Choose Liberty First

Originally published on Substack. 

I understand why so many people are uneasy right now.

Politics feels disorienting. The labels keep multiplying. On the right alone, you hear Christian nationalism, national conservatism, freedom conservatism, libertarianism, populism, and a dozen hybrids in between. President Trump can sound like a nationalist one day, a pragmatist the next, and a progressive on tariffs or industrial policy the day after that. Meanwhile, many lawmakers are trying to make sense of a country that feels more divided, more centralized, and less confident than it should.

That confusion is real. But confusion is exactly why first principles matter.

After decades studying economics to get my doctorate and thereafter, teaching students at multiple places of higher education, working at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and other think tanks, serving in the White House Office of Management and Budget, and now leading Ginn Economic Consulting, I keep coming back to the same conclusion: classical liberalism is the most consistent public philosophy available.

Not because it is fashionable. Not because it always wins elections. But because it starts with the right view of the human person, the right limits on government, and the right understanding of how prosperity is created.

As a Christian, husband, father of three, economist, and policy adviser, I care deeply about truth, virtue, family, and human dignity. That is exactly why I reject the idea that government should be our parent, pastor, planner, or permanent manager.

What Classical Liberalism Gets Right

Classical liberalism starts with a simple truth: people flourish best when they are free, responsible, and protected by equal justice under the law.

That means property rights, free exchange, free speech, religious liberty, limited government, and the rule of law. It means government exists to preserve liberty, not to redesign society according to the ambitions of whichever faction happens to hold power. It means parents should raise children, families should form character, churches should disciple believers, businesses should create value, and civil society should do the work government has crowded out for far too long.

That is why classical liberalism is more coherent than the alternatives. It is morally serious without turning the state into a moral tutor. It is economically sound without pretending experts can outthink millions of free people. And it is politically realistic because it recognizes what Friedrich Hayek called the problem of dispersed knowledge — the fact that no planner possesses all the local, changing, “particular circumstances of time and place” needed to direct a society well.

That point matters more than ever in an age of AI, rapid innovation, and entrepreneurial change. The future will not be built by committees in Washington. It will be built by people experimenting, inventing, taking risks, solving problems, and adapting faster than government can write the rules.

If we want more prosperity, we need more entrepreneurs, more innovation, more AI, and more freedom to discover what works — not more elite management from above.

Where Other Views Go Wrong

That does not mean other traditions have nothing valuable to say. Many of them identify real concerns.

Christian nationalism is right to worry about moral decay, family breakdown, and cultural drift. Christians should care about those things. I do. But once the state is asked to enforce a thicker religious or national identity, the line between moral witness and coercive politics gets blurry fast. The government is not and shouldn’t be the church. It is not a good shepherd. It is usually a clumsy, expensive substitute for institutions that actually shape character well. As a Christian, I believe the death of your old life and rebirth of your new life happens in the heart when you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord, not government pushing it on you.

National conservatism is often right to criticize elite detachment, institutional rot, and the failures of global managerialism. But it too often drifts toward tariffs, industrial policy, centralized favoritism, and the idea that national strength requires more state direction. That is where it loses me. A nation does not get stronger by becoming more economically managed. It gets weaker, more politicized, and more dependent on the judgments of people who will always know less than they think they know. Trying to use government to solve problems due to government failures will exacerbate the problems.

Modern conservatism often says good things about family, order, and constitutional government. But too much of it still tolerates big government as long as it is used for supposedly better ends. That is not enough. If the state is still oversized, overcentralized, and overconfident, liberty is still in danger.

Libertarianism often gets the economics and the skepticism of concentrated power right. I respect that. But some forms of libertarianism can sound too thin on culture, family, and the supporting institutions that help freedom endure. Freedom is not just being left alone. It is also having the moral and institutional foundations to use freedom well.

Classical liberalism holds these tensions together better than the alternatives. It respects freedom without denying virtue. It values moral order without conscripting the state into engineering it.

Parents, Not Bureaucrats

This is especially important in family life and education.

Parents should be empowered to teach, educate, and parent their children instead of having government try to do it for them. That does not mean every family will make perfect decisions. It means the people closest to the child should have the most authority, not the least.

A government that keeps crowding out parents in education, health, nutrition, technology, and culture does not make families stronger. It makes them more dependent and less confident in their role.

That is part of the institutional rot we are living with now. Too many elites in politics, media, academia, and bureaucracy think they have the answers. They do not. That mindset has produced dysfunction in Washington and across state and local governments alike.

The institutional framework is getting too many things wrong because it is built on the false assumption that centralized expertise can replace free people, free exchange, and local responsibility.

Spending Is the Disease

This is where public policy gets practical.

The worst thing government does is spend too much.

That is the disease. Taxes, regulations, inflation, debt, and other distortions are often symptoms of that disease.

Government spends too much, and then it has to tax more, borrow more, regulate more, and centralize more to support itself. If lawmakers want to fix what is broken, they should start there. That is why I keep arguing for strong spending restraints at the federal, state, and local levels.

Once government grows beyond what taxpayers can sustainably support, everything else gets harder and more politicized.

Milton Friedman said one of the great mistakes is to judge policies by their intentions rather than their results. That remains one of the best tests in public life.

Good intentions gave us price controls, corporate favoritism, tariff hikes, overbuilt bureaucracies, narrow tax bases, and all kinds of progressive and “post-liberal” experiments that sound compassionate or strategic but fail in practice. Results matter. And the results of too much government are all around us.

Direction Matters

This is one reason Argentina President Javier Milei has drawn so much attention. Argentina is not America, and his reforms have involved real hardship and controversy.

But Reuters reports that Milei has pursued deep spending cuts, achieved Argentina’s first budget surplus in more than a decade, and helped drive inflation sharply lower from the levels seen when he took office. That is much closer to the direction we should be moving than the usual mix of tariffs, industrial policy, subsidies, and paternalism that still dominates too much of American policymaking.

At Ginn Economic Consulting, that is what I provide: a North Star for policy grounded in first principles and serious economics. But it can also an incremental star.

We do not go from today’s dysfunction to a freer society in one step. We get there by moving consistently in the right direction. The key is not to lose sight of the destination while making prudent progress.

The Debate We Need

We do need tension and debate. Different camps challenging one another can be healthy. Good ideas get tested that way.

But the nastiness, the name-calling, the performative outrage — that is not serious persuasion. It makes people look ridiculous, and it weakens the very causes they claim to defend. We need more humility, more substance, and more willingness to reason from first principles and evidence.

That is what classical liberalism encourages: humility about power, humility about knowledge, and confidence that free people, not political elites, are best equipped to shape their own lives.

Three Takeaways for Policymakers

1. Classical liberalism is the most coherent governing philosophy.

It protects liberty, property, faith, speech, and family without turning government into society’s parent or planner.

2. Spending is the disease.

Taxes, regulations, inflation, debt, and dependency are often downstream symptoms of a government that has grown too large.

3. The future belongs to freedom, not elite management.

If we want stronger families, more innovation, more AI, more entrepreneurship, and more prosperity, government must get out of the way and let people prosper.

The labels will keep changing. The trends will keep shifting. But the principles do not.

That is why I still believe classical liberalism is the best North Star we have.