He knew I was writing a book about how to win the fight for free enterprise. He knew all my arguments about earned success, meritocratic fairness, and lifting up the poor. However, he wanted advice on something more specific: how to make the best possible moral argument for a particular tax policy that was about to come before Congress. As the president of a think tank, I’m used to giving answers to specific policy questions. What is the right income exclusion so that a flat tax is not regressive? What is the economic multiplier on military spending? What leads to better growth in an economy—cutting government spending or raising taxes? But I have rarely had a policymaker ask me how to construct the moral argument for a specific policy. That’s a very different challenge from making the moral argument for free enterprise as a whole. A huge philosophical exegesis about the morality of freedom won’t have the right effect. It would be like reciting Paradise Lost at a limerick competition.
