbed Strauss’s attention in 1961, however, feels very 2025. After singling out parts of the book for praise, Strauss then reached his big point that subsequently drove much of their conversation. He wondered whether Stalin, more than Lenin, influenced the development of the Communist cadre that Meyer described in his book, writing that he gleaned that impression 

from Trotsky’s confrontation of Lenin’s empathy with the masses and Stalin’s much more bureaucratic mold. Is anything known about any difference between Lenin and Stalin regarding the schooling of communists? Some time ago it occurred to me that Khrushchev differs from Stalin and Lenin by the fact that there is no longer a coincidence between ‘philosophy’ and political power in the sense that Khrushchev apparently does not or cannot claim to be the communist theorist. Is this opinion correct?

No, Meyer gently informed on this last point. Conceding he could be wrong, Meyer believed that Khrushchev, however much the buffoon he appeared to Westerners, traveled well on his way to consolidating the dual roles of political power and theoretical supremacy. Furthermore, the bifurcation of political and philosophical leadership meant bad news for Communism, a system that included the tautological meta-belief that it amounted to a proven science no different from biology or physics (which necessarily proved the smaller beliefs that stemmed from the big idea).

Whether Khrushchev truly was the leading philosopher of Communism struck as an almost tertiary concern to one who had imparted doctrine as a longtime faculty member at Communist schools and occasional writer on theory for The Communist and New Masses. Khrushchev, “despite his flamboyant personal style,” needed to become that leading voice on doctrinal matters for the good of international Marxism. And what was good for the party was true, and what was bad for it was false.

The fact that small-c communists favored Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, or Ho Chi Minh over Soviet leaders as the decade progressed—and thereafter some branched off to regard economics as not among the most important applications of Marx—suggested prescience at the heart of Strauss’s question.

Meyer agreed with Strauss’s point regarding Stalin’s role in molding Communists. Meyer, a molder as a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain’s board and later the director of the Chicago Workers School, drew on his experience. He meted out correction in that life. He presented a closeted member with an ultimatum: cease active homosexuality within 48 hours or face expulsion (he chose the former). In 1938, after a drunk Nelson Algren engaged in public combat with Trotskyists, Meyer disciplined the author, told him he reflected poorly on fellow radicals, and later nudged him out of the party as unserious and, presumably, un-mouldable. The corrector eventually faced correction. In 1945, Meyer wavered. The party presented an ultimatum to his salvageable wife: divorce Frank to stay in the party. She divorced the party, instead.

Meyer wrote Strauss:

You are right, I think, more emphatically even than you put it in your letter, on the Stalinist character of the moulding process about which I have written. While the concept of the “party of a new type” was Lenin’s, he had to deal even in the Russian Bolshevik Party with men of the long-established socialist type—and his hands were full in establishing his concept of the Party and directing its practical revolutionary activities. It is questionable, I imagine, whether Lenin ever understood the sort of moulding that would be necessary to create men of the type demanded by a Party of the kind he conceived. He too, of course, like Marx before him, could not existentially grasp the human implications of his ideological concepts.

On March 23, Strauss continued the conversation by asking, “Is not full-fledged Stalinism a ‘synthesis’ of Leninism and Hitlerism?”

Strauss believed that the Soviet dictator learned two things from the Nazi dictator:

1) The Marxist-Leninist conclusion from the Jacobin experience that the revolution must not eat its own children is not unqualifiedly correct as Hitler proved beautifully by the Roehm purge; surely the big purges by Stalin took place after the experience of the Roehm purge had plenty of time to sink in. 2) It was a principle of pre-First World War socialism ([August] Bebel) that anti-Semitism is the socialism of the fools; again Hitler proved beautifully that this fact does not deprive anti-Jewish policies of an enormous political effectiveness and Stalin, as well as Khrushchev, learned his lesson.

Here, Strauss sees Stalin as not merely one who entered into a utilitarian no-honor-among-thieves alliance with Hitler, but as a student who essentially took notes on the master’s modus operandi. Stalin’s persecution of Jews served as but one example that illustrated the truth of his belief.

The monsters that shaped Strauss and Meyer’s perspectives differed. But their discussion indicated that maybe the monsters more closely resembled one another in real life than they did in their long afterlife in the popular imagination.

Meyer necessarily approached the question from a different starting point and different life experiences. He effectively sent men to their deaths as a recruiter for the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War. He later engaged in embarrassing feats of mental gymnastics to justify the Hitler-Stalin Pact. His penance of sorts came in volunteering at 33, over repeated objections by the Communist Party, for the US Army. He wanted to fight Nazis. In the Army, he met, finally, the proletariat after the social insulation of a private preparatory school, a high-hat hotel serving as home, and higher education at Oxford. The workingmen with whom he shared a squad bay did not resemble the proletariat Karl Marx had described. Training injuries curtailed his time in the military. Recuperation led to a prolonged reassessment and thoughts about Big Evil on the European continent.

Injuries prevented Meyer from fighting the Nazis in Europe. They catalyzed him to fight Communists in America.

“I would agree that on both points Stalin learned from Hitler,” he wrote Strauss on April 4, regarding anti-Semitism and the revolution devouring its own. “But is it not a sort of multiple-stomach digestive process? I mean, the general characteristics of Nazism seem to me to derive from Bolshevism, and then an amalgam of these general characteristics with the special characteristics that Nazism produces is created. From this amalgamated special type of totalitarianism, the two phenomena you mention (and probably others) were re-digested by Stalin.”

Meyer questioned himself. Had he unfairly dismissed Hitler as one possessing very little originality? The prejudice stemmed from his view distilled to its essence that “all the characteristics of contemporary totalitarianism were potential in Marx.” He immediately thereafter mentioned Marx’s anti-Semitism. He possibly included this as a characteristic of totalitarianism or, more specifically, of one of its more well-known twentieth-century manifestations.

Just as Meyer’s life as a committed Stalinist on two continents shaped his view, Strauss’s exit from Germany, the homeland where he lived the first 32 years of his life, shortly before the Nazis seized power, naturally shaped his.

“It is hard to separate Strauss’s reading of texts from a moral-cultural critique that came out of his early life, particularly from his status as a Jew in Germany in the first third of the twentieth century,” Paul Gottfried wrote in Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America: A Critical Appraisal. “His hermeneutic points back to critical points in his life, including his reactions to the rise and triumph of Nazism, his subsequent flight to England, and his long-time residence in the United States.”

Strauss and Meyer shared much in common. The monsters that shaped their perspectives differed. But their discussion indicated that maybe the monsters more closely resembled one another in real life than they did in their long afterlife in the popular imagination.

The two men stayed in touch. But their communication never matched the depth of their 1961 letters. Strauss looked forward the next year to reading Meyer’s In Defense of Freedom and later to seeing Meyer in 1965 when he spoke at the University of Chicago during the Public Affairs Conference on Liberalism and Conservatism, an event attended by Rep. Donald Rumsfeld, future US Senators Charles Percy and Adlai Stevenson III, political reporter Robert Novak, and scholars Joseph Cropsey, Harry Jaffa, Walter Berns, and Edward Banfield. The following year, Meyer relayed that he had read his friend’s “fascinating” Socrates and Aristophanes.

After that burst of initial letters, they wrote to each other sporadically. Nineteen-sixty-one’s mailbox conversation mainly continued telephonically and face-to-face, both of which afforded more time and space to explore the big questions surrounding Big Evil. Sadly, no stenographer transcribed.

Economists have an old habit of assuming that people are strictly selfish and rational, maximizing their “utility.” In theory, everyone is “Max U,” as Deirdre McCloskey mockingly puts it. The assumption can be useful—people often do act selfishly, and belief in market efficiency sometimes clarifies moral choices—but it is false as a generalization. Virtue and capitalism need each other, and have long quietly collaborated to improve the human condition. 

That truth is kept quiet, ironically, by economists themselves. They understand capitalism better than most, and generally defend it, but Max U is a moral blind spot that causes them to underrate capitalism ethically, and teach others to do so. With friends like these, capitalism hardly needs enemies.

In The Bourgeois Virtues (2006) and its sequels, McCloskey uncovers this virtue-capitalism nexus, and champions a richer economics grounded in the classical tradition of the seven virtues. Since the book consists in a quixotic quest to overthrow Max U and refound economics on virtual ethical foundations, it would have had to catalyze a sweeping reset of the discipline from the ground up to really succeed. Too many reputations are invested in the old orthodoxy, and Max U still rules. Yet McCloskey’s project remains vital. Capitalism will never be understood—or valued properly—while seen through the lens of assumed amorality. That misunderstanding is especially dangerous today, as the woke left and populist right feed each other’s doubts about the liberal order that undergirds modern freedom and prosperity.

McCloskey’s “virtue economics” (so to speak) also offends modern pieties by implying that some people, classes, and nations are poor partly because of a deficiency of virtue. Her argument that Western capitalists deserved their wealth because of their bourgeois virtues is a thumb in the eye to Marxists; Charles Murray’s similar thesis in Coming Apart (2012) also gave offense. If the seed of virtue economics ever takes root, it will grow up fighting.

Why Capitalism Needs Virtue

A simple parable can serve as proof of concept for why capitalism needs virtue.

Suppose a man wants a job as a cashier—the only work available. But he is dishonest. He’ll steal if he can get away with it. He is not a compulsive thief, only Max U: rationally self-interested. If he’ll be caught, he won’t steal; if not, he will.

Hiring managers see through him. They could monitor him constantly, but surveillance is costly. It’s more profitable not to hire him at all. Now suppose the man could truly change—coming to love honesty and hate theft. The same managers perceive it and give him the job. Virtue pays.

The story shows the limits of economists’ habit of treating preferences as the standard of value. Some preferences are simply better than others. Even by his former lights, the dishonest man should wish to become honest: the change makes him employable and happier.

Economists steeped in Max U may resist the idea that people can change their utility functions. They treat conduct as a function of incentives. Virtue ethicists know better. Conduct also flows from character, and virtue is habit-forming: act justly long enough, and you come to love justice.

The Bourgeois Virtues scales this lesson to society. McCloskey—at once a Chicago School economist and a humanist polymath—argues that capitalism depends everywhere on the virtues. Real markets are shot through with principal-agent problems that Max U theory cannot solve but ordinary virtue routinely does. Trust, self-command, and good faith keep commerce running where formal incentives fail.

Getting the List of Virtues Right

Which virtues matter, though? What’s fundamental? If our cashier needed a moral quality to be trusted, what is it, and how does it generalize? 

The dishonest cashier might be cured by justice, or by love toward his employer. Another man might need prudence or temperance to succeed—but these are virtues Max U already possesses, though economists often mistake them for automatic traits rather than acquired ones. Courage keeps the other virtues steady when things grow difficult; faith steadies a person and keeps them true to their convictions and identity through fluctuating moods and situations; and hope transforms mere toil into labor for a goal. 

Courage, justice, prudence, and temperance (the classical “cardinal virtues”) and faith, hope, and love (the Christian “theological virtues”) represent a kind of “periodic table” of moral goodness, the qualities needed both for effectiveness and for expanding human happiness and giving life meaning. Other terms of moral praise, if valid, are synonyms, applications, or combinations. To infuse one’s life with these virtues is the higher self-interest that makes oneself interesting, one’s life story worth telling.

Not stealing is pretty basic, but at a higher level, capitalism is full of use cases of virtue like:

• Mentoring an employee who’s likely to move on (hope and love);
• Fulfilling the exact terms of a contract with a party not likely to sue or provide repeat business (justice and faith);
• Maintaining an orderly, respectable “bourgeois” lifestyle and settling for slow, long-term success (temperance, prudence, and hope);
• Tipping for good service in a restaurant you’ll never come back to (love and justice);
• Maintaining excellence in an indispensable but underappreciated specialist role, instead of getting into a turf war for a more prestigious and upwardly mobile function (temperance, justice, and love); 
• Launching a business or trying to invent a new technology (prudence, courage, and hope);
• Persisting in a job search despite a hundred rejections (hope);
• Writing a reference for a colleague who’s not likely to have an opportunity to return the favor (love);
• Guarding product quality when customers would take a long time to notice a quiet downgrade (faith); and
• Making executive decisions in shareholders’ interests when they’re not looking and couldn’t understand the stakes (justice).

In Managerial Dilemmas: The Political Economy of Hierarchy (1993), Gary J. Miller channeled a lot of economics literature to laboriously prove that it’s impossible to design a firm in which employees’ self-interest is aligned with the firm’s profit maximization. Actual firms run on morale and solidarity. Virtue makes capitalism thrive, and makes people thrive in capitalism.

Such things were better understood when the premodern tradition of the virtues was in health, but unfortunately, as Alasdair MacIntyre discerned in After Virtue (1984), that tradition was largely lost when the Enlightenment, having lost faith in an older, Christian-infused metaphysics during the wars of religion, tried to rebuild moral philosophy on mechanistic rationality. Since that failure, there have been many attempts to fill the virtue-sized hole in the intelligentsia’s understanding of human nature. Much of The Bourgeois Virtues aims to retrieve and refine scattered modern attempts to rebuild moral philosophy, reintegrating them with the classical tradition. 

A sweeping rhetorical revaluation of commerce in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially in England and Holland, changed people’s motives and priorities and set the stage for modern economic growth.

Two such efforts since McCloskey’s work deserve brief notice. Jonathan Haidt’s “moral foundations theory” (The Righteous Mind, 2012) lists care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity; Charles Murray’s Coming Apart highlights marriage, industriousness, honesty, and religiosity. Both schemes are helpful in navigating survey and demographic data, but are rough substitutes for the classical seven virtues. They are like octagonal wheels—serviceable but clumsy compared with the original circle. When a society has forgotten the wheel, archeology is more useful than tinkering.

It’s not just amnesia that makes people forget the seven classical virtues and invent weaker substitutes. Social scientists struggle with ethics because they inherit the fallacy that one “can’t derive an ought from an is,” often traced to Hume, even though MacIntyre refuted it by showing the teleology inherent in language and reason. But the habit of trying to enforce sharp fact/value distinctions runs deep. The very name “social sciences” expresses an attempt to cross-apply, from the natural sciences, a paradigm of post-teleological, mechanistic objectivity to the study of human society. Max U appeals because it’s as simple as gravity, but that’s not what people are actually like. 

A physicist learns externally, detaching his feelings and biases. But economists and sociologists cannot and should not do that. Since we are human, our introspection and conscience are crucial evidence about what humans are like. To ignore them in imitation of the natural sciences makes us duller, not wiser. Tradition, meanwhile, is in part humanity’s harvest of introspection, lessons learned from the moral experiments of generations. By learning from tradition through sympathy and imagination—not only data—we broaden our minds beyond what reason or personal introspection can achieve.

MacIntyre and McCloskey show how to redeem the social sciences through erudite moral realism and respect for tradition and the past. And part of that project is learning to think in terms of the old seven virtues. 

The Christian and Chivalric Roots of Western Virtue

McCloskey’s ambition reaches beyond the constitution of present capitalism to illuminate its historic backstory, and is extended through two sequels to The Bourgeois Virtues, of which one, Bourgeois Dignity (2010), has the subtitle, “Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World.” 

By “the modern world,” she means the “Great Enrichment,” the dramatic and sustained rise in living standards beginning in the early nineteenth century. And the subtitle really means “why Max U economics can’t explain the modern world, but virtue economics can.” She illustrates how a sweeping rhetorical revaluation of commerce in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially in England and Holland, changed people’s motives and priorities and set the stage for modern economic growth. But this story should be braided together with others to enrich the picture.

McCloskey pushes back, rightly though too strongly, on “institutional” stories that credit the origins of modern economic growth to changes in modern society mainly intended to secure property rights, rule of law, and representative government. These are overrated, but they still have some merit. There was more rule of law and respect for individual and property rights in eighteenth‑century England and Holland than in most societies through most of history. It’s true that institutions aren’t the whole story, partly because they rest on moral and cultural foundations. But McCloskey argues mainly from timing that institutions couldn’t have been decisive, noting that many Western institutional advantages predated modern growth by centuries. And that misses a key point, because the timing actually doesn’t need to match closely.

Think of modern economic growth like an airplane taking off. The West accelerated down a runway of commercial, technological, and educational progress for centuries before it gained enough momentum to escape Malthusian gravity. Then at last poverty retreated—but there may have been no sharp discontinuity at the moment of takeoff. The West was far ahead of other societies in most fields of endeavor, from warfare to navigation to astronomy to linguistics to law, and more fundamentally in its moral, political, and scientific understandings, long before GDP per capita began its sustained rise.

We remain willfully blind to the moral foundations of prosperity because we hesitate to admit that virtue often produces wealth, and vice, poverty. 

Once we’re past tripping over the timing issue, another key factor, revealed by the astute Joseph Henrich as the central argument in his magisterial book The WEIRDest People in the World (2020), comes into focus. Westerners, he shows, became psychologically distinct because the Catholic Church’s “marriage and family program” (MFP) dismantled the kinship-based societies that dominated most of history. Kin groups had ensured property transmission through clear lineage and practices such as cousin or levirate marriage and polygamy. From the early Middle Ages, Christian churches—especially the Roman Catholic—suppressed these customs, partly for bequests but also from conviction, breaking up clan systems and fostering more individualist societies that value fairness over loyalty and guilt over shame. It drove a profound psychological shift that still distinguishes Westerners dramatically in survey research and behavioral studies. It is a key factor in Western success and the difficulty of exporting it.

Henrich, unlike McCloskey, adopts the nonjudgmental tone of the social sciences and avoids moral language, even when describing tendencies to lie or cheat. Yet his work is really a story of how Christianity nurtured virtue. It dovetails with McCloskey’s account, though with different timing and causes. Rodney Stark’s The Victory of Reason (2005) and Tom Holland’s Dominion (2019) trace other ways Christianity advanced virtue, but the MFP remains central. Katy Faust’s Them Before Us (2021) is a recent statement, lucid and activist, of the well-established truth that the stable two‑parent family long upheld by the Church is still the best setting for children’s flourishing and the transmission of virtue.

Finally, Gregory Clark, in A Farewell to Alms (2007), examines inheritance data showing that the better-off in medieval England had more children. From this, he infers a hereditary—genetic or cultural—advantage that shaped the British character by the Industrial Revolution. McCloskey, favoring the bourgeoisie, resists this view because it credits knights more than merchants. Yet modern liberal institutions—Magna Carta and Parliament—were indeed born from knightly revolts against royal tyranny. The bourgeois virtues, then, may partly descend from chivalry, as the evolution of the word “gentleman” suggests.

Virtue Economics vs. the Myth of Equality

If mechanistic objectivity and science envy are one source of resistance to virtue economics, another is modern thought’s obsession with equality. It resists any suggestion that wealth or poverty might reflect differences in virtue, often resorting to moral outrage or conspiracy thinking when the argument gets difficult. Democratic and communist ideals have long glorified the poor at the expense of the rich, while fascism and populism twist the same theme for their own ends. We remain willfully blind to the moral foundations of prosperity because we hesitate to admit that virtue often produces wealth, and vice, poverty. 

Instead, the deserving rich, classes and nations alike, should remember that much virtue is inherited: you do well by doing good because that’s what you were taught. Practice noblesse oblige towards others who were not so fortunate. 

Virtue economics is an uphill battle, but it’s worth the fight. It warns against killing the goose—virtue—that lays the golden eggs. Virtue must be maintained through families, churches, and honorable institutions. And while the quiet collaboration of virtue and capitalism has done much to better the human condition, it could do much more if we were more intentional about making virtue and capitalism work together. Although noblesse oblige endures—billions flow each year from the wealthy who want to give back—the modern bias is not to trust it, but instead, to stand up government bureaucracies to do what noblesse oblige could do better. A brighter future awaits if we let virtue economics unlock it.