Centrist Independent Voter has endorsed Representative Maggie Goodlander in the September 8 Democratic primary for New Hampshire’s 2nd Congressional District.
Goodlander has served in Congress only since January 2025, but she has already demonstrated the institutional seriousness and willingness to work across party lines that Centrist Independent Voter looks for in candidates.
Her background includes service as a Navy Reserve intelligence officer, constitutional-law professor, Justice Department official and adviser to Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman. In Congress, she has worked on government transparency, Pentagon accountability, fiscal responsibility and ethics reform.
Goodlander also supports Ukraine, favors immigration reform that combines secure borders with a legal path for long-established undocumented residents, and has signed the Promise to America, whose principles include capitalism, fiscal responsibility, free speech, secure borders and continued American leadership abroad.
We do have an important disagreement with Goodlander over her vote to end $3.3 billion in annual direct military assistance to Israel. But she continues to support Israel’s security and American assistance for Israeli air defense. Her primary opponent, Paige Beauchemin, takes a considerably more restrictive position on American support for Israel and is also challenging Goodlander from the party’s ideological left on several other issues.
No candidate will agree with us on everything. Goodlander offers the stronger combination of experience, institutional judgment, political realism and bipartisan potential.
Centrist Independent Voter has endorsed Brian Shortsleeve in Massachusetts’s Republican primary for governor.
Shortsleeve is a conservative on fiscal matters but considerably more moderate than many Republicans on social issues. In a state as heavily Democratic as Massachusetts, we think that combination gives him a better chance to govern effectively and work with a legislature that will almost certainly remain controlled by Democrats.
Shortsleeve’s record in business and public administration, his fiscal seriousness and his willingness to depart from Republican orthodoxy make him the stronger choice in the primary.
We do not agree with Shortsleeve on every issue. The full endorsement discusses those differences as well as the reasons we believe they are outweighed by his experience, pragmatism and ability to govern across partisan lines.
Centrist Independent Voter has endorsed Gentner Drummond in Oklahoma’s August 25 Republican runoff for governor.
Drummond is a conservative Republican, and we disagree with him on several important issues. But his record as Oklahoma attorney general demonstrates something we increasingly value in elected officials: a willingness to exercise independent judgment even when doing so puts him at odds with powerful members of his own party.
That independence has appeared repeatedly. Drummond challenged Oklahoma’s proposed publicly funded religious charter school, sought a new trial for death-row inmate Richard Glossip after concluding that his original trial was unfair, pursued a more cooperative relationship with Oklahoma’s tribal nations, and has continued opposing the proposed Inola aluminum smelter despite President Trump’s support for the project.
We do not necessarily agree with every decision Drummond has made. What matters is that the evidence suggests those decisions are based on his understanding of Oklahoma’s interests and the law rather than simply on presidential or party preference.
That makes him the stronger choice in the Republican runoff.
Centrist Independent Voter has endorsed Lisa Kinney in Wyoming’s August 18 Democratic primary for the U.S. House of Representatives.
Kinney served ten years in the Wyoming Senate, including two years as minority leader. What most distinguishes her for us is her record of working across party lines and her explicit interest in finding a small group of moderate members of Congress who can cooperate and exercise meaningful influence.
We do not agree with Kinney on everything. We have reservations about some of her tax proposals, and we have not found a clear statement from her on continued American assistance to Ukraine. Her explicit support for NATO is reassuring, but voters should watch for further clarification on Ukraine and related foreign-policy questions before the primary.
Those reservations do not outweigh her experience, independence and demonstrated willingness to work with Republicans. In a Congress increasingly organized around partisan loyalty, those qualities deserve support.
Wyoming voters now have CIVPAC-endorsed candidates in both House primaries: Lisa Kinney in the Democratic primary and Kevin Christensen in the Republican primary.
Sometimes the centrist position is to say that the menu itself is inadequate.
CIVPAC is not endorsing in the Maine Senate race at this time.
That is not because the race is unimportant. It is very important. Maine could help determine control of the United States Senate. Susan Collins is one of the few remaining Republican senators with a reputation for independence. Graham Platner, the Democratic nominee, has become an embattled and highly controversial candidate. Even apart from the personal controversies, his policy positions make a centrist uneasy. And the possible Democratic replacements, if Platner withdraws, do not yet present an obvious centrist alternative.
That is precisely the problem.
This race poses a real dilemma for centrists. On ordinary policy and temperament grounds, many centrists may find Susan Collins preferable to the current Democratic field. She is experienced, institutionally minded, and comparatively moderate within the modern Republican Party. She has sometimes broken with Donald Trump in ways that matter.
But “comparatively moderate” is not the same as independent of today’s Republican Party. A vote for Collins is also a vote that affects Senate control, committee control, confirmations, and the ability of Congress to restrain or enable a Trump-dominated Republican Party. PolitiFact found that Collins voted with Trump’s position 94.6% of the time in 2025, while also noting that she was still among the less Trump-aligned Republican senators. Both halves of that sentence matter.
The Democratic side is not easier. Platner won the Democratic nomination, despite CIVPAC’s preference for Janet Mills in the primary, but he now faces serious allegations and controversies, which he denies, and major Democratic leaders have called on him to withdraw. Senate Democratic leaders have said the DSCC will not invest in the Maine race if he remains on the ballot. Maine Democrats have said that if Platner withdraws, he cannot choose his replacement; the state party would do so under Maine’s replacement process.
Legally, Platner cannot name his replacement. Politically, that is not the end of the matter. He is under no legal obligation to withdraw, and that gives him cards to play. If he tries to condition his withdrawal on influence over the replacement, I am not persuaded that the Maine Democratic Party will have the will to call his bluff. If it capitulates — especially to a successor in Platner’s ideological lane — it will likely lose a majority of the centrist independent vote.
That replacement process may produce a better nominee. It may not.
The names being discussed include figures with experience and ability. Janet Mills is a sitting governor and a conventional governing Democrat. Nirav Shah has a technocratic public-health and administrative profile. Troy Jackson has appeal to working-class populists. Shenna Bellows has experience in state office and a strong democracy/civil-liberties profile. But none of these alternatives, at least at this stage, clearly solves the centrist problem.
Mills may be the most conventionally centrist Democrat. Shah may be the most technocratic. Jackson and Bellows appeal more strongly to progressive voters, which is precisely why they do not clearly solve the problem from a centrist’s point of view. But “less bad” or “more plausible” is not the same as meeting an affirmative standard for endorsement.
That distinction matters to CIVPAC.
Our endorsements are not meant to be automatic partisan gestures. We do not endorse Democrats simply because of our concerns about Trump’s Republican Party. We do not endorse Republicans simply because a Democratic nominee is too far left. We are looking for candidates who show moderation, seriousness, judgment, respect for democratic institutions, and a willingness to govern rather than perform.
Sometimes a race does not offer that choice.
That is not merely a Maine problem. It is a system problem.
America’s winner-take-all elections push politics into two major parties. In normal times, that can be frustrating. In abnormal times, it can become dangerous. Voters are forced to weigh questions that should not have to be bundled together. Do I prefer this candidate’s policy instincts? Do I prefer the other party’s control of the Senate? Do I trust this person’s character? Do I trust that person’s party? Am I voting for a senator, a Senate majority, a check on a president, or a message to my own side?
The answer, too often, is all of the above.
That is why many centrists feel politically homeless. They may prefer Susan Collins to much of the Democratic field on temperament and some policy questions. They may also fear strengthening a Republican Senate in the Trump era. They may want Democrats to nominate serious, mainstream, pro-democracy candidates. They may also be unwilling to reward a party that elevates candidates who are unvetted, extreme, or unfit. They may want a politics of moderation, but find themselves offered a choice between party control and candidate quality.
That is not a healthy political system.
CIVPAC believes voters deserve better than this. They deserve serious candidates in both parties. They deserve primaries that test judgment, not merely ideological enthusiasm. They deserve parties that vet candidates before crisis. They deserve institutions that make room for independent-minded voters without forcing them into binary choices that distort their actual views.
The Maine Senate race is a reminder that centrism is not the same thing as splitting the difference. Sometimes the centrist position is not to “endorse the moderate Republican” or “endorse the least objectionable Democrat.” Sometimes the centrist position is to say that the menu itself is inadequate.
That is where CIVPAC is today.
We may revisit the race if the field changes. If Platner withdraws and Maine Democrats choose a replacement who demonstrates moderation, seriousness, judgment, and respect for democratic institutions, that candidate deserves evaluation. If Collins takes positions or actions that demonstrate genuine independence from Trumpism, that matters too. But at this point, CIVPAC is not prepared to endorse anyone.
That may sound unsatisfying. It is unsatisfying.
But honesty is better than pretending.
The Maine Senate race presents exactly the kind of dilemma that makes many Americans distrust politics: a comparatively moderate Republican tied to a party many centrists believe has become dangerous, and a Democratic field that has not yet produced a clearly acceptable alternative.
That is not a reason to stop caring. It is a reason to demand better.
Update: Shortly after this post was published, Graham Platner announced that he was suspending his campaign. That does not eliminate the dilemma described below; it moves it to the replacement process. The central question now is whether Maine Democrats will choose a nominee who can appeal to centrist and independent voters, or whether they will remain in Platner’s ideological lane.
If the replacement is chosen through a rushed activist convention, Democrats may have avoided letting Platner name his successor while still creating a process likely to favor his faction. That may prove to be all the capitulation he needed.
“Property is theft” is a powerful slogan. But slogans are not systems.
There was a time when a line like “property is theft” would have struck me as profound.
It is a great line. Short, shocking, morally charged, and almost impossible to forget. I remembered it for decades, although I managed to attach it to the wrong author. The phrase is Proudhon’s, not Bukharin’s, as I used to think. My memory apparently filed it somewhere in the Russian revolutionary theory drawer, between Mikhail Bakunin, who would have embraced the phrase, and Nikolai Bukharin, who might have rejected it.
That probably says something about how memory works. It also says something about how political slogans work. The best ones do not merely state a proposition. They lodge.
In high school, I was not immune to that kind of language. I had been raised working class and skeptical of inherited privilege. I had seen enough of the world to know that property was not distributed according to virtue. Some people inherited homes, money, confidence, connections, and second chances. Others inherited bills, caution, and a smaller sense of what was possible. A slogan like “property is theft” did not sound absurd to me.
And it is a phrase worth taking seriously.
Private property is not morally innocent. It can create opportunity, but it can also preserve exclusion. It can reward work, but it can also reward inheritance, luck, monopoly, political influence, and proximity to power. It can create independence, but it can also give some people power over the lives and labor of others.
So I understand the appeal of Proudhon’s line. I also understand why young people drawn to socialism, democratic socialism, or other critiques of capitalism find it clarifying. It takes the world as they see it — unequal, unfair, tilted toward owners — and gives that perception a moral vocabulary.
But slogans are not systems. CIVPAC’s broader approach to political philosophy starts from that distinction.
The strongest argument for private property is not that it is sacred. It is not that God, nature, or metaphysics somehow assigned each parcel of land, each factory, each share of stock, or each bank account to its current owner. Property rights are human institutions. They are created, defined, limited, taxed, inherited, transferred, regulated, and enforced by law.
The better argument for private property is practical.
Societies that protect private property are generally richer, more productive, more innovative, and better able to sustain broad prosperity. People invest, build, save, lend, borrow, repair, improve, and take risks in part because they expect to keep most of what they create. Societies that reject private property sometimes starve. Secure property rights are one of the great foundations of economic life.
Without them, people do not become morally purified. They become poorer.
The political argument may be even more important. Hayek and Friedman were right: economic power and political power cannot be completely separated. If the state controls jobs, housing, investment, credit, production, and the means of livelihood, it controls much more than “the economy.” It controls the practical conditions under which people speak, organize, dissent, publish, worship, move, and live.
A person who can lose only an argument is freer than a person who can lose his livelihood. A society with many employers, many property owners, many newspapers, many associations, many sources of income, and many centers of power gives dissidents room to breathe. A society in which all economic life runs through the state may promise equality, but it gives political authority a terrifying lever.
That does not make laissez-faire a sufficient theory of justice. It is not. Markets can fail. Private power can become abusive. Property can be accumulated in ways that undermine opportunity and democracy. A serious defense of private property has to include taxation, antitrust, public goods, environmental rules, social insurance, and limits on fraud, coercion, and monopoly.
But that is very different from treating property itself as theft.
A better formulation is that private property is not sacred, but it is indispensable. It is not a natural right floating above politics, but it is one of the institutions through which both prosperity and freedom become possible.
This is where I part company with the slogan. Proudhon’s line does not tell us how to build a free and prosperous society. It identifies a wound, but not a cure.
The old socialist and anarchist writers were not stupid. Many of them saw genuine injustice. Some of their questions remain good questions. Who owns? Who works? Who benefits? Who has power? Who is excluded? Those questions should still be asked.
But the history of the twentieth century should make us cautious about answers that concentrate economic power in the name of justice. When politics absorbs property, politics absorbs nearly everything.
That is why I defend private property, but not as an idol. I defend it as a practical institution, one that must be bounded by law and judged by its consequences. It helps make people richer. It can help keep power dispersed. It gives individuals, families, businesses, newspapers, churches, unions, universities, and civic organizations some space outside the direct command of the state.
Jefferson did not follow Locke’s familiar formulation of natural rights as life, liberty, and property. He chose “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” That does not mean property was unimportant to the Founders. It means property was not the highest end. Property was one of the institutions through which people could pursue security, independence, prosperity, and happiness. It was a means, not the whole moral purpose of the political order.
Property is not theft. Property is not sacred either.
Property is a tool. Like all powerful tools, it can be used badly. But without it, we are not merely poorer. We are less free.
The scarce resource is not money. It is ideas and judgment.
That is an odd thing for a political action committee to say.
Political action committees are supposed to ask for money. They are supposed to build lists, cultivate donors, send urgent emails, and explain why democracy, freedom, sanity, or civilization itself depends on a contribution before midnight.
We are not going to do that.
This is not because money never matters in politics. It does. But for an organization like CIVPAC, and for the kind of politics we are trying to encourage, money is not the scarce resource. Judgment is. Seriousness is. A willingness to think clearly about tradeoffs is. A willingness to support good candidates even when they are imperfect, and to oppose bad policies even when they come from one’s own side, is.
A recent Atlantic article by Idrees Kahloon makes the point sharply. Small-dollar donors were once imagined as the democratic answer to big money in politics. (CIVPAC has even taken that position itself.) Instead, the evidence increasingly suggests that small-dollar fundraising can reward outrage, ideological extremity, nationalized grievance, and performative politics. Kahloon cites examples of vast sums flowing into long-shot races because donors despised the opposing candidate: $55 million in small donations to Amy McGrath’s 2020 race against Mitch McConnell, $71 million to Jaime Harrison’s race against Lindsey Graham, and nearly $10 million already raised by Eileen Laubacher against Lauren Boebert in a Colorado district Donald Trump carried by 18 points in 2024. The problem is not civic engagement. The problem is that anger is easy to monetize, and anger does not allocate political resources wisely.
The underlying research by Zachary Albert and Raymond La Raja is even more sobering. Their book, Small Donors in US Politics, finds that small donors are not a representative cross-section of ordinary voters. They tend to be more socioeconomically advantaged, more intensely partisan, and more ideological than non-donors. They often give to high-profile, ideologically extreme, nationally visible candidates rather than to competitive local or down-ballot races where money might do more good.
There is a reasonable counterargument. Small donors are citizens. They are participating. Wealthy donors and dark money remain serious problems, and small-donor systems can sometimes broaden participation. (That is the case that CIVPAC was making.) The Brennan Center argues that critics overstate the role of small donors in polarization and that public financing can encourage candidates to raise money from their own constituents rather than chase national notoriety.
That is a fair caution. The lesson is not that small donors are bad people. The lesson is that money, including small money, can create bad incentives. A politics funded by emotional reaction can become a politics designed to produce emotional reaction. Candidates learn to perform for the donor class, not the electorate. Consultants learn to write the email that gets opened, not the argument that deserves to be believed. The system rewards the person who can make you furious faster than the person who can help you think.
Centrists should be especially wary of this trap.
There is a long history of expensive centrist efforts that produced far less than their funders hoped.
Americans Elect spent a reported $35 million in 2012 trying to build a centrist third-party vehicle and then failed to find a candidate who could meet its own support thresholds. That may well have been because in 2012 we were confronted by two major-party presidential candidates, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, who, with the benefit of hindsight, feel remarkably centrist.
No Labels later raised tens of millions for a 2024 “unity ticket” effort; Reuters reported that the group said it had raised $50 million, even as its leaders warned that no viable candidates might emerge. The effort ultimately ended without a ticket because no candidate with a credible path to winning emerged.
Those two efforts alone involved roughly $85 million. Other centrist projects, reform organizations, unity campaigns, ballot-access drives, and good-government efforts add many millions more. Some of that work was honorable. Some of it may have helped indirectly. But the record should make us humble.
A large pile of money does not magically create a constituency. It does not change the fact that America’s winner-take-all elections make third-party politics brutally difficult. It does not substitute for the slow work of persuasion.
For CIVPAC, the juice is not worth the squeeze.
We do not need to become another organization that spends most of its energy raising money so that it can spend money asking for more money. We do not need to build a direct-mail machine, hire fundraising consultants, or discover which subject line produces the highest level of panic. We do not want to confuse political seriousness with fundraising success.
What we want is more valuable and harder to buy.
We want people to argue with us. We want people to tell us when we have missed something important about a race. We want local knowledge about candidates who are serious, practical, pro-democracy, and willing to govern rather than perform. We want better definitions of centrism — not mushy moderation, not splitting the difference, not “both sides” reflexes, but a politics grounded in liberal democracy, institutional stability, fiscal realism, and personal freedom. We believe in market economics — capitalism, if you like — not as a tribal slogan, but because markets usually work better than politics at allocating resources. We also believe in competent government where government is necessary.
We want readers who will ask: Is this candidate trying to solve problems or build a brand on the back of outrage and anger? Is this policy efficient, fair, and politically sustainable? Does this argument survive contact with facts? Does it respect tradeoffs? Does it strengthen democratic institutions or weaken them? Does it make compromise easier or harder?
That kind of engagement is more useful to us than a check.
CIVPAC’s endorsements are not, at this stage, kingmaking exercises. We are not pretending that our support will decide most races. Our endorsements are public markers: statements about the kind of politics we believe deserves support and the kind of politics we believe should be resisted.
That may sound modest. It is modest. But it is also honest.
The country does not lack political money. It lacks political judgment. It lacks citizens willing to say that some candidates on their own side are reckless, some candidates on the other side are responsible.
So no, we are not asking for your money.
We are asking for your attention, your criticism, your local knowledge, your arguments, and your willingness to help build a politics that rewards seriousness instead of outrage.
If that sounds like less than a contribution, it is not.
CIVPAC is pleased to announce that Ellen Beatty and Eugene “Gene” O’Sullivan have joined the CIVPAC Board of Governors.
CIVPAC’s Board reflects a range of perspectives across the political center, from center-left to center-right. While members do not agree on every issue, they share a commitment to evaluating policy based on evidence, tradeoffs, and real-world outcomes.
Ellen Beatty brings extensive senior financial and organizational experience, including service as Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of NORC at the University of Chicago. Her career has included senior finance roles in research, energy, public accounting, and corporate management. Her experience adds to CIVPAC’s emphasis on fiscal realism, institutional competence, and practical governing judgment.
Gene O’Sullivan brings decades of senior financial, business, and civic experience. His background includes public accounting, manufacturing, corporate finance, nonprofit and university service, and long experience with the practical responsibilities of business leadership. His experience adds to CIVPAC’s emphasis on fiscal discipline, institutional competence, and practical judgment.
With the addition of Ellen and Gene, CIVPAC’s Board currently includes multiple former chief financial officers, professional economists, computer scientists, educators, nonprofit board members, people with government and national-security experience, and founders and operators of successful small businesses. That mix reflects CIVPAC’s belief that good policy requires more than good intentions. It requires fiscal realism, attention to incentives, respect for institutional limits, and practical experience with how decisions are implemented in the real world.
CIVPAC supports centrist policy positions and moderate candidates from either party, as well as independents, where there is a plausible path to success. CIVPAC promotes practical governing judgment, democratic institutions, personal freedom, market-compatible policy, and a stable international order.
We are grateful that Ellen and Gene have agreed to serve, and we look forward to the judgment and experience they will bring to CIVPAC’s work.
You can learn more about CIVPAC and the Board of Governors on our About Us page.
You can also read Ellen Beatty’s biography here and Eugene O’Sullivan’s biography here.
Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons.
In 2026, Americans will celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. That anniversary deserves attention. But there is another 250th anniversary worth remembering: the publication of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations in 1776.
The two anniversaries are not unrelated. The modern case for political liberty and the modern case for economic liberty developed in the same historical moment. Both reflected suspicion of concentrated power. Both challenged inherited systems of privilege. Both assumed that ordinary people should have more freedom to make decisions without permission from distant authorities.
That does not mean Adam Smith should be treated as a simple mascot for free-market politics. He was not that. Smith was a moral philosopher as well as an economist. He understood self-interest, but he also understood vanity, overconfidence, monopoly, privilege, collusion, and the human tendency to justify one’s own advantage as public virtue.
That is one reason Smith remains useful. He does not fit comfortably into modern slogans.
Smith respected markets because markets allow people to cooperate without central command. They allow millions of people, each with limited knowledge, to produce, exchange, save, invest, specialize, and adapt. Prices carry information. Competition disciplines producers. Voluntary exchange allows people to pursue their own plans while often creating value for others.
But Smith did not worship businessmen. He famously warned that people in the same trade rarely gather without the conversation ending in some effort to raise prices or conspire against the public. That is not a minor aside. It is central to Smith’s understanding of political economy. Business interests often seek protection from competition. They may ask government for tariffs, subsidies, licensing rules, monopoly privileges, regulatory barriers, or other arrangements that protect incumbents at public expense.
Smith defended competition, not collusion. He defended voluntary exchange, not monopoly. He defended commercial society, not crony capitalism.
Markets Deserve a Presumption, Not Worship
CIVPAC’s view is not that markets always work perfectly. They do not. Markets can be distorted by monopoly power, externalities, public goods, asymmetric information, fraud, and poorly designed rules. They can also produce outcomes that society may choose to modify for distributional reasons.
But markets deserve a presumption in their favor because they do several things government usually cannot do as well. They coordinate dispersed information. They reward production that others value. They allow decentralized choice. They permit experimentation. They create incentives for efficiency and innovation. They also limit concentrations of power by allowing people to work, buy, sell, invest, and organize without asking government to allocate every opportunity.
This is where Smith connects to Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman.
Hayek emphasized the knowledge problem. No central planner can possess all the local, changing, practical information embedded in prices, preferences, technology, costs, and circumstances. Markets are not merely a moral preference. They are information systems.
Friedman emphasized the relationship between economic freedom and political freedom. If government controls employment, capital, prices, production, education, housing, and access to opportunity, political liberty becomes fragile. A person who depends on the state for livelihood is less free to dissent from the state.
Those arguments can be overstated. Monopoly power can threaten liberty. Fraud can undermine consent. Pollution can impose costs on unwilling parties. Government is also necessary to enforce contracts, protect property, maintain courts, provide public goods, restrain violence, and preserve the rules under which markets function.
But the connection between markets and freedom is real. A society that weakens market institutions too casually should not be surprised when it also weakens individual independence.
Economics Is Not Conservative, but It Is Disciplined
Some people think economics is inherently conservative. That is not quite right.
Economics can support many policies associated with the left. Externalities can justify environmental regulation or carbon pricing. Public goods can justify national defense, basic research, infrastructure, and disease surveillance. Asymmetric information can justify rules in insurance, finance, medicine, food safety, and consumer markets. Monopoly power can justify antitrust and utility regulation. Diminishing marginal utility of income and wealth can support progressive taxation and redistribution.
Progressive policy does not have to be anti-economic. It can be stated in economic terms.
But economics imposes discipline. It asks uncomfortable questions of every political tendency. What is the market failure? How large is it? Is the proposed intervention likely to solve it? What incentives will the remedy create? Who pays? What happens at the margin? Are we correcting an efficiency problem, redistributing income, protecting liberty, or responding to a government-created distortion?
Nor is it enough to show that a market is imperfect. Markets are imperfect because human beings are imperfect. Governments are made of the same material. Public officials, regulators, legislators, voters, interest groups, and experts all have incomplete information and imperfect incentives.
A market imperfection therefore does not automatically justify government intervention. The relevant question is comparative: is the proposed intervention likely to improve the result after taking account of government error, political capture, administrative cost, incentive effects, and unintended consequences?
That places a real burden of proof on intervention. The burden is not impossible to meet. Pollution, monopoly power, fraud, public goods, and severe information failures may justify public action. Distributional objectives may justify redistribution. But the imperfection should be substantial enough, and the remedy plausible enough, to justify replacing one imperfect process with another.
The status quo is not presumed perfect. It is merely presumed to be the condition that must be improved upon, not just criticized.
The Difference Between Market Failure and Market Dislike
This distinction separates CIVPAC’s approach from democratic socialism and Marxism.
Marxist analysis often begins from the premise that capitalism itself is inherently exploitative. In that framework, market outcomes are suspect because they are market outcomes. The central issue is not whether there is a particular externality, monopoly, information failure, public good, or government distortion. The central issue is ownership, class power, and control over production.
Some democratic socialists hold a softer version of that view. Others are closer to ordinary social democrats who accept markets but want more redistribution and regulation. But the instinct is often similar: market outcomes require political correction because markets are assumed to reflect unequal power rather than legitimate exchange.
CIVPAC begins differently.
We begin with the presumption that markets are valuable institutions. They are not perfect. They are not sacred. But they are essential mechanisms for coordinating human activity, transmitting information, dispersing power, and preserving individual choice.
That presumption can be overcome. Government intervention may be justified. But the justification should be explicit. Is the problem monopoly power? An externality? A public good? Asymmetric information? A distributional objective? A threat to democratic institutions? A government rule that prevents the market from functioning properly?
If the answer is only “we do not like the outcome,” that may begin a moral or political conversation. It does not complete an economic argument.
Smith Was Suspicious of Business Too
Smith’s understanding of markets was more subtle than many modern arguments that invoke him.
He knew that merchants and manufacturers often prefer protection from competition. They may present their private interests as national interests. They may seek rules that raise prices, restrict entry, or shift risk to the public. The fact that a business asks for a policy does not mean the policy is pro-market. It may be anti-market.
This is one reason CIVPAC is skeptical of both anti-business populism and business-friendly corporatism.
The anti-business populist sees corporate power and assumes the solution is to punish or restrict business. The corporatist sees business success and assumes the public interest is served by helping incumbent firms. Smith warns against both mistakes.
A market economy requires competition, not merely private ownership. It requires open entry, not protection for insiders. It requires rules of fair dealing, not favoritism. When businesses seek subsidies, tariffs, regulatory barriers, licensing restrictions, or protection from competition, they are not defending free markets. They are often trying to escape them.
Overconfidence Is Also Part of the Human Condition
Smith also understood something modern behavioral economics later formalized: human beings are overconfident.
He wrote of the “over-weening conceit” many people have in their own abilities and the “absurd presumption” people often have in their own good fortune. That observation helps explain why risky professions can become overcrowded and why people take chances that look irrational from the outside.
This matters for policy. Markets involve error. People misjudge. Investors chase returns. Entrepreneurs fail. Consumers overpay. Voters misunderstand. Politicians overpromise. Experts overestimate what they know.
The fact that people make mistakes does not prove that government should make choices for them. Government officials are also human. They have their own incentives, blind spots, overconfidence, constituencies, and institutional biases. The question is not whether markets produce mistakes. They do. The question is whether a proposed intervention is likely to reduce error or merely move it into a political process with weaker feedback and fewer exit options.
Markets do not make people wise. But they create feedback. Losses, prices, competition, entry, exit, and consumer choice discipline error in ways political systems often resist.
Housing as an Example
Housing policy illustrates why language discipline matters.
It is easy to say that America has a “housing shortage” or that housing is “unaffordable.” Those phrases are familiar. They may point toward a real problem. But they can also smuggle in assumptions.
Housing has not literally disappeared. In high-demand communities, housing can still be bought or rented by households with enough income or wealth. The more precise problem is that, in many jurisdictions, housing prices and rents have risen faster than residents, buyers, employers, and local governments would have expected only a few years ago. Housing therefore requires a larger share of income or wealth than many households reasonably planned for.
That is a supply-constrained price problem.
In many places, state and local governments have restricted the ability of housing supply to respond to demand. Zoning rules, permitting delays, parking mandates, density limits, environmental-review processes, and neighborhood veto points prevent markets from adjusting normally. When quantity cannot adjust, prices do more of the work.
A democratic-socialist interpretation may begin with the idea that housing is too expensive because capitalism treats homes as commodities and allows profit-seeking actors to exploit need. A market-oriented institutional interpretation asks a different question: what is preventing supply from responding?
The answer is often government.
That does not mean no government should act. It means government should act on the actual distortion. If government rules are preventing homes from being built, the solution is to reform those rules. Demand subsidies or symbolic attacks on disfavored buyers may be politically satisfying, but they do not solve the underlying problem.
This is the Smith-Hayek-Friedman lesson in practice. Let prices convey information. Let markets respond. Do not let incumbent interests use government to prevent competition. Intervene where there is a real market failure or distributional objective, but do not mistake every disliked price signal for proof that markets have failed.
The CIVPAC Standard
The lesson of The Wealth of Nations is not that business should always win. It is not that government should never act. It is not that inequality is irrelevant or that markets are morally self-justifying.
The lesson is that prosperity and liberty require institutions that channel self-interest toward useful production, competition, innovation, and exchange. Those institutions include markets, but also courts, property rights, contract enforcement, stable money, public goods, antitrust where appropriate, and rules against fraud, coercion, and favoritism.
CIVPAC’s standard is therefore straightforward:
Before government intervenes in a market, identify the problem.
Is it a market failure? A public good? An externality? Monopoly power? Asymmetric information? A distributional objective? A government-created distortion? Does the proposed remedy address the actual problem? What incentives and unintended consequences will it create?
That is not a left-wing or right-wing checklist. It is a discipline.
Smith’s anniversary is worth celebrating because he helped teach the modern world that free exchange, specialization, and competition can produce enormous public benefit without central direction. It is also worth celebrating because Smith was wise enough not to confuse markets with merchants, capitalism with monopoly, or self-interest with virtue.
The country could use more of that wisdom.
At a time when both parties are tempted by populist villain-hunting, economic nationalism, industrial favoritism, and distrust of institutions, Adam Smith remains a useful corrective. He reminds us that markets are powerful not because business is noble, but because competition disciplines self-interest. He reminds us that government is necessary, but also easily captured. He reminds us that ordinary people know things planners do not. He reminds us that liberty depends not only on elections, but on the ability of people to make choices in their economic lives.
The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence will rightly celebrate political liberty. The 250th anniversary of The Wealth of Nations should remind us that economic liberty is part of the same inheritance.
Both require institutions. Both require discipline. And both require skepticism toward concentrated power, whether it comes from government, business, or movements convinced that they alone know how society should be ordered.
There is a new idea circulating in Washington that cuts across ordinary partisan lines: the federal government should take an equity interest in major artificial intelligence companies so the public can share in the gains from AI.
The Case for Capturing the Gains from AI
The instinct behind the idea is understandable. Artificial intelligence is not being created in a vacuum. AI systems draw from the accumulated knowledge of society: public research, open scientific work, software, writing, images, data, language, law, medicine, engineering, and countless other forms of human knowledge. Much of that knowledge was created by people who will not be directly compensated when AI systems use it. Some of it was supported by government-funded research. Some of it came from public institutions. Much of it came from the creative and intellectual work of millions of people over generations.
So there is a legitimate question: if AI produces enormous private wealth, should the public share in some of that gain?
Yes. But government equity ownership is the wrong way to do it.
The Case Against Government Equity Ownership of AI
The first problem is that it is not obvious where the gains from AI will actually accrue. It is possible that a few AI companies will become immensely profitable and capture a large share of the value they create. But it is also possible that competition will drive the market price of AI assistance very low. If that happens, the companies that spend the most building AI systems may not capture anything close to the full social value of what they produce.
History offers a useful warning. The railroads of the nineteenth century created enormous economic value. They opened markets, reduced transportation costs, changed settlement patterns, and increased productivity across the economy. But that did not mean every railroad investor earned extraordinary returns. In many cases, competition, overbuilding, debt, and financial instability shifted the benefits away from the original investors and toward shippers, consumers, landowners, and the broader economy. Many of these railroads went bankrupt.
AI could follow a similar pattern. The largest gains may not remain with the AI model companies. They may flow to software firms, chip companies, cloud providers, manufacturers, hospitals, banks, law firms, schools, small businesses, workers, consumers, and investors across the economy. If AI becomes a cheap general-purpose tool, much of the value may be captured by those who use AI rather than by those who build the underlying models.
This matters because a government equity stake in selected AI firms is a narrow and speculative instrument. It requires the government to decide which companies are likely to capture the future rents from AI. It also requires the government to value highly uncertain firms, negotiate ownership terms, and then manage the conflict between being a regulator and being a shareholder.
This is not a small problem. The federal government should regulate AI in the public interest. It should be concerned about safety, privacy, national security, labor-market effects, competition, misinformation, energy use, and democratic accountability. If the government also owns shares in the firms it regulates, its incentives become muddier. Will policy be written to protect the public, or to protect the value of the government’s portfolio? Even if the answer is “the public,” the appearance of conflict will be hard to avoid.
There is also a simpler point: we already have mechanisms for capturing broad economic gains.
They are called taxes.
The Case for Capturing Some of the Gains from AI Through the Tax System
If AI produces extraordinary corporate profits, the corporate income tax can capture part of those gains. If AI increases the value of publicly traded companies, capital-gains taxes can capture part of those gains when shares are sold. If AI produces great fortunes, estate and inheritance taxes can capture part of those gains when wealth is transferred across generations. If AI raises productivity and wages, individual income taxes will capture part of those gains. If AI benefits a broad range of firms and industries, the tax system can follow the gains wherever they actually appear.
This is a much better approach than trying to make the federal government a venture capitalist.
The tax system is not perfect. In fact, some of the best arguments for public participation in AI gains are really arguments for repairing the tax system.
One obvious reform is limiting the step-up in basis at death. If AI creates enormous unrealized capital gains, those gains should not simply disappear for tax purposes when an owner dies. A tax system that allows large gains to escape both income taxation during life and capital-gains taxation at death is poorly designed. If this creates a record-keeping burden for small inherited portfolios, the limit on step-up in basis can be tied to estates above some significant threshold.
A second reform is preserving, and possibly modestly increasing, the corporate income tax. The goal should not be to punish business investment. AI will require large investments in computing, energy, chips, software, and talent. But if AI substantially increases corporate profits, it is reasonable for part of those profits to support the public institutions and infrastructure that make economic growth possible.
A third reform is tightening the estate tax. A serious estate tax is one of the few mechanisms we have for limiting the permanent concentration of wealth across generations. This does not mean confiscatory taxation. It does mean that very large fortunes should not be able to avoid taxation through increasingly elaborate planning devices.
One particular issue deserves more attention: the use of charitable structures that allow wealthy individuals and families to receive large tax advantages while retaining substantial influence over the assets. Philanthropy can serve public purposes. But an unlimited charitable deduction for self-governed or family-influenced charitable entities can become a way to avoid tax while preserving social power and control. This is not the same thing as paying taxes to support public purposes through the ordinary budget process.
Conclusion
If the public has a claim to the benefits from AI, the cleanest way to recognize that claim is not for the government to take shares in a handful of companies. It is to make sure the tax system captures AI-generated gains wherever they occur.
This approach has several advantages.
It does not require the government to pick winners.
It does not require the government to decide which AI company will dominate ten years from now.
It does not entangle regulators with ownership interests.
It does not assume that AI developers will capture all of the value they create.
It preserves market competition while allowing the public to share in broad economic gains.
And it fits ordinary public-finance principles. When economic activity creates large gains, the tax system should capture a reasonable share of those gains to support public purposes. When economic activity creates risks or external costs, regulation should address those risks directly.
This distinction is important. AI regulation and AI revenue policy should not be confused.
The government should regulate AI where public risks are real. It should address fraud, discrimination, privacy violations, national-security risks, cyber risks, misuse in elections, labor-market disruption, and the concentration of market power. It should consider whether copyright law, data rules, and competition policy need to be updated for the AI era.
But if the question is how the public should share in the economic upside of AI, the answer should be broad tax policy, not public ownership of selected firms.
CIVPAC’s general view is that public policy should be economically sound, fair, respectful of individual freedom, and politically realistic. A federal equity stake in major AI companies fails too many of those tests. It is economically speculative, administratively messy, politically tempting, and likely to create conflicts between regulation and ownership.
The better answer is less dramatic but more durable: preserve competitive markets, regulate AI directly where public risks are real, and fix the tax system so that AI-generated gains cannot escape taxation simply because they appear as corporate profits, unrealized capital gains, or inherited wealth.
AI may well transform the economy. If it does, the public should benefit. But the way to do this is not to make the federal government a shareholder in a few favored companies. The way to do it is to tax the gains wherever they actually appear.
