You start by arguing against “market fundamentalism,” “neoliberalism,” and “extreme libertarianism,” and you end by arguing against economics. Vice President JD Vance is the latest postliberal to embrace what is now, for all intents and purposes, an anti-growth position.

In his latest book, Communion, Vance inveighs against those perennial straw men, the GDP-obsessed economists. We keep hearing about these mysterious figures, cold-hearted calculators who believe that GDP is the only measure that counts. Oddly, despite having spent my life around free-marketeers and despite now running the world’s oldest classical liberal think tank, I have yet to meet one.

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Vance, though, is evidently convinced that people who “struggle to put a value on anything that can’t be specifically measured” not only exist, but run America. The country is governed, he tells us, “by numbers on a spreadsheet and the people who built those spreadsheets.”

He goes on to write, with the air of a man imparting an original insight, that looking after your........

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