The new Washington think tank that I mentioned a few pages ago is the Niskanen Center, and the thinkers there would remodel our economy along the lines of the Nordic social democracies. So…socialist? Not exactly—it was created by apostate defectors from Charles Koch’s libertarian Cato Institute. “Markets are not just the natural and spontaneous consequence of government inaction,” its 2018 manifesto explained. Remember: the economic right’s great confidence trick in the 1980s was to redesign and reengineer the economy to privilege the rich and business—and then to insist that a market economy
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