Senator Marco Rubio has always been at the forefront of various trends within the Republican Party and the conservative movement. He was an original member of the Tea Party Republicans who rode to victory in 2010 in opposition to President Obama’s attempts to enlarge the size of the federal government on numerous fronts. As a young and emerging senator from Florida, Rubio responded well to the compelling demand to contest strenuously the size and scope of federal power during the Obama presidency. 

The failure of Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign in 2012 triggered something inside the GOP and its conservative base that would slowly, then rapidly, unfold in ensuing years. What followed was the now much-documented turn of the Republicans towards populism, nationalism, and protectionism, with a decidedly smaller focus on spending and regulatory issues. Senator Rubio, however, took what appeared to be a predictable path for an ambitious politician in the wake of the 2012 defeat. 

He sought implementation of a major element of the Republican National Committee’s now infamous post-election “autopsy report” that recommended the party accept increased levels of immigration to reach the growing Latino population, among other changes to Republican policy. Rubio joined the so-called bipartisan “Gang of 8” senators in support of higher levels of immigration. He looked like he was “leading” on a difficult issue, helping his party coalesce around a solution to a very sticky problem. 

But this led to nagging issues for him on the 2016 primary trail as he campaigned for the Republican nomination for president. The primary electorate of the party had turned solidly against immigration, seemingly of any kind. Rubio was considered a squish for having promoted augmented levels of lawful immigration in response to the dysfunctional approach that continues to govern us. His penchant to be in the lead on perceived trends turned back on him, as the party sorted itself into its critical stance on immigration generally. And Trump rang the bell loudly against Rubio for this seemingly unforgivable mistake.

Not to be deterred, Rubio, now safely back in the Senate after the 2016 election, took the measure of a populist party now convinced that our economic situation was in stasis, if not decline, and required affirmative government intervention to remedy it. New issues emerged that would become framed in terms of what new policies the federal government should implement regarding China, trade, personal income, family dissolution, falling birth rates, and declining numbers of working-age men actually working rather than collecting transfer payments. 

Senator Rubio once again decided to helm the ship. The new book he recently released titled Decades of Decadence articulates his efforts over the past few years to define a notion he calls “common-good capitalism” (CGC), which places a supposedly free economy in the service of the nation, family, and community. Rubio first floated the concept at an address delivered in 2019 at the Catholic University of America, where he interlaced it with Catholic social thought stretching back to the nineteenth century on the dignity of labor and the ethical grounding for private property. He excoriated socialism, but also added national purpose and the good of workers to the goals of corporate business, stating that labor markets in America were in many cases unjust to workers.

Rubio defines CGC as “a form of capitalism that is tended to by stakeholders to ensure that the results our economy produces are in the best interest of our people, our families, our communities, and our nation.” He analogizes it to the rules transformation in the NFL that led to a more offense-oriented game by limiting how defenses can attack the quarterback. Of course, the objective in football and the standard by which success is defined has not changed: win. His proposed CGC would change not only the incentive structure but seemingly the standard by which business is judged. Profits are fine, but the nebulous national interest and common good must also be weighed by business leaders, and for that to really matter, the government certainly must put its thumbs on the scales. 

In that regard, one example is instructive: share buybacks. Sometimes companies repurchase their own shares from the market, thus shrinking the number of shares available and returning money to current investors. Rubio insists that share buybacks should be disincentivized (taxed?) because they don’t “boost job creation or worker pay.” However, the reasons why companies engage in share buybacks vary. In many cases, they are designed as a one-term dividend, rewarding shareholders and boosting stock prices. Is it a fatal flaw that not all share buybacks work as companies plan them? Is the optimal solution to regulate them out of existence? Might those who make these decisions on behalf of companies know more and know better how to benefit the business’s operations? Wouldn’t consistently poor use of share buybacks by companies get priced in by investors, thus making the employment of such decisions problematic? Do not the most thickly traded financial markets in the world have ways to cope with the good and the bad of share buybacks? Even if we agree with Rubio that boosting job creation and worker pay is the most important thing, it’s not clearly true that share buybacks don’t achieve that. If they help a company to succeed, job creation and increased salaries for workers could absolutely be among the goods that follow from that.

Rubio doesn’t wonder if perhaps second or third-order effects of disincentivizing shareholder buybacks might lead to bad results for business investment generally. He assumes there is one answer, and the SEC should impose it. To his credit, Rubio doesn’t endorse stakeholder capitalism. But he doesn’t really need to given the regulatory weights that his CGC will surely impose on companies.

Another bad practice: “outsourcing.” Why? “Our national interest and the common good are threatened by the loss of these industries and capacities.” China has used “subsidies and protectionism” to build its industries at our expense. And it follows, we need to return the favor. His judgment here is that our elites, “rather than shoring up our manufacturing capacity … exported jobs to places like Mexico and China, leaving many American workers without the means to provide for their families.” It’s not hard to understand why many might think that our manufacturing sector has declined. Total employment in the sector has declined from 19.5 million in 1979 to 13 million in 2023. Of course, many can still observe the husks of that former economy in the abandoned plants that dot our landscapes, perhaps not noticing the in-migration of new factories that operate now outside of the Rust Belt in America. Rubio’s charge that we don’t make things anymore is a false conclusion, one belied by a more precise and hopeful set of facts about manufacturing and the overall economy. In short, when it comes to manufacturing, we continue to do more with less. As Colin Grabow recently reported about the state of manufacturing in America: 

In 2021, it ranked second in the share of global manufacturing output at 15.92 percent—greater than Japan, Germany, and South Korea combined—and the sector by itself would constitute the world’s eighth‐​largest economy. The United States was the world’s fourth‐​largest steel producer in 2020, second‐​largest automaker in 2021, and largest aerospace exporter in 2021.

We remain the leader globally in manufacturing value-added by worker, according to Grabow. Total US industrial capacity is almost at its all-time high. Moreover, authorities ranging from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis to the Congressional Budget Office and the Bureau of Labor Statistics have dismissed the notion of a manufacturing wage premium among private sector nonsupervisory positions. A Federal Reserve paper in 2022 held that manufacturing wages are in the bottom half of all jobs in the United States. 

Rubio rightly notes the Chinese ownership of a large portion of the rare-earth minerals market, and the potentially problematic aspect of this ownership because of its connection to national security. We can and should secure other markets for these minerals for our economic and military use. But he never acknowledges that many policymakers had concluded by 2015, if not sooner, that moving trade out of China was now a legitimate security concern that needed to be addressed. Here was a case in which sinister elites were in fact acknowledging the China policy of the past three decades had not achieved what they intended. This was the whole point of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) that was agreed to by President Obama but was never ratified by the Senate. President Trump removed the United States from it in 2017. 

The TPP was a much better policy than the expensive and nearly impossible notion that we can decouple trade with China entirely and simply move most or all of it back to America, damn the costs. We should not ignore the challenges that China presents to America, but that’s also why TPP gave American companies a way to move their supply chains to a host of other nations in Asia, who also would benefit from a closer alliance with us as China increases its own anti-growth and authoritarian policies. It’s a moot point now, or so it seems.

Rubio moves beyond the legitimate point of a national security exception to free trade when he lists “aerospace, telecommunications, autonomous vehicles, energy, transportation, and housing” as the industries “where promoting the common good will require public policies that drive investments in key industries, because pure market principles and our national interests are not aligned.” What counts, though, as part of the national interest is nearly limitless, when you believe, as Rubio is at pains to tell us, that your “elite” have purposely led you into decline so that they might benefit at the expense of communities and families of hard-working Americans. The argument itself is baked in resentment and clearly points to the central hand of the federal government to shape trade, tax, fiscal, and financial policies in the direction of Rubio’s common good. 

Left unconsidered by Florida’s senior senator is the period from 1979 to 2016 when we did see a decline in manufacturing employment, and employment in the country’s civilian sector grew from 99 million to 151 million jobs. Even 40–50% of the value of the dreaded Chinese import is added by American workers once that import reaches our shores, creating jobs in numerous fields. Nowhere does Rubio assess what many have concluded: that technology, not trade, accounts for most of the jobs lost in manufacturing. The economists Michael Hicks and Srikant Devaraj find that in the first decade of this century, about 13% of manufacturing job losses in America were caused by trade; almost 88% disappeared because of technological development. Rubio’s dour brief is not only incomplete but woefully misguided.

Rubio claims to champion the common good, but he seems not to appreciate that economic growth itself, which is premised on free decision-making that relies on local knowledge, free prices, and the dependability of the rule of law, is the best friend that human persons and families have when it comes to growing their material resources. Economic thinking must begin with managing the inherent scarcity of resources that constrains all economic actors. When done well it inherently redounds to the benefit of families, communities, and voluntary associations, including, as Adam Smith knew, the wealth of a nation. The populist refrain that economies must be placed in the service of families sounds true, but economics is about decision-making under imperfect conditions by individuals pursuing their self-interest. If a grab bag of conditions is imposed on companies and individuals to put economics in the service of families, the grand result might well be that everyone is worse off as a result. Economic growth is hard enough as it is.

The indictment issued by Rubio is ultimately against “free market fundamentalists” and “market purists” who, he claims, bought the “end of history” thesis of Francis Fukuyama that the defeat of totalitarian gods ushered in the reign of liberal democracy, free markets, and the end of enmities and hatreds between nations. What was needed, according to the Fukuyama zombies, was the free movement of capital, jobs, and persons across borders to ensure endless prosperity. Rubio judges that “the sense that history was overcome to change the way US policymakers thought about our place in the world.” There is something right, even if overstated, about this conclusion. 

Fukuyama’s claim was not nearly as all-encompassing and immediate as many, including Rubio, now insist. Extraordinary and unrealistic claims about democracy promotion and trade were indeed made by public intellectuals in the post-Cold War period. In general, Fukuyama thought we could become angels, divorced from our nature as social and political beings located in particular places with our pride, loyalties, and loves, bearing all the traits of fallen human persons. Trade, human rights, and democracy could become the lodestars of humanity and swamp all the other factors that lead to political instability. He was wrong on the merits and events have amply proved this point. But that hardly means that more realist cases about trade and economic growth should not be made in response to this hubris. We don’t have to go full Fukuyama, but we needn’t become Pat Buchanan disciples either.

Rubio rightly focuses attention on the decline of marriage, religious faith, and the birth rate. These are serious problems, implying that a certain strain of individualism has overtaken our relational and social nature. Reforming and remaking these institutions, though, really can’t be done by the federal or state governments. What they could do in many cases is get out of the way and let us live rich associational lives. Rubio largely frames these problems in terms of economic policy that can remake institutions and give us a more Tocquevillean America, if we only have the courage and morality to achieve it. 

Senator Rubio is attempting to lead, once again, and this time, many seem willing to follow him. We could all be made poorer for it.