Hamilton, Friedman, and the Problem of the Benevolent Guardian: An Objectivist, Cipollian, and Rational Paternalist Critique of J. D. Vance

Andrew Langer’s Wall Street Journal essay, “What JD Vance Gets Wrong About Hamilton,” published August 27, 2026, addresses an important change taking place within contemporary American conservatism. Langer responds to Vice President J. D. Vance’s increasingly explicit rejection of the laissez-faire tradition associated with Milton Friedman in favor of what Vance describes as a more Hamiltonian approach to political economy. Vance recently told Michael Knowles that economic policy on the American right has become “much more Alexander Hamilton” than Milton Friedman and called that development “obviously a good thing.” More consequentially, he explained why. Friedman’s ideas, Vance argued, made greater sense when the United States possessed “a very rich and powerful institutional Christianity” and when laissez-faire therefore operated with “Christian guardrails on everything.” The implication is that the erosion of those institutions changes the proper role of government and strengthens the case for a state more willing to direct economic activity toward socially desirable ends. Langer correctly recognizes that this is not simply an argument over tariffs or industrial policy. It is an argument about the relationship among economic liberty, moral authority, civil society, and political power.

There is an important historical qualification at the outset. Vance is not simply inventing his Hamilton. Alexander Hamilton favored public credit, a national bank, tariffs, encouragement of manufacturing, and a substantially more energetic national government than Jefferson and Madison were generally prepared to accept. What does not follow is that Hamilton’s program for establishing the productive and fiscal capacity of a vulnerable eighteenth-century republic supplies a general warrant for twenty-first-century economic guardianship. As Langer argues, Hamilton’s political economy was never the uncontested American position, and the relevant historical alternative is not an authentically American Hamilton opposed to an alien Friedman. The dispute over centralization, economic direction, and individual liberty was present at the founding itself. Vance is therefore entitled to claim Hamilton as an ancestor of economic nationalism, but he is not entitled to treat Hamiltonianism as though it settles the constitutional or moral question of how much authority government should exercise over economic life.

The more important problem becomes visible from an Objectivist perspective because the central question is not whether industrial policy occasionally produces a desirable outcome or whether strong families and communities contribute to a healthy civilization. The question is what moral authority government possesses to determine the purposes toward which individuals should direct their productive lives. Vance begins with a proposition that is perfectly defensible: economic growth does not constitute the whole of human flourishing. People require families, friendships, communities, moral commitments, intellectual development, and purposes that cannot be reduced to gross domestic product or consumer satisfaction. Nothing in a serious defense of capitalism requires pretending otherwise. A price system can communicate scarcity, coordinate economic activity, and permit enormous numbers of strangers to cooperate, but it cannot tell a person whether he should marry, remain faithful to his spouse, care for an aging parent, pursue scholarship rather than greater income, devote himself to religious observance, or sacrifice an attractive opportunity because accepting it would violate his integrity. The mistake begins when the incompleteness of economics as a moral philosophy is converted into evidence that political authority should supply the missing moral content.

Objectivism draws the relevant boundary more sharply than conventional libertarianism because it rejects the tendency to treat “the nation,” “society,” “the family,” or “the common good” as entities possessing purposes independent of the individuals who compose them. Nations do not think, suffer, love, produce, hope, or die; individuals do. Communities can be profoundly important to human flourishing, but their importance arises from the relationships, commitments, and institutions created by human beings rather than from some independent collective consciousness possessing a superior claim upon them. Government consequently performs an indispensable moral function when it protects individual rights, prohibits force and fraud, enforces contracts, protects property, adjudicates disputes, and establishes the objective legal conditions under which peaceful cooperation is possible. It crosses an entirely different boundary when it begins treating individuals as instruments through which government will achieve family stability, national greatness, religious renewal, demographic objectives, preferred patterns of production, or any other politically defined conception of flourishing.

Vance’s appeal to Christianity makes this distinction especially important. He is correct that capitalism operates within a broader moral culture and that economic institutions alone cannot cultivate every disposition required for civilized life. Families, churches, schools, professional organizations, voluntary associations, and cultural traditions have historically taught honesty, deferred gratification, responsibility, contractual fidelity, charity, self-restraint, and obligations extending beyond immediate material consumption. Friedman did not need to deny any of this, because capitalism was never offered as a substitute for theology, family, ethics, or culture. The argument for economic liberty is not that markets contain the entirety of moral wisdom; it is that decisions concerning production and exchange generally should remain with the people who own the property, perform the work, assume the risks, and bear the consequences.

The decisive distinction is therefore between moral authority and coercive authority. A church may teach that a wealthy person has a duty to give generously to the poor. Parents may insist that their children develop habits of responsibility and restraint. A professional institution may impose demanding ethical obligations upon individuals who voluntarily enter a profession. Communities can condemn conduct they regard as destructive, and citizens can argue vigorously about virtue, obligation, and the proper use of wealth. None of these institutions possesses the distinctive power of government, because government ultimately operates through enforceable law. A tariff does not persuade consumers to prefer domestic goods; it alters the terms upon which they are permitted to buy foreign ones. A subsidy does not convince taxpayers that a particular industry deserves support; it compels them to support it. Regulation backed by legal sanctions is not moral instruction. The moment Vance moves from the observation that Christianity once supplied valuable cultural restraints to the conclusion that government should compensate for their disappearance, he has quietly substituted political coercion for moral formation.

That move creates an additional logical difficulty that deserves considerably more attention than it usually receives. If Christianity is important to Vance’s political economy because it historically produced the cultural characteristics necessary for economic and national success, Christianity has ceased to be defended primarily as a matter of theological truth or individual conviction. It has become an instrument of social policy whose value is partly demonstrated by its consequences. Once religion is evaluated in that instrumental way, however, Christianity must compete against other religious and cultural traditions according to the same empirical standard. If the relevant question is which tradition produces unusually strong educational attainment, professional achievement, entrepreneurship, social cohesion, family responsibility, or accumulation of human capital, why should the government stop with Christianity? Why not, to put the reductio plainly, convert the United States to Judaism?

The question is deliberately provocative, but the underlying problem is entirely serious. Jews are plainly not the only economically or intellectually successful population in the world, and it would be methodologically foolish to construct a universal hierarchy of religions or ethnic groups from a handful of socioeconomic indicators. Nevertheless, Jewish achievement presents an inconvenient counterexample to any claim that Christian moral formation is uniquely required for economic flourishing. Pew’s global research found Jews to be the most highly educated of the world’s major religious groups, averaging 13.4 years of schooling, with 61 percent possessing postsecondary education. Contemporary American data show the same extraordinary educational pattern: Pew’s 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study found that 65 percent of Jewish adults had at least a bachelor’s degree, compared with 35 percent of American adults overall, exceeded among the religious groups Pew measured only by Hindus at 70 percent. Earlier Pew research also found Jewish American households substantially overrepresented at high income levels. These figures cannot establish that Judaism causes prosperity; geography, immigration selection, historical circumstance, occupational patterns, family structure, and many other variables matter. Yet precisely that qualification exposes the weakness in using Christianity instrumentally as well. If we cannot infer the truth or political authority of Judaism from Jewish socioeconomic achievement, neither can we infer governmental authority for Christianity from the social achievements of historically Christian societies.

The Jewish case actually makes the argument more interesting because Jewish communities frequently achieved extraordinary educational, commercial, professional, and intellectual success while living as minorities without control of the surrounding state. Jewish traditions placed enormous importance on literacy, study, textual interpretation, family obligation, communal institutions, law, argument, and the transmission of learning across generations. Historical exclusion from landholding and many occupations also encouraged the development of portable forms of human capital, commercial networks, professional expertise, and education. How much explanatory weight belongs to religion, historical persecution, urbanization, migration patterns, institutional adaptation, or selection effects is a legitimate scholarly question, and no single explanation is adequate. What matters here is that the characteristics Vance appears to value can emerge through institutions that possess powerful internal moral authority without controlling the government. Jewish history therefore provides less support for Vance’s argument than for its opposite: resilient moral and cultural institutions can develop precisely because communities must transmit their values through family, education, persuasion, custom, and voluntary association rather than through sovereign political authority.

The absurdity of imagining a governmental program of Judaization is therefore analytically useful. Suppose statistical research established beyond serious dispute that one religious community produced, on average, greater educational attainment, higher savings rates, more entrepreneurship, stronger family continuity, or greater intellectual achievement than other communities. Would those findings give Congress legitimate authority to promote conversion to that religion? Would tax preferences for religious observance become legitimate economic policy? Would schools be justified in teaching its theology because empirical evidence suggested that its cultural habits improved productivity? Few defenders of religious liberty would accept such conclusions. The reason is not merely that government might choose the wrong religion. The more fundamental reason is that government has no legitimate authority to decide religious truth by reference to economic utility in the first place. Once this is understood, Vance’s “Christian guardrails” argument becomes much more difficult to sustain. Christianity may make moral claims that are true, profound, and socially beneficial, but its political legitimacy cannot rest upon the proposition that Christians produce better economic outcomes.

There is also a theological irony in Vance’s formulation. Treating Christianity as necessary because it makes capitalism, industrial policy, or American national power function more effectively risks reducing Christianity itself to a technology of governance. Christianity claims to concern truth, salvation, sin, obligation, transcendence, and the relationship between human beings and God. To defend it principally because it generates disciplined workers, stable families, patriotic citizens, or more sustainable capitalism is to subordinate religion to the very material and political objectives religion is supposed to transcend. A Christian should have almost as much reason as an Objectivist to resist such instrumentalization, albeit for entirely different philosophical reasons. The Objectivist objects because government cannot legitimately prescribe another person’s ultimate values; the Christian ought to object because faith selected for its usefulness to the state is already being transformed into something other than faith.

This does not eliminate the genuine philosophical tension between Christianity and Objectivism. Christianity traditionally grounds morality in God and revelation and places considerable emphasis upon humility, charity, obedience, sacrifice, and obligations toward others. Objectivism grounds ethics in reason and the requirements of human life and rejects self-sacrifice as a general moral ideal, emphasizing rational self-interest, independence, productivity, integrity, and pride. These are real differences that cannot be made to disappear by describing both traditions as defenders of “ordered liberty.” Yet political liberty does not require them to disappear. A Christian may believe that a wealthy person has a moral obligation to give away much of his fortune, while an Objectivist may regard such sacrifice as irrational. A Jewish scholar may understand moral obligation through an entirely different theological and legal tradition. A secular individual may reject all three accounts. The achievement of a free society is that these disagreements can remain arguments about how people ought to live rather than becoming political contests over which faction gains the power to compel everyone else to live accordingly.

Carlo Cipolla’s theory of stupidity introduces another difficulty into Vance’s conception of an energetic developmental state because even if one granted that political authorities should direct society toward substantive moral and economic ends, someone must actually make those decisions. Cipolla’s famous classification is useful precisely because it separates intention, intelligence, social status, and formal education from outcomes. Intelligent conduct benefits the actor and others. Bandit behavior benefits the actor while harming others. Helpless conduct benefits others while injuring the actor. Stupid conduct imposes losses on others without a corresponding gain to the actor and may harm the actor as well. The relevance to political economy is immediate: there is no entity called “government” that thinks independently of the people operating it. Economic planning is performed by politicians, administrators, economists, lawyers, advisers, lobbyists, and bureaucracies, all of whom remain subject to the same ignorance, self-deception, ideological fashions, conflicts of interest, and occasional stupidity as everyone else.

Vance’s argument consequently requires considerably more confidence in political judgment than its advocates generally acknowledge. A developmental state must decide which industries are strategically important, which jobs deserve protection, which forms of production should remain domestic despite higher costs, which foreign dependencies create unacceptable risks, which technologies deserve public support, and how much consumers should sacrifice in exchange for these objectives. National security can unquestionably make some of these questions legitimate concerns of government; a country need not become strategically dependent upon an adversary for weapons, critical infrastructure, or indispensable military inputs merely because those goods can be imported cheaply. Yet recognizing such exceptional problems does not establish a general competence to manage the productive structure of the economy. The question Cipolla forces upon us is why the politicians making these allocations should be expected to know enough to outperform the decentralized judgments of millions of people who possess local knowledge and personally bear many of the consequences of their decisions.

The institutional problem becomes more severe because political mistakes possess different feedback mechanisms from ordinary private mistakes. A business that repeatedly produces something people do not want eventually loses customers and capital. A professional who persistently gives incompetent advice may lose clients and, in a functioning professional regime, potentially lose the privilege of practice. A religious institution that alienates its members can lose congregants. These corrective mechanisms are neither instantaneous nor perfect; private organizations can remain incompetent or abusive for decades. Their institutional advantage is not inherent wisdom but the possibility of competition and exit. Political decisions are much harder to escape. Citizens cannot individually opt out of a national tariff, a tax system, an industrial subsidy, or a regulatory regime simply because they believe policymakers have made a mistake.

Langer’s strongest argument can be understood in precisely these terms. Vance maintains that laissez-faire operated more successfully when America possessed stronger Christian and civic institutions and that their weakening now justifies greater government direction. Langer responds that the causal sequence may partly run in reverse. Over several generations, government assumed functions once performed by families, churches, mutual-aid associations, fraternal organizations, charities, and local communities. Public provision did not single-handedly destroy civil society, but it often displaced voluntary provision and changed expectations about where responsibility for social problems belonged. The resulting weakness of nonpolitical institutions is then invoked as a reason for transferring still more responsibility to government. This creates the possibility of a self-reinforcing institutional process in which an intervention contributes to the weakness subsequently offered as justification for another intervention.

Cipolla’s framework also prevents an important analytical mistake, because not every destructive public policy should be classified as stupid from the perspective of the individuals promoting it. A tariff may impose small losses on millions of consumers while producing substantial gains for a concentrated domestic industry. A subsidy may allocate capital inefficiently from the standpoint of the broader economy while producing excellent returns for the recipient. A regulatory structure may make an industry less productive while increasing the authority, budgets, employment security, and political importance of the administrative institutions responsible for regulating it. The individuals pursuing these benefits may be acting with considerable intelligence on their own behalf. In Cipolla’s terminology, their behavior is closer to banditry than stupidity because they obtain gains while imposing costs upon others. Institutional stupidity appears when enough of these individually advantageous arrangements accumulate that the entire productive system deteriorates, eventually injuring even many of those who originally benefited from the interventions.

This is why decentralization deserves a defense that does not romanticize markets or civil society. Families can be irrational. Churches can become corrupt or authoritarian. Corporations can destroy shareholder value while senior management congratulates itself on its sophistication. Universities can reward ideological conformity rather than intellectual achievement. Professional associations can protect incompetent insiders. Voluntary institutions contain precisely the same human beings who populate government. Their comparative advantage lies in the fact that their failures are generally more limited in scope and more vulnerable to alternatives. A dysfunctional company need not become the nation’s company; a foolish university curriculum need not become the national curriculum; an incompetent adviser need not become everyone’s adviser. Centralization increases the danger that one institution’s error will acquire legal universality.

Rational Paternalism complicates this argument in a useful way because it rejects the simplistic conclusion that voluntariness by itself resolves every ethical problem. Human beings routinely make decisions in circumstances of substantial information asymmetry. A patient knows less medicine than the physician treating him. A client confronting a complex estate-planning problem knows less tax law than the attorney advising her. A purchaser of a sophisticated insurance contract may lack the actuarial, financial, and tax knowledge necessary to evaluate assumptions that are obvious to an experienced professional. In these settings, merely informing the client that he is autonomous and therefore free to make whatever decision he wants can amount to professional abandonment rather than respect for autonomy. Expertise sometimes creates an affirmative responsibility to advise forcefully, challenge poorly informed preferences, expose risks the client does not appreciate, and occasionally refuse to participate in conduct inconsistent with professional obligations.

Rational Paternalism nevertheless differs fundamentally from Vance’s political paternalism because legitimate professional guidance arises within a bounded relationship. The professional possesses specialized knowledge relevant to a defined problem. The client has voluntarily sought that expertise. The professional owes identifiable duties to the particular person being advised. Material conflicts can be disclosed and controlled, and the intervention can be judged by reference to the client’s objectives. Most importantly, expertise concerning means does not confer unlimited authority over ends. A financial adviser may know far more than a client about portfolio construction without thereby acquiring the right to decide whether the client should maximize wealth, support children, fund charity, retire early, or consume more during life. A physician may understand the probabilities associated with a treatment better than the patient without acquiring the right to determine how that patient should balance longevity, suffering, family responsibilities, religious conviction, and quality of life.

Government cannot readily reproduce these conditions. Its supposed client is “the public,” “the nation,” or “society,” categories containing people with conflicting interests, circumstances, preferences, and objectives. A tariff may benefit a manufacturer while harming a retailer and raising prices for consumers. A subsidy may protect employment in one industry by extracting resources from taxpayers and competing industries. Industrial policy may strengthen national security while decreasing immediate economic efficiency, or it may merely disguise protection of politically influential constituencies as national security. There is no single beneficiary whose interests resolve these conflicts in the way a professional can identify the interests of an actual client. The greater the scale of paternalism, the more diffuse the beneficiary becomes and the weaker the analogy with a fiduciary relationship.

The absence of meaningful exit further distinguishes political paternalism from Rational Paternalism. A client can ordinarily fire an adviser. A patient can seek another physician. A congregant can leave a church. A consumer can patronize another business. Citizens cannot comparably withdraw from a tariff regime, tax structure, national industrial policy, or regulatory system. This does not make all governmental intervention illegitimate, but it substantially increases the burden of justification. Where exit is weak and coercive power is strong, epistemic humility becomes more rather than less important.

Rational Paternalism therefore leaves a meaningful role for government, but it is primarily a role concerned with preserving the conditions of agency rather than selecting the ends toward which agency should be directed. Fraud undermines rational choice because a decision based upon deliberately falsified information is not genuinely informed. Force destroys autonomy directly. Contract enforcement enables individuals to make reliable commitments through time. Carefully designed disclosure requirements can address severe information asymmetries, while legal rules governing incapacity can protect persons temporarily or permanently unable to exercise ordinary judgment. These forms of intervention can be paternalistic in effect without becoming guardianship because their purpose is to preserve, restore, or make possible competent individual choice.

The distinction provides a useful standard for evaluating both professional and political intervention. Legitimate paternalism should ordinarily increase the beneficiary’s capacity for future autonomous judgment rather than create permanent dependence upon the paternalist. The adviser who explains a sophisticated problem so that the client becomes capable of making a better decision is exercising professional responsibility. The adviser who deliberately maintains the client’s ignorance because dependence is profitable has transformed informational asymmetry into a source of power. The same danger appears on a much larger scale when political institutions respond to social incapacity by perpetually enlarging the sphere in which citizens are presumed incapable of acting without governmental direction.

Objectivism gives Rational Paternalism its necessary moral boundary by insisting that the beneficiary remains an end rather than becoming an instrument of the guardian’s objectives. Cipolla provides a complementary institutional warning by insisting that benevolent intentions tell us remarkably little about actual consequences. An intervention that genuinely improves the beneficiary’s position while increasing competence may represent intelligent paternalism. An arrangement that primarily enriches or empowers the paternalist while imposing losses upon the beneficiary approaches Cipollian banditry. An intervention that harms the beneficiary, damages the institution, diminishes trust, and nevertheless perpetuates itself because nobody can admit that the original theory was mistaken becomes an example of institutional stupidity. These distinctions are particularly valuable in public policy because almost every intervention is described rhetorically in terms of the people it is intended to help.

Seen through these three frameworks, Langer’s criticism of Vance is substantially correct but philosophically incomplete. Markets should not be defended because markets are morally infallible, nor should civil society be defended because private institutions are invariably virtuous. Neither proposition is remotely plausible. Markets, businesses, churches, families, universities, and professional organizations are populated by fallible people and therefore exhibit fraud, stupidity, self-interest, conformity, incompetence, and occasional abuse. Their strongest institutional defense is that decentralized authority permits error to be challenged, competition to emerge, and individuals to withdraw from relationships that cease to serve them. Government differs not because politicians are necessarily worse people, but because the mistakes of political authority can acquire a breadth and coercive permanence unavailable to most private actors.

Vance nevertheless asks a serious question that defenders of markets should not evade. If the institutions that once transmitted moral responsibility, community obligation, intergenerational continuity, and habits of self-restraint weaken substantially, a civilization may indeed lose something that markets cannot independently recreate. It is not an adequate answer simply to insist that economic liberty will automatically regenerate every social institution required for flourishing. Yet recognizing a genuine social loss does not establish that government possesses either the knowledge or the moral authority to replace what disappeared. A government can subsidize marriage but cannot manufacture love or fidelity. It can fund religious organizations but cannot manufacture faith. It can protect domestic employment but cannot manufacture pride in work. It can attempt to preserve communities but cannot manufacture the voluntary commitments through which communities acquire meaning. Political institutions can alter external incentives, but the internal moral commitments Vance values derive much of their significance precisely from the fact that they are undertaken rather than imposed.

The Jewish counterexample makes this point especially vivid. If a minority community can cultivate exceptional educational achievement, professional accomplishment, continuity, and intellectual seriousness through family, tradition, education, communal institutions, and voluntary religious practice, the appropriate lesson is not that government should make everybody Jewish. It is that powerful moral cultures do not require sovereignty over those who do not share them. Indeed, political appropriation may corrupt the very institutions government claims to strengthen by transforming moral obligation into regulatory compliance and religious conviction into public policy. Christianity may make an indispensable contribution to the lives of Christians, just as Judaism does to Jews and other moral traditions do to their adherents. Their social influence is compatible with liberty precisely because they ordinarily must persuade rather than command.

The deeper issue in the dispute among Vance, Hamilton, Friedman, and Langer is therefore not whether government should always be smaller or whether every economic intervention is inherently illegitimate. National defense, protection against force and fraud, enforcement of contracts, adjudication of disputes, and the preservation of a stable legal order are indispensable governmental functions. Severe information asymmetries can also justify carefully bounded interventions designed to protect meaningful agency. What should be resisted is the conceptual progression by which every demonstrated limitation of individual judgment becomes an argument for enlarging political authority, every undesirable market outcome becomes evidence that government knows the preferable allocation of resources, and every weakening of civil society becomes justification for transferring additional responsibility to the institution whose coercive power already exceeds that of every competing social institution.

A more coherent political philosophy begins from a less flattering but more realistic account of human nature. Individuals are capable of extraordinary intelligence and extraordinary foolishness, frequently within the same lifetime and occasionally within the same afternoon. Expertise exists and matters, which is why Rational Paternalism cannot simply equate autonomy with abandonment. Moral institutions matter, which is why an adequate theory of freedom must leave room for families, religions, communities, and professions to exercise demanding forms of noncoercive authority. Yet none of these observations justifies the search for a political guardian sufficiently intelligent and virtuous to coordinate everyone else toward the proper conception of flourishing. Objectivism explains the moral danger of such guardianship because the individual ceases to be the ultimate beneficiary and becomes an instrument of collective purposes. Rational Paternalism explains why legitimate expertise generates bounded responsibilities rather than unlimited jurisdiction. Cipolla explains why concentrating authority in people convinced of their own competence is particularly dangerous, because neither intelligence, education, status, nor good intentions provides immunity against disastrous judgment.

The strongest answer to Vance is consequently not Friedmanite indifference to culture, nor a romantic belief that every private decision is wise. It is an institutional order in which authority is allocated according to function and constrained according to the power being exercised. Government protects the legal conditions under which agency is possible. Professionals use superior knowledge within relationships carrying identifiable duties to those who rely upon them. Families, churches, synagogues, communities, and voluntary associations cultivate moral commitments that cannot be authentically legislated into existence. Markets permit people with radically different beliefs and purposes to cooperate without first resolving those disagreements through politics. Individuals remain capable of choosing among these institutions and of deciding what conception of human flourishing they will ultimately pursue.

Such an arrangement will never eliminate stupidity, selfishness, moral failure, or institutional incompetence because these are features of human beings rather than defects peculiar to either markets or government. The proper objective is more modest: institutions should make mistakes corrigible, authority contestable, power divisible, and the consequences of bad judgment as containable as possible. Vance’s attraction to the Hamiltonian guardian reflects one of politics’ oldest temptations—the belief that if social disorder results from individuals making inadequate choices, sufficiently intelligent people should acquire enough authority to make better choices on their behalf. The history of human institutions gives us very little reason to believe that those entrusted with such power become wiser merely because the jurisdiction of their decisions expands. Langer is therefore right to resist Vance’s movement away from Friedman, but the strongest reason for doing so extends beyond economics. A free society does not require us to believe that people are always rational. It requires us to understand how dangerous it is to assume that their guardians will be.