In a 2018 Wall Street Journal interview, Oren Cass, a former Mitt Romney adviser and now executive director of the think tank American Compass, made his case for a supposedly pro-labor conservatism. Economic anxiety was real, he said. But that didn’t mean low-income Americans wanted to be patronized for their struggles to find dignified work by having money thrown at them.
Ryan Bourne occupies the R. Evan Scharf Chair for the Public Understanding of Economics at the Cato Institute.
