The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America

By F.H. Buckley

The promise of America is that, with ambition and hard work, anyone can rise to the top. But now the promise has been broken, and we’ve become an aristocracy where rich parents raise rich kids and poor parents raise poor kids.

We’ve been told that the changes are structural, that there’s nothing we can do about this. But that doesn’t explain why other First World countries are beating us hands down on the issue of mobility.

What's different about America is our politics. An ostensibly progressive New Class of comfortably rich professionals, media leaders, and academics has shaped the contours of American politics and given us a country of fixed economic classes. It is supported by the poorest of Americans, who have little chance to rise, an alliance of both ends against the middle that recalls the Red Tories of parliamentary countries. Because they support an aristocracy, the members of the New Class are Tories, and because of their feigned concern for the poor, they are Red Tories.

The Way Back explains the revolution in American politics, where political insurgents have challenged the complacent establishment of both parties, and shows how we can restore the promise of economic mobility and equality by pursuing socialist ends through capitalist means.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Release date: Nov 7, 2017
• ISBN: 9781594039607

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PRAISE FOR

The Way Back

"The Way Back makes a persuasive case that social mobility, fundamental to the American Dream, has eroded, and that people both on the left and right need to deal seriously with the problem of inequality. Frank Buckley marshals tremendous data and insight in a compelling study."

—FRANCIS FUKUYAMA

With his signature combination of erudition, imagination, and wit, F.H. Buckley has produced a game-changing contribution to the inequality literature.

—CHRISTOPHER DEMUTH, Hudson Institute

Frank Buckley offers a provocative and important commentary on the underlying problems of inequality and immobility. He dissects who’s to blame, what to do, and what not to do—with scholarship, wit, and insight.

—ROBERT A. LEVY, Chairman, Cato Institute

"The Way Back is full of marvelously shrewd observation, as well as scholarship, both aimed at subjects of the greatest importance."

—JONATHAN CLARK

PRAISE FOR

The Once and Future King

A masterpiece. —American Thinker

Compelling—and compellingly readable. —Reason

His prose explodes with energy. —The Weekly Standard

No U.S. political scientist has achieved what F.H. Buckley does in this ambitious book. —Times Literary Supplement

© 2016, 2017 by F.H. Buckley

Preface to the paperback edition © 2017 by F.H. Buckley

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First American edition published in 2016 by Encounter Books, an activity of Encounter for Culture and Education, Inc., a nonprofit, tax-exempt corporation.

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First paperback edition published in 2017.

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGUED

THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

Names: Buckley, F. H. (Francis H.), 1948– author.

Title: The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America / F.H. Buckley.

Description: New York: Encounter Books, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015028091 | ISBN 9781594039607 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Social mobility—United States. | American Dream. | Elites Social sciences)—United States. | United States—Economic conditions. | United States—Social conditions. | United States—Politics and government.

Classification: LCC HN90.S65 B83 2016 | DDC 305.5/130973—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015028091

For Esther, Sarah, and Nick

Contents

Preface to the Paperback Edition

Acknowledgments

1.Socialist Ends, Capitalist Means

Things We Can’t Change

Legacy Nation

Things We Can Change

PART I

The Idea of America

2.Up from Aristocracy

Alexander Hamilton Stumbles

An Aristocratic Colony

A Revolution of Ideas

3.The Invention of the American Dream

A Natural Aristocracy

The Transformation of America

The Promise Renewed

PART II

The Way We Are Now

4.Unequal and Immobile

Inequality

Immobility

Inequality Hardens into Immobility

5.Why Republicans Should Care about Income Immobility

Not Just the Left

The Fragiles Come out to Vote

6.Why Conservatives Should Care about Income Immobility

Why We Need Intermediate Organizations

Have Intermediate Organizations Declined?

What’s Immobility Got to Do with It?

7.Why Libertarians Should Care about Income Immobility

8.Why Everyone Should Care about Income Immobility

Wealth

Happiness

PART III

Things We (Mostly) Can’t Change: Technology, Taxes, Welfare, Culture, Genes

9.The Move to an Information Economy

Is Technological Change Skill-based?

Has Technological Change Recently Increased?

A Supply-side Explanation?

10.Globalization

The Loss of Low-tech Jobs

The New Global Super-rich

11.The Limits of Public Policy

Stingy Welfare Benefits?

Low Tax Rates?

Campaign Finance Reform?

12.Living with Immobility

Inherited Wealth

Environment and Culture

Genoeconomics

PART IV

Things We (Mostly) Can’t Change: The Aristocrat Abides

13.Darwinian Immobility

The Bequest Motive

Relative Preferences

Spite

14.The New Class

Reciprocal Altruism

Green Beards, Networks, and Reputations

Class Markers

Politics as a Green Beard

15.Red Tories

Maypoles on the Village Green

Heroism and Hubris

Sealing the Deal

PART V

Things We Can Change

16.Education

The Promise Made

The Promise Broken

The Enemies of Promise

17.Immigration

A Nation of Immigrants

The 1965 Immigration Act

Opportunity Costs

18.Crony Nation

Benign Neglect

Licensing Entrepreneurs

Romancing Wall Street

Tax Subsidies for the Rich

Coporate Law Malfunctions

19.Criminalizing Entrepreneurship

The United States of Crime

A System Designed to Convict

Enemies of the People

20.The Rule of Lawyers

21.The Way Back

A Wish List

Endless History

Reversing

Appendices

A.Income Inequality

B.Piketty’s Law of Accumulation

C.Regression Analysis

D.Altruism and Evolutionary Fitness

Endnotes

Index

Dick is . . . smart enough to profit from the book’s simple messages: that all labor is respectable, that poverty is no bar to advancement, that getting ahead requires education and saving one’s money. Page 4.

ALL PHOTOS: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

The Carter’s Grove [pictured above], Sabine Hall, and Shirley plantations of the Carters, the Westover of the Byrds, the Stratford of the Lees and the Mount Vernons left no doubt that their owners were masters of large fortunes. Page 23.

Lincoln joked that he had not a platform to stand on, whereupon someone brought him an empty dry-goods box. Page 39.

Solving the travelling salesman problem [pictured left] turns out to be crucially important in keeping costs down. Page 102.

[Self-driving] vehicles rely on Google Maps and Street View as well as radar and video messages that are fed into a computer, and have been said to provide a safer drive than any a human driver could provide. Page 104.

"In one well-known family, then, the daughter represented not merely an r of 0.5, but a sum of 2.5 over only three generations." Page 152.

A costumed Knight of the Swan challenged the Knight of the Golden Lion to battle. Page 183. Photo: The Challenge, Eglinton Tournament, by James Henry Nixon.

[Booker T. Washington] never attended school, though he sometimes went as far as the schoolhouse door with his white mistresses, carrying their books. Page 187.

‘I can see ye don’t know what it means to be up to yer neck in nuns.’ Page 206. Photo: Graduation at St. Joseph’s School, Petersburg VA.

He begins as a ‘greenhorn,’ unable to speak English, but soon finds himself selling hardware from a pushcart on the lower East Side. Page 232. Photo: Mulberry Street, New York City.

Preface to the Paperback Edition

BOOKS TAKE YEARS TO WRITE. MINE DO, AT LEAST. The Way Back was published in April 2016, but I had begun it well before that year’s election campaign. I hadn’t been thinking about Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders. Instead, I had Obama, Mitt Romney and the Republican Establishment in my sights.

I knew that change must come. Like blind and deaf wrestlers, our two political parties were locked in clumsy battle, as spectators shouted warnings that neither ever heard. What both parties missed was how the American Dream had faded. We had thought that this was the country where, whoever you were, wherever you came from, you could get ahead. More importantly, we had believed that this was a country where your children would have it better than you did. And we had been wrong.

When I began to write, Thomas Piketty had just published Capital in the Twenty-First Century, about the rise of income inequality. We had known that we were increasingly divided into different economic classes, but what caught our attention was Piketty’s claim that over time we would necessarily become more unequal still. The book was a publishing sensation, but we soon learned that Piketty had wildly overstated things. His arguments about the inexorable rise of people already in the top income stream rested on implausible assumptions, and he clearly didn’t know much about the United States. The evidence just wasn’t there, as I explain in the appendix. But though Piketty got some things quite wrong, he was correct in noting that we had in fact become more unequal, economically and socially too.

While great inequality is concerning, I thought the more serious problem was income immobility. For the first time in American history, people no longer expected their children to do better than they did, according to the pollsters. Looking back into my own family history, I saw parents and grandparents whose lives were scarred by hardships I could scarcely have endured. What must have driven them was the idea that their descendants would reap what they had sown. But what if they had not anticipated a payoff in the future? What if they had thought their children would revert to the misery of their grandparents? They would have given up.

That was my intuition, at any rate, and for an explanation I turned to neo-Darwinism. Evolutionary biologists such as W. D. Hamilton and Richard Dawkins asked us to take the gene’s-eye view of human action, and I thought this explained why mobility matters more to us than equal outcomes in our own generation. As I showed, it’s because our genes may be more heavily invested in our descendants than in ourselves. That seemed to me an original insight, one which explains why the social contract is front-end loaded, with family duties paid forward. We take from our parents, and without repaying them give to our children; and that tripartite contract is repeated over all generations, over all history. We are biologically biased in favor of future generations, so long as we have children. For there is one kind of social justice for families with children, and quite another for a society which like Cronus eats its children.

At the same time, there’s a dark side to neo-Darwinism, for it also explains why aristocracy is the natural default position of any society, why elite Americans would seek to shape our legal institutions in such a way as to secure economic privileges for their own children while constricting mobility for others. It now seems obvious that we have a privileged New Class composed of lawyers, academics, trust-fund babies and high-tech workers, clustered in the Acela corridor, in the creative class cities described by Richard Florida, and cocooned from contact with the lower orders. What’s only beginning to be recognized is how its members subscribe to a politics of immobility that prevents the children of the lower classes from rising.

That’s the theme of this book, and to drive it home I showed how the American Dream was alive and well in other countries. A comparison with the country we most closely resemble is particularly surprising, even shocking. The table on page 55 reveals how immobile our society is, compared with Canada, and the figures on pages 135 and 198 show how the difference is located in the top 10 percent and the bottom 10 percent of earners. In America, the rich pass on their economic privileges to their children, while in Canada there is much more downward mobility from the top. In America, poverty too is inherited, while in Canada the children of the poor have a good chance of getting ahead.

This difference in mobility couldn’t be explained by pointing to differences in national wealth, since the economies of the two countries are so similar. Other common excuses for American immobility also make no sense. Some have argued that the move to an information economy, with skill-based technological change, explains everything. But then it’s not as if highly mobile Canada is living in the Stone Age. As for free-trade agreements, Canada relies more on them than the United States. Welfare policies don’t explain anything much either, since America has one of the most generous welfare systems in the world.

There is more going on, however, and if Canada has succeeded where America has failed we should look to other differences that have something to do with mobility. And then emulate Canada. That would mean school choice, immigration policies designed to favor the native-born, a strengthened rule of law—all policies that Canada has adopted. They are also more deeply conservative than the corresponding policies in America. Here, the Democrats decry income immobility while supporting policies dictated by their base that limit mobility. Had Republicans taken the issue of economic mobility seriously, they would have called out Democrats for their hypocrisy. It was the issue on which the 2012 election turned, and the Republicans gave it away.

Having lived in both America and Canada, I’ve concluded that few North Americans know much about their own countries. Americans imagine that they live in an essentially capitalist and conservative country, as compared with Soviet Canuckistan. Canadians are apt to think of themselves as so much more progressive than their neighbors to the south. There’s a good deal of self-deception for both. Underneath the comforting images are very different sets of writings, a palimpsest of a liberal America and a conservative Canada. America has one of the world’s most generous welfare systems and very liberal immigration, tax and rule of law policies, while Canada has education, immigration, tax and legal institutions that Donald Trump admires. America’s conservatism is mushy and infected with waste and corruption; while Canada’s liberalism is that of the teenager who hangs out in hip neighborhoods, in jeans his mother pressed this morning, but who always returns home at night.

Socialist Ends, Capitalist Means

At a dinner in fall 2015, I heard a Republican congressman deride some of his Freedom Caucus colleagues as right-wing Marxists. Aha, I thought. That’s me. I saw an America divided by class, and thought we were in what Marxist-Leninists called an objectively revolutionary situation. Marx himself had wondered why one didn’t see English radicalism in the world’s most advanced capitalist society. That ran against his theory of history: first feudalism, then capitalism, then socialism. So America should have been primed for socialism when Marx wrote, in 1852. Except it wasn’t, and Marx said the reason for American exceptionalism was that Americans were so mobile. It followed, however, that if ever America became immobile, then we’d expect class consciousness and class struggle. Which is how we’re to understand American politics in 2016.

Trump and Sanders both recognized what had changed. Both wanted a return to a more mobile and just society. They had the same socialist goals but wanted to reach them in different ways. Sanders offered us socialist ends through socialist means, while Trump proposed socialist ends through capitalist means. Because I saw American politics as class warfare, and predicted how this would become the story of the 2016 election, I was a Marxist. And because I saw the way back as a return to free-market principles I was a right-wing Marxist.

Socialist goals through capitalist means upset some conservatives, who didn’t want socially just goals no matter how we got there. I think that phrase had originally been suggested by Milton Friedman, though I couldn’t find the reference. But what did it matter? It’s what I thought American voters wanted and needed.

It’s also what the Trump campaign wanted. I say this as one who, with my wife and my friend Bob Tyrrell, provided first drafts of many of Trump’s campaign speeches in the spring and summer of 2016, and who subsequently advised on transition matters. The speech of Donald Trump Jr. at the Republican Convention, which I had a hand in writing, summarized what I had written in The Way Back. The Democrats had complained of American immobility, but it was they who had caused the problem. Trump himself praised my book, which to my mind proved either that he was a splendid fellow or that he had not read it. In any event, I knew that his domestic policies were the same as the ones I had recommended.

We Trump supporters had taken sides in a bitter Republican civil war. The other side, the NeverTrumpers, was composed of a small group of ideological purists who had assembled a checklist of received right-wing ideas. And what were these? They might have been derived from a deep study of John Locke and Robert Nozick, with perhaps a bit of Ayn Rand thrown in for light reading. An advanced degree in Austrian economics would also help. That might take years, but in the end you’d know just what to believe. All good stuff, but if we’re talking about the NeverTrumpers you could mostly just ask what are the most heartless policies around. That would save a lot of time.

The perfect ideological idiot had forgotten to connect his ideas with people. He had forgotten that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. A smarter person might have learned this, but instead the ideologue reviled Trump for appealing to the ordinary American voter. Trump and his supporters were called populists. That was meant as a term of opprobrium. We were kin to Father Coughlin, to David Duke, to all that was nasty in American politics. That was simply an effort to smear us, and when the editor of National Review, Richard Lowry, called us populists in a debate, I turned to him and said, I do not think I am ill-bred, compared to you; I do not think I am ill-educated, compared to you.

Sneers at populists were to be expected, however, for in 2016 almost no one had shown much interest in the ordinary voter, except for Trump. And that’s because no one was much interested in the idea of equality. Without much discussion, we had come to accept that we live in a class society and that we are permitted to avert our gaze from great differences in wealth and status. In the past, such indifference would have been condemned by Marxists and by egalitarian liberals, for they regarded equality as a moral imperative that demanded something from us. Now, none of them seemed up to the job.

The classical Marxist dream of universal brotherhood had died in the moral and political bankruptcy of communism. On the progressive left it had been abandoned for identity politics that explicitly deny a common humanity by granting priority to favored groups—minorities, gays, women. There was a telling moment in a 2015 Democratic presidential debate when the candidates were asked to choose between Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter. One might have thought that only a moral imbecile or a racist would judge people by the color of their skin and not by the content of their character. But among the candidates only Jim Webb said that all lives matter, and he left the Democratic Party not long afterward.

As for egalitarian liberalism, it was never the firmest reed in America. At the founding it coexisted with slavery, and it’s always been tainted by religious bigotry. In academic milieus it got a boost from the work of John Rawls, but a theory so rational, so esoteric, wasn’t going to leave a firm imprint on very many people. Moreover, Rawls’ difference principle encouraged readers to ignore social and economic inequalities unless they affected the least advantaged members of society. In short, the Rawlsian liberal wouldn’t much care about the typical Trump voters.

Concerns about inequality scarcely bothered the meritocratic New Class, which embraced the idea that its members were the chosen people of a new, global information economy, and that those who failed to attend Yale Law School, take out a subscription to The Atlantic or attend workshops at the Brookings Institution had only themselves to blame. The conceit that the answer to the country’s social ills lay in turning the working class into proper little left-wing intellectuals was wonderfully ridiculed by Thomas Frank in Listen, Liberal, but somehow the New Class missed the satire.

Where egalitarianism has any purchase, it’s among religious believers, especially Evangelicals and Catholics, who massively supported Trump. If we believe we’re all made in God’s image, that we all have souls, it’s impossible to deny our common humanity. And without religious belief, the belief in equality is a tough sell. Walter Berns, a conservative thinker, once quoted the opening words of the Declaration of Independence to me. All men are created equal. He asked me: Do you think that’s an empirical proposition?

When we look at others what we see are differences, between the long and the short and the tall. In the left’s identity politics, it’s differences between races, ethnic groups, genders. On the right, it might be the nasty IQ debate introduced by people such as Charles Murray, which has permitted the members of the New Class to feel superior to the little brains beneath them. Without religious belief, what else is there?

Among the wiser socialists, that’s led to a new respect for religion as a foundation for their dearest beliefs. Without abandoning his atheism, German philosopher Jürgen Habermas was willing to debate Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) and announce his openness to the egalitarian content of religious traditions. G. A. Cohen, a Canadian-American philosopher, came to the same realization in If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? Similarly, in Culture and the Death of God, Terry Eagleton noted that it was the fate of the Enlightenment to usher in a civilization in which its pragmatism, materialism and utilitarianism tended to discredit some of the very exalted ideas which presided over its birth. That’s why today’s clever Marxist is as likely to study the Epistle to the Romans as he is to read Das Kapital. But the New Class paid no attention to any of this. It wasn’t that they were believers, or even that they were atheists. Rather, they had simply stopped caring about equality.

The Republican Workers Party

The NeverTrumpers were right about one thing. On domestic policies Trump was not a doctrinaire libertarian. Early in the 2016 presidential campaign, a higher-up at the Charles Koch Foundation told me his problem with Trump. The developer from Queens didn’t have an entitlement policy. He didn’t plan to roll back Medicare or curb Social Security. But that’s not what most Americans want either. We have a generous welfare policy, as I noted, and all Trump planned to do was make it work better. He proposed to repeal and replace Obamacare, not just repeal it; and he wanted a system that wouldn’t leave people uninsured.

In appealing to ordinary voters, and rejecting rigid Republican right-wing doctrines, Trump had rescued what is living from what is dead in conservatism. What is living is a Republican Party that doesn’t think those left behind deserve their fate. Trump is a nationalist, and what many of his opponents missed is the logic of nationalism: that the needs of Americans take priority over the interests of non-Americans, that what is denied non-Americans must be paid for by what is given to Americans. That’s a lesson as old as the distinction between strangers and brothers in Deuteronomy, but it’s one that right-wing ideologues, with their desire for open borders and their willingness to ship jobs offshore, had failed to hear. They had a perfect fidelity to principle, but an indifference to fellow Americans. And that’s what was dead in conservatism.

Trump’s Republicanism would be a party of buy American and hire American, a party for the laid-off coal miner, the auto worker whose job was sent abroad, the child in a terrible school, those who struggle with crime in their inner-city neighborhoods. At the 2017 CPAC Conference he called it the Republican Workers Party. It would be the jobs party. (In time, I hope, it will also be the health-care party.) What it wouldn’t be is the bicycle-lane party, the transgender-bathroom party. He’d leave those issues for the Democrats.

The new party wouldn’t blame those who are left behind, as NeverTrumpers did. With a vituperation that recalled Marx’s contempt for the lumpenproletariat, the writers at National Review described Trump supporters as Oxy-sniffing moral lepers who whelped their children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog. Before long, the mainstream media took up the theme, and a redneck-porn literature was born, one that invited upper-class readers to indulge in their sense of superiority by slumming with the underclass.

How very different this was from the older literature of poverty in America, James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men or Michael Harrington’s The Other America. The earlier writers described the poor with compassion, as fellow Americans. They were the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath, honorable people down on their luck. There was no sense of moral superiority in this literature, even with those who might have brought their poverty on themselves. The desperately poor were broken in body and spirit, and while they didn’t belong to anyone or anything they still were our brothers, with whom we shared a common humanity and citizenship. If they lived their lives at a level beneath that necessary for human decency, we were called upon to do something about it. In Harrington’s case, that meant living with them in one of Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker hospices, not an experience any of today’s purveyors of redneck porn will have shared.

Harrington described how poverty had persisted during the boom years of the 1950s. In our day, too, we’ve seen poverty coexisting with spectacular wealth gains for others. Similarly, we’re seeing unprecedented longevity for some, alongside climbing mortality rates for others. With new drugs and better medical providers, we’re saving people who in the past would have died earlier from things like heart disease and cancer. That’s how it is in every other First World country, and that’s how it is for African-Americans and Hispanics. But life expectancy for white, middle-aged Americans has recently declined. Anne Case and her husband, Nobel laureate Sir Angus Deaton, report that had the rate held at 1998 levels, there would have been 100,000 fewer deaths over the next fifteen years for whites aged 45−54. In much of Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta, life expectancy is lower today than in Bangladesh or Nepal.

How did this happen? The NeverTrumper and the liberal blamed the victims themselves. More generously, Case and Deaton said that the increased deaths are largely a result of despair, social isolation, drug and alcohol poisoning, suicide and chronic liver disease, and that all this in turn could be attributed to higher unemployment and lower wages. In Appalachia, in the heartland, white, working class Americans had lost their jobs and were killing themselves, but at our elite colleges, social-justice warriors were asking them to check their privilege, while Hillary Clinton was calling them deplorable and irredeemable.

If we want to do something about it, Case and Deaton surely pointed us in the right direction. The best remedy for an opioid crisis is jobs. People don’t lose their jobs because they smoke Oxy; they smoke Oxy because they’ve lost their jobs. By voting for a person who called himself the jobs president, Republican voters showed that they understood this. They evidently looked past Trump’s moral lapses, and had little interest in a state-led moral rearmament crusade. With David Hume, they likely thought that all plans of government, which suppose great reformation in the manners of mankind, are plainly imaginary.

The voters defined the policy challenges for the Trump administration: create jobs and restore economic mobility. That in turn will require the reforms in education, immigration policy, the tax system and the regulatory regime that I describe in this book. Nothing much else ascends to the level of policy. Trump intellectuals said they wanted to make America great again, but stop being a loser isn’t a policy; stop doing stupid stuff isn’t a reform. Through all of Trump’s self-induced crises they defended him, like Jonahs inside the belly of the whale, swept wherever it might take them. But they didn’t tell us what the way back might be, which was the point of my book. They never told us what to do about decline.

For what, after all, is American greatness? Is it cultural superiority, to match that of France? Is it military might, such as the Soviet Union once had? Is it a foreign policy of liberal imperialism, riding in triumph through Persepolis? Those are the dreams of other people, other candidates, but they weren’t Trump’s dream, or the American Dream, that of a country where one isn’t held back, where all may get ahead, where our children will have things we never had.

And now? As I write, the papers are full of stories about special prosecutors and Russian sabotage. The Democrats talk impeachment, and Republican NeverTrumpers lick their lips at the prospect of a President Pence. It’s more than a little hysterical, but in truth the dream of a Republican Workers Party has faded a little, and that’s not surprising. Everything begins in mystique, said Charles Péguy, and ends in politics. Still, we’ve seen what doesn’t work, the politics of heartless conservatism and hypocritical liberalism, and we know that that’s all over and done with.

—F.H. BUCKLEY

May 26, 2017

Acknowledgments

A GOOD MANY PEOPLE HELPED ME WITH THIS BOOK, AND I am very grateful. For his comments, and for our long conversations about Abraham Lincoln, I am greatly indebted to Allen Guelzo, the leading scholar on the sixteenth president, and who if pressed can provide a very credible imitation of Lincoln’s accent.

Jonathan Clark, the eminent historian of the long British eighteenth century, gave this book a close reading and his wise advice on British constitutional history was most helpful. Jeff Broadwater has written the best biography of the never-too-much-to-be-praised George Mason, and kindly helped me with questions I had about my school’s namesake.

My colleague, David Levy, was extremely helpful on regression analysis and for tips on where I might find bluegrass music. Dartmouth’s Jason Soren’s also gave very useful advice on the empirical portions of the book.

For their comments and help on questions of income inequality and immobility, I am indebted to Sarah Buckley, Miles Corak, Tyler Cowen, Chris DeMuth, Frank Fukuyama, Robin Hanson, Glenn Hubbard, Bob Levy, Tom Lindsay, Tom and Lorraine Pangle, and John Samples. Brian Lee Crowley and the Macdonald-Laurier Institute brought me to Ottawa to debate Chrystia Freeland, now the Candian Minister of International Trade, on the subject of income inequality, and we also debated on CBC. She and I gave it as good as we could, as proxies for Laurier and Macdonald, respectively.

For his advice on U.S. tax law I am indebted to my colleague, Terry Chorvat.

Academic lawyers are quick to pick