Regardless of who becomes America’s forty-fifth president in January 2017, the new chief executive and Congress will face considerable social, foreign policy, and economic challenges. That’s true of any president and legislature. The economic problems, however, will especially be formidable: not, we hope, because of something akin to the financial crisis that confronted President Obama upon assuming office, but because of long-term difficulties for which minor policy tweaks won’t be a sufficient response.

These circumstances will present market-inclined conservative reformers with a choice. One option is to pursue incremental improvements, such as tinkering with various regulations or mildly scaling back the rate of growth in entitlements without substantially reducing the scope and depth of government economic interventionism. The other possibility is to take a page out of the progressive playbook. This would be to pursue a more expansive agenda: one that not only pushes the American economy in a free market direction to the same degree that Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society seriously undermined economic liberty, but that, like progressivism, also makes a point of underscoring the values that must be promoted and embraced if such transformations are to last.

Read more on conservatism and free markets here…

Read the article “ANALYSIS: Conservatism, Free Markets and America’s Post-Obama Economy” on thepublicdiscourse.com.