A Response to the Conservative Backlash: These Ideas ARE Conservative
There is a principle in conservative thought going back to Aristotle, reinforced by Catholic social teaching (Rerum Novarum, 1891), and embedded in the Ame…
The Conservative Principle at Stake: Subsidiarity
There is a principle in conservative thought going back to Aristotle, reinforced by Catholic social teaching (Rerum Novarum, 1891), and embedded in the American Constitution: subsidiarity. It means this: decisions should be made at the lowest, most local level capable of making them. The family should decide family matters. Communities should decide community matters. States should decide state matters. The federal government should involve itself only when no lower authority can adequately address an issue.
The entire thrust of the proposals in this series is subsidiarity. We are arguing for power to flow back to workers, to communities, to local governance. We are arguing against the centralization of power in distant corporations.
The current system violates subsidiarity catastrophically. A decision made in the boardroom of Amazon in Seattle affects the wage, working conditions, and economic survival of a worker in rural Mississippi—who has no voice, no vote, no say. That is not conservative. That is tyranny.
Now let me address the specific objections, point by point.
The Objections and the Responses
The Talking Point: Raise the minimum wage and employers will hire fewer people. This is basic supply and demand. You can't ignore economics.
The Response: This objection is not economics. It is ideology masquerading as economics. Let me show you the actual data.
The most comprehensive review of minimum wage research, published by the Economic Policy Institute in 2024, examined decades of studies. The finding: the overwhelming majority of recent research finds no job losses or only small disemployment effects from minimum wage increases.
Look at actual history. When the federal minimum wage hit its peak purchasing power in 1968 at $13.86 in today's dollars, unemployment was 3.5-3.6%. We had essentially full employment. Wages were rising. Companies were thriving. The stock market was strong. This was not a catastrophe.
When Washington State and California raised wages above the federal level in recent decades while surrounding states did not, researchers could compare directly. States that raised wages experienced BETTER employment and small business trends than states that did not.
The Cengiz-Dube-Lindner-Zipperer study (2019) examined 138 state minimum wage changes from 1979-2016. Result: "the overall number of low-wage jobs remained essentially unchanged over the five years following the increase." No job loss.
Does any wage increase eventually matter? Perhaps. But we're not talking about tripling wages overnight. We're talking about modest increases phased in over time. The research shows these do not destroy jobs. They destroy profit margins. And yes, a company losing profit margin is painful for the shareholder. But that is not the same as job destruction.
The deeper point: Conservatives claim to believe in markets. But when workers have more bargaining power (because they have another option, another job, a decent living), that IS the market working. The market is clearing at a higher wage. That is what you want if you believe in markets. If you believe only in one-directional power—the employer can demand anything, the worker must accept anything—you don't believe in markets. You believe in power.
The Talking Point: People should be free to work or not work, to join a union or not. Forcing them into a union violates their liberty.
The Response: I agree. And nobody in this series is proposing mandatory unionization. We are proposing that workers have the freedom to organize if they choose. That is the opposite of coercion.
Right now, workers are "free" to organize—but if they do, they can be fired (illegally, but it happens). If they try to organize, companies hire union-busters, sue them, intimidate them. The National Labor Relations Act is supposed to protect organizing, but it is unenforced and inadequate.
What we are proposing is this: make the legal protection for organizing actually real. Allow workers to form unions without retaliation. Let the market for labor organization compete freely. Some workers will choose unions. Others will not. That is their choice. But make the choice real, not coerced.
Here is the deeper point about freedom: An individual worker, without organization, has almost no power against an employer. The employer can demand anything. Pay or starve. Work these hours or find another job. The worker is "free" in the way a slave is free—free to accept chains or die.
Conservatives believe in checks and balances. You believe the federal government should not have unchecked power, so we divide it into three branches. By this logic, an employer should not have unchecked power over a worker, so we need checks and balances in labor markets. That check is called unionization. It is the worker's branch of government.
Mutual aid organizations, worker cooperatives, guilds, fraternal orders—these are all traditional conservative institutions. They are based on voluntary association and mutual benefit. A union is mutual aid for workers. This is conservative.
The Talking Point: People work to make money. If you tax their success, they'll work less. Tax too much and you get economic stagnation. It's not fair to punish people for being successful.
The Response: Let me challenge this on two levels: empirical and philosophical.
Empirical: The United States in the 1950s had a top marginal tax rate of 91% on income over $2 million. Corporate tax rates were 52-53%. And what happened? The strongest business profitability in American history. The strongest stock market returns. The strongest economic growth (3.9-4.8% annually). The strongest job creation. The strongest wage growth.
If high taxes destroy incentive, this should not have been possible. Yet it happened. Why? Because people work for reasons beyond maximum profit. They work for security, for status, for the ability to provide for their family, for the satisfaction of building something. A 91% tax rate means: keep 9 cents of every dollar over $2 million. A person in this situation still has every incentive to work. They will still be enormously wealthy. They will still profit hugely from success. They just cannot infinite-extract.
Philosophical: There is a difference between payment for work and extraction. When you pay a worker, you pay them for the value they created. That is fair. When you extract value that workers created but workers do not receive, that is not incentive—that is theft.
Current corporate profits represent extraction. A CEO who "earned" $50 million did not work 1,000x harder than an employee earning $50K. The $50 million is extracted from workers' unpaid productivity. Progressive taxation claws back some of this extraction and redirects it to the public good (roads, schools, military, research).
Is that unfair to the CEO? Perhaps. But it is less unfair than the extraction itself.
Here is what we are really proposing: A return to the tax rates and business models of the 1950s, when America had the strongest economy in the world, the strongest labor movement, the strongest middle class. This is not radical. This is conservative—conserving the economic model that worked.
The Talking Point: These ideas require massive government intervention in business. That is socialism. America was founded on small government and free markets.
The Response: Actually, most of what we propose reduces federal government power. And what you are defending is already massive government intervention.
What we propose that reduces government: Worker cooperatives and ESOPs do not require government. They are voluntary. Benefit corporations do not require government—they are private companies. These are decentralization, not centralization.
What requires government is enforcement of antitrust law to break up monopolies. Currently, 40 years of deregulation and lax antitrust enforcement have allowed massive corporate consolidation. Amazon, Google, Meta, Comcast, the megabanks—these are government creations. The government allowed them to consolidate. The government allows them to avoid taxes. The government allows them to manipulate markets. The government allows them to lobby for laws that crush their competitors.
If you want small government, you should support antitrust enforcement. Breaking up monopolies IS small government. It returns power to local communities and small businesses.
What the current system is: Not free markets. Crony capitalism. Large corporations use their lobbying power to get government to write laws in their favor. Tax breaks for big corporations but not small ones. Regulations that small businesses cannot afford to comply with but big corporations can. This is government intervention—in favor of the already-powerful.
What we propose: Level the playing field. Let small businesses compete with big ones. Let workers organize. Let communities decide what kind of businesses they want. This is free markets.
Historically, American capitalism was never "free market." Alexander Hamilton used government to invest in infrastructure, subsidize manufacturing, and protect American industries. Lincoln used government to invest in education and land grants to farmers. Theodore Roosevelt used government antitrust to break up monopolies. Eisenhower used government to build interstate highways. These were conservative presidents using government strategically to decentralize power and strengthen local communities.
What is Un-American is corporate consolidation, monopoly power, and the corruption of democracy by corporate lobbying. What is American is breaking up concentrated power.
The Talking Point: Small cooperatives might work, but you can't run a modern economy on cooperatives. They lack the efficiency and scale of investor-owned companies. It's utopian thinking.
The Response: Mondragon Corporation in Spain is a federation of worker cooperatives. 80,000 workers. Operating in 40 countries. Generating billions in revenue. More profitable than comparable investor-owned companies. More stable. More innovative.
John Lewis in the UK is employee-owned. 70,000 workers. Highly profitable. Industry-leading wages.
SRC Holdings is an ESOP. Stock price up 1,000,000% in 42 years. The founder, Jack Stack, is a multimillionaire. His employees are millionaires. The company is hugely successful.
Patagonia and Ben & Jerry's are benefit corporations. Industry-leading margins. World-class talent retention. Strong customer loyalty. More "efficient" than conventional companies by every measure that matters.
This is not utopia. This is current reality. The claim that cooperatives can't scale is empirically false.
Why do they work? Because employees who own the company work harder, innovate more, and care about long-term success instead of quarterly earnings. Because there is no adversarial conflict between management and workers—they are the same people. Because decision-making is faster (no need for distant shareholders). Because compensation systems reward real performance instead of gaming quarterly numbers.
Research shows worker-owned companies have 4-5 times lower turnover, higher productivity, and higher profit margins than comparable investor-owned companies. This is not opinion. This is data.
The question is not whether cooperatives can work. They do. The question is: why don't we have more of them? Because the current legal and financial system is designed to reward investor-ownership. Banks prefer lending to conventional companies. Tax law prefers investor-owned companies. Regulations favor scale in investor-owned companies. Not because cooperatives are inferior, but because the system is rigged.
Change the system. Remove the bias. Cooperatives will flourish.
The Talking Point: Your Genuine Progress Indicator is nice in theory, but people care about real measures—jobs, incomes, economic growth. GDP is the standard measure and it works.
The Response: GDP is the worst measure of economic success ever created. Let me show you why.
GDP counts everything, values nothing. A hurricane that destroys $10 billion in infrastructure is counted as $10 billion of positive growth (reconstruction spending). Cancer epidemics are positive GDP (treatment spending). Traffic accidents are positive GDP (emergency services). Divorce is positive GDP (legal fees and duplicate households). Depleting aquifers that took 1 million years to form is positive GDP (extraction revenue).
Meanwhile, real measures of wellbeing show that while US GDP has tripled since 1975, life satisfaction has declined 25 percentage points. Real wages are flat. Life expectancy is declining. Mental health is in crisis. Work hours are long. Job security is gone.
Is this success? By GDP, yes. By any human measure, no.
The Genuine Progress Indicator adds the things GDP ignores (household work, volunteer work, leisure, community) and subtracts the things GDP counts wrong (pollution, crime, resource depletion, inequality). The result: a honest picture of whether we are actually better off.
And the result in America is clear: we stopped making progress in the 1970s. GDP grew. Real progress did not.
Your concern about jobs is correct. But measuring by GDP is backwards. An economy that optimizes for real jobs—stable, well-paying, meaningful work—would look very different. It would have fewer abstract financial transactions and more real production. Fewer service workers in giant warehouses and more small farmers, local manufacturers, skilled craftspeople.
You want good jobs? Measure by jobs, not GDP. You want wages to rise? Measure wages, not GDP. You want communities to be strong? Measure community health, not GDP. Stop using a measure that counts destruction as progress.
The Talking Point: Communities and local governments are corrupt too. Centralizing power at the local level instead of the federal level doesn't solve the problem—it just moves corruption around.
The Response: True. Corruption is everywhere. But there are degrees. At the federal level, corruption is invisible, distant, and affects millions. Your senator takes a corporate bribe and it affects 10 million constituents. At the local level, corruption is visible, near, and affects hundreds. Your town council takes a bribe and the community sees it, knows who to vote out.
Moreover, at the local level, you have options. If your town becomes corrupt, you can move to another town. If the federal government becomes corrupt, you can... move to another country? Local governance enables exit, voice, and loyalty in ways federal governance does not.
But here is the deeper point: What we are proposing is not just "local government instead of federal government." We are proposing cooperative, democratic ownership. Workers owning companies. Communities owning shared resources. Decisions made by those affected.
This is not government at all—local or federal. It is self-governance. It is people controlling their own lives.
A worker cooperative is not "local government corruption"—it is workers running their own workplace. A community that decides to support local agriculture instead of corporate chains is not "local government corruption"—it is people making democratic choices about their community. A network of small banks instead of megabanks is not "government power"—it is market power decentralized.
Yes, these can be corrupted. Everything can. But they are less likely to be corrupted because power is distributed and visible. And when they are corrupted, the stakes are smaller.
The Real Question: Who Centralizes Power?
Here is what mystifies me about the conservative backlash to this series: Conservatives claim to fear centralized power. You rightly worry about "big government." Yet you defend big business—which is far more centralized, far more powerful, far more unaccountable than government.
A senator is elected by voters and can be voted out. A corporation is controlled by shareholders and cannot be voted out. Government authority is constrained by the Constitution. Corporate authority is constrained only by law—and the corporation hires lawyers to interpret the law.
Government can be voted out. Corporations are eternal.
When Amazon closes a warehouse, 5,000 people lose their jobs with no due process, no appeal, no compensation. When a senator votes for a bad law, 10 million people can vote them out. Yet conservatives worry more about government tyranny than corporate tyranny. Why?
Because corporate power is invisible. You don't think of Amazon as "government." You think of it as "the market." But Amazon controls the buying habits of 200 million Americans. It sets prices. It decides what people see. It pays politicians to write laws in its favor. That is not the market—that is monopoly.
Monopoly is centralization of power. The current corporate consolidation—Amazon, Google, Meta, the megabanks, the hospital chains—is the most dramatic centralization of economic power in American history. Far more centralized than government.
What we are proposing is the opposite of centralization. We are proposing to disperse power:
- → Break up monopolies so many companies compete instead of one company controlling
- → Give workers a voice in their workplaces instead of dictatorial management
- → Let communities decide what kind of businesses they want instead of distant corporations deciding for them
- → Return to the subsidiarity principle: decisions at the lowest level capable of making them
- → Empower small businesses, local banks, local farms, local manufacturers instead of allowing consolidation into national/global megacorps
This is decentralization. This is what conservatives should want.
On American Tradition
Let me address one more claim: that these ideas are un-American.
Worker cooperatives existed in America long before socialism was a word. The Rochdale Pioneers (1844, England) established cooperative principles that were adopted by American farmer cooperatives, worker cooperatives, and mutual aid societies throughout the 1800s and early 1900s.
Mutual aid—people helping each other without government—is a distinctly American tradition. Benjamin Franklin's Junto was mutual aid. The volunteer fire brigades were mutual aid. The barn-raising tradition was mutual aid. These are quintessentially American. They predate government safety nets by centuries.
Employee ownership is American. The first ESOP was created in America. The ESOP movement is an American innovation. When Jack Stack created the ESOP model for SRC Holdings, he was inventing something American.
Antitrust enforcement is American. Theodore Roosevelt, an American conservative, broke up Standard Oil. That is the tradition we are invoking—not the neoliberal corruption of the last 40 years, but the authentic conservative tradition of dispersing power.
Localism is American. The genius of the Constitution is subsidiarity—decisions at the lowest capable level. The states are supposed to be laboratories for democracy. Communities are supposed to self-govern. This is the deepest American tradition.
"What is un-American is corporate consolidation. What is un-American is a worker having no voice in decisions that affect their life. What is un-American is a distant corporation deciding what a community needs. What is un-American is the subordination of local autonomy to national capital. What is American—profoundly American—is the belief that communities should govern themselves and workers should have a say in their work."
A Question for True Conservatives
I ask real conservatives—those who actually believe in checks and balances, decentralized power, local autonomy, and individual liberty—to examine what you are defending.
You defend the right to organize as fundamental to liberty. Yet you allow corporations to suppress unionization. Why?
You defend free markets as the best way to organize economic activity. Yet you allow monopolies to destroy competition. Why?
You fear government tyranny. Yet you seem unconcerned about corporate tyranny, which is far more extensive. Why?
You believe decisions should be made locally. Yet you allow distant corporations to make decisions that affect local communities. Why?
The answer is that you have been persuaded by a false ideology. An ideology that says "the market" (which is really just large corporations) is always good, and government is always bad. This is not genuine conservatism. This is corporate ideology pretending to be conservatism.
Real conservatism would oppose corporate monopoly with the same vigor it opposes government tyranny. Real conservatism would support worker voice and community autonomy. Real conservatism would resist the consolidation of power—whether governmental or corporate.
The proposals in this series are conservative in the true sense: they conserve local community, they conserve worker dignity, they conserve the ability of people to govern their own lives, they conserve the dispersed power that enables liberty.
The ideology you are defending—neoliberal corporate consolidation—is not conservative. It is the most radical transformation of American society in the past century. It has destroyed local autonomy, eliminated small businesses, concentrated wealth and power in a tiny elite, and corrupted democracy. That is radical.
What is conservative—truly conservative—is returning to the subsidiarity principle. Returning to the 1950s business model where workers had voice and companies were local. Returning to the American tradition of mutual aid and cooperative organization. Returning to antitrust enforcement and the dispersal of power.
If you are a true conservative, you should be on this side of the argument. And I believe many of you are. You have just been confused by the noise.
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