Three Pillars of the American Idea

Robert Curry is an independent scholar and author. He writes: “ Unalienable rights and self- evident truths are the two core ideas of the American founding. Expand the number of core ideas under consideration to three and you get unalienable rights, self- evident truths, and free market economics. He writes:

:You could call them the three pillars of the American Idea. These three pillars are the direct gifts to America of three great thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment: Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and Thomas Reid. Their thinking—known today as “common sense realism”—took America by storm at precisely the right time to shape America fundamentally.

Francis Hutcheson: “Our rights are either alienable or unalienable ...”

A revolution in thinking about our rights preceded the American Revolution. In the words of George Washington, America’s founding took place during a time “ when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined than at any former period.” Hutcheson’s analysis of our rights showed the way.

The meaning of Hutcheson’s distinction was sharp and clear in the founders’ time but to understand it today you and I must first be clear about the meaning of “alienable.” Here is its complete definition in my dictionary: “adj. Law. Capable of being transferred to the ownership of another.” Your right to your car is an alienable right; because your car is your property, you can sell your car or give it away—but our rights to our lives and our liberty are unalienable, that is, not property, not capable of being transferred to the ownership of another.

Hutcheson was challenging John Locke’s account of our rights— and in so doing he helped ignite the American Revolution. Locke, you see, had defined our rights in terms of property.

John Locke: “ Man ... hath by nature a power ... to preserve his property— that is, his life, liberty and estate.”

According to Hutcheson and the founders, our rights to our lives and our liberty are not property; those rights are unalienable, inherent, essential, and not transferrable.

Hutcheson’s distinction provided the intellectual foundation for two of the greatest achievements in world history: Adam Smith’s “ The Wealth of Nations” and the Declaration of Independence. Adam Smith’s focus was our alienable rights; the American founders focused on our unalienable rights.

The Declaration and “ Wealth” both entered the world they were to transform in the same year, 1776.

The year 1776 marks the economic and political boundary between the world in which you and I live and all that had gone before.

Adam Smith Wealth,” Smith makes clear the source in human nature of the all-important division of labor: “ This division of labour ... is the necessary ... consequence of a certain propensity in human nature ...; the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.”

Francis Hutcheson mentored Adam Smith. Upon Hutcheson’s death, Smith was appointed to the prestigious professorship at the University of Glasgow that Hutcheson had held.

Smith’s epoch-making “ Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” is the foundation of free market economics. Hutcheson’s analysis of our rights set the direction Smith took. In “ Wealth,” Smith famously demonstrated that the division of labor is the source of the wealth of nations.

The division of labor depends on the right to exchange (alienate) our property and labor. We can “truck, barter, and exchange” because our right to our property is, as Hutcheson had shown, “naturally alienable.”

The social order that resulted from the new thinking of the Scottish and the American enlightenments was a far cry from the world that assigned supremacy to hereditary monarchs and hereditary aristocrats.

The great economist Ludwig von Mises described that new social order like this: “[ It] assigned supremacy to the common man. In his capacity as a consumer, the ‘regular fellow’ was called upon to determine ultimately what should be produced, in what quantity, and of what quality, by whom, how, and where; in his capacity as a voter, he was sovereign in directing the nation’s policies.”

Thomas Reid When Thomas Jefferson wrote “ We hold these truths to be self- evident,” he was relying on the thinking of Thomas Reid.

Reid’s “An Inquiry Into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense” was published in 1764, the same year he was awarded the prestigious professorship formerly occupied by Francis Hutcheson and Adam Smith.

I write in my book “ Reclaiming Common Sense”: “ Reid’s philosophical purpose was to provide a foundation for morality and knowledge. He argued that there is an endowment of human nature that makes both morality and knowledge possible, and he called it common sense. ... With it, we are able to make rational judgments and moral judgments. Common sense is the human attribute that makes it possible for us to be rational creatures and moral agents.

“ Reid’s fundamental insight was that our ability to make sense of our experience presupposes certain first principles. Because these principles are implicit in our conduct and our thought, they cannot be proved; there are no other truths from which they can be derived. However, to deny or even to doubt any of them is to involve ourselves in absurdity. Consequently, the principles of common sense have the special authority of first principles: we cannot operate without them.”

The Progressives From their beginning, the purpose of the Progressives has been the step-by-step— that is, the progressive—undoing of the America of the founders. Their relentless campaign has done tremendous damage. If you and I are to do our part in helping to restore America, we need to go into action armed with a clear understanding of the American Idea. That is why I wrote the two common sense books, “Common Sense Nation: Unlocking the Forgotten Power of the American Idea” (2015) and “ Reclaiming Common Sense: Finding Truth in a Post-Truth World” (2019).

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Conservatism Needed a Reset

Karl Zinsmeister served as the White House’s chief domestic policy adviser, 2006-09. He is author of Backbone: Why American Populism Should Be Welcomed, Not Feared and the new memoir My West Wing, from which this article is adapted. He writes: “Like many conservatives, I have spent my life as an advocate of unforced societal evolution rather than radical change.

Yet in recent years I’ve found myself in unexpected territory. Washington has become a depressing mix of failure and left-wing illiberalism. Governments have imposed new cultural dictates that encroach on freedoms of conscience, speech and action.

These trends shriveled the conservative instinct to guard and temper. There is no appeal in conserving dysfunctional institutions. Suddenly, knocking down defective entities and building anew tempts even the most cautious patriot. The result was the current icon-breaking by the Trump administration.

I share Thomas Jefferson’s view that federal rule should be “mild”— modest in scope, light in its press on citizens, never high-handed or imperious. “That government is best which governs least,” is a line often attributed to him. The less Washington roils our daily life, the better.

What happens, though, when daily life has already been warped? Over the past decade, our communities were wrenched by government and cultural manias more controlling, crusading and coercive than anything ever seen in the U.S. The Great Awokening. The Covid lies and lockdowns. The hypocritical exemptions to the pandemic mandates granted for the Black Lives Matter riots. Disturbing new racial and sexual ideologies. Vast expansions of federal spending and power. Political weaponization of the justice system.

These spasms pushed public opinion into new places. Five years ago there was no broad public support for shutting down the Education Department. Then the Biden administration used the department to push inflammatory nostrums of identity politics into children’s classrooms and unload billions of student loans from recipients to taxpayers. The status quo got ugly, the stakes soared and impossible reforms suddenly became inevitable.

For decades, conservatives acted almost solely as defenders and refiners of society, while progressives were active in attacking norms and taking over organizations. Conservatives came to feel like patsies. They merely kept faulty procedures and rotten agencies in place. They were managing decline.

The left, meanwhile, has been aggressively capturing institutions by patiently feeding activists into the operating ranks of an organization, gradually taking it over from within, then turning it into whatever they wanted. Over the past generation, progressives captured universities, labor unions, the media and more in this fashion.

An even more confrontational approach has been to delegitimize and destroy a disfavored institution. The traditional family, confidence in the police, religion in the public square, classical education—all have faded in the face of withering liberal attacks.

Then Donald Trump roared into the picture. He flashed into action on the capture and tear-down side of social change, where previously only politicians of the left had operated. The public so far has been surprisingly tolerant of his aggressive interventions. There are times when some messy political demolition and noisy rebuilding are necessary.

A few years ago, temperamentally conservative Americans wouldn’t have countenanced the raucous methods of Mr. Trump. He has many of the qualities our mothers warned us against—self-absorption, vulgarity, braggadocio, lack of humility. Yet in our current moment, he seems the only political figure with the fearlessness and vigor needed to clear blockages, cut out tumors and reset our national health.

Americans, however, have no lasting appetite for upheaval. Once we are beyond today’s emergency, our national healers will need to shift to more restrained, disciplined and respectful modes of treatment. Our revived nation will require builders of consensus—leaders who share Jefferson’s preference for a “mild” and less intrusive state.

Ordinary citizens will soon want Washington to become a quieter and more boring place. That way they can stop focusing on events in our nation’s capital and pour energy into their traditional priorities of enterprise, family and community building.

If there isn’t eventually a transition of this sort, the Trump era could end in flaming hubris and overreach. From Odysseus to Napoleon, that’s the way bold chargers always fall down—overconfidence and pride causing fatal mistakes.

That outcome is entirely avoidable. But it will require a shifting of gears at some point by Mr. Trump. And by all of those who want to see his reforms extended into the future.”

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Why is this a good idea?

Xi Pursues Economic Fortress As Shield Against U.S. Pressure

Brian Spegele is a senior correspondent in The Wall Street Journal's Beijing bureau. He writes broadly about political, economic and business development in China, and he has traveled throughout the country for his reporting. He was previously based in Beijing as a reporter from 2011 to 2017, where he covered the rise and early rule of President Xi Jinping.

Jason Douglas reports from The Wall Street Journal’s Singapore bureau on economics in Asia. He writes about trends and developments in China’s economy as well as the economic forces reshaping the world’s most populous continent.

Yoko Kubota is The Wall Street Journal's deputy bureau chief in Beijing, responsible for business news coverage in China including the technology, autos and consumer sectors. She oversees a team of correspondents and researchers in Beijing, Shanghai, Singapore and New York. They together cover areas including Chinese and multinational companies, industry and trade policy, supply chain and the tech rivalry between the U.S. and China. They write:

“A day in China could easily start like this: Roll out of bed and swipe through WeChat messages on your Huawei smartphone. Hop into a BYD electric car and drive to the railroad station, where a highspeed train from a state-run factory whisks you to your destination. Chinese-designed nuclear plants, solar farms and wind turbines power the city’s lights.

China is racing to make itself less reliant on the outside world’s products and technology— part of a yearslong effort by leader Xi Jinping to make China more self-sufficient and impervious to Western pressure as tensions with the U.S. rise. Beijing has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into favored industries, especially in high-end manufacturing, while exhorting business leaders to fall in line with the government’s priorities.

In many ways, the effort is succeeding. Instead of relying on foreign companies for robots and medical devices, China is making more of its own. Chinese made solar panels are replacing some of the country’s need for imported energy. The success of China’s electric-vehicle makers and artificial-intelligence upstart DeepSeek has ignited fears that China might even eclipse the West in some cutting-edge sectors.

Beneath those wins, however, Xi’s industrial policy is hugely expensive, eating up state resources as government revenue is stagnating. One estimate by the Washington--based Center for Strategic and International Studies put China’s annual spending on industrial policy at around $250 billion as of 2019. Large sums have been wasted on projects that failed, especially in areas such as advanced semiconductors.

The flood of investment pouring into Chinese factories is also causing problems for China abroad, as it leads to enormous quantities of Chinese goods that are being pushed onto foreign markets at cut-rate prices, exacerbating trade tensions. Western countries have sought to block advanced chips from flowing to the country, and China’s growing manufacturing dominance in some high-value sectors is set to be a flashpoint as President Trump turns up the heat on Beijing.

China needs to find new growth levers right now, to offset the drag on its economy from a languishing real-estate sector and a darkening global backdrop for trade. Many economists said China should be building out its threadbare social safety net to drive a durable pickup in consumer spending, rather than throwing more money at its vast industrial base, racking up more debt with no guarantee on future returns.

But Beijing believes that channeling huge resources into advanced manufacturing and technology will boost national security by making the country less susceptible to Western pressure. If that means some economic problems are neglected or add to tensions with the West, Chinese leaders are signaling that the risks are worth it.

The cost of China’s effort “has been a lot of burnt capital,” said Alfredo Montufar-Helu, head of the China Center at research group The Conference Board in Beijing. “Is China going to be able to bear the cost? In the eyes of the Chinese government, they are being forced to bear this cost.”

“Self-reliance in science and technology is the basis of our national strength and prosperity, and necessary for our security,” an anchor with state broadcaster CCTV said this month.

Flying Solo Xi formalized his ambitions to make the country more self-reliant in 2015, when he unveiled an initiative dubbed “Made in China 2025.”

A government document that laid out the program’s goals stressed that the world was on the cusp of a new technological revolution and that China would only succeed by investing in a more advanced manufacturing base.

While the initiative sought to elevate Chinese manufacturing across the board, it highlighted 10 sectors such as robotics, aerospace and newenergy vehicles as priorities. It also set explicit goals for raising the domestic content of core components and basic materials. A gusher of state subsidies and other financial support would help China achieve its goals.

U.S. officials criticized the program for aiming to shut out foreign firms, a rift that only worsened after Trump took office in 2017. By 2019, under pressure from the U.S., Beijing was signaling it planned to give a bigger role to foreign companies in supplying China.

Yet as relations with the U.S. further deteriorated, China’s bid at self-sufficiency only intensified. The world was growing more turbulent, the government said in its latest five-year economic plan published in 2021, and “self-reliance” in science and technology was paramount.

In EVs, one of the 10 sectors identified in “Made in China 2025,” industrial support surged to more than $45 billion in 2023 from $15 billion in 2019, according to estimates by CSIS. More than 100 brands raced into the market. The cars have been thrashing foreign rivals in China and making rapid inroads overseas as their quality has improved.

Last year, electric and plugin hybrid cars accounted for 48% of car sales in China, up from 41% from a year earlier, or nearly 11 million vehicles, data from the China Passenger Car Association showed. Most of those electric cars were made by Chinese brands, such as BYD and Geely. BYD recently surpassed Volkswagen to become China’s bestselling carmaker, while sales of U.S. automakers such as General Motors, which recently said it would take more than $5 billion in charges linked to its weak China business, have tanked.

For years, China was a net importer of chemicals, especially from the Middle East, Europe and the U.S., as domestic production wasn’t enough to provide all the plastics, fibers and other chemicals consumed by its growing economy. Since 2021, however, that deficit has flipped to a surplus, as rising domestic production pushes out imports. China in 2024 recorded an export surplus of $34 billion in chemicals, compared with a $40 billion deficit in 2020.

Obstacles Ahead In other ways, however, Xi’s self-sufficiency drive continues to face hurdles.

In aerospace, China’s C919 jetliner entered commercial service in 2023, a feat celebrated by the government after years of setbacks. But the plane, built by state-owned manufacturer Comac to rival the workhorse passenger jets of Boeing and Airbus, is chock-full of foreign systems and components, including landing gear from Germany and engines from the U.S. and France.

Beyond technology, a push to boost China’s self-reliance in its food supply is constrained by a lack of arable land and water.

In semiconductors, Western countries are actively working to make sure China doesn’t catch up soon, which has only reinforced Beijing’s determination for self-reliance. Policy--makers a decade ago said they wanted 70% of China’s chip demand to be met by domestic production by 2025. By the end of this year, domestic production will supply around 30% of Chinese chip demand, consulting firm International Business Strategies estimates. Chip imports last year were close to $400 billion, according to Chinese customs data.

China doesn’t have homegrown tech to produce the most advanced chip-making tools, which are now made by a handful of suppliers in the Netherlands, Japan and the U.S. Export-control measures block China from obtaining those tools. Without them, fabricating the most advanced chips has proven difficult for China.

Still, Chinese players have made breakthroughs that surprised U.S. officials. In 2023, Huawei Technologies released the Mate 60 smartphone, which contained an integrated circuit that was a step closer to the technology level of advanced chips in Apple’s iPhones, though industry experts have raised questions about the production yield of these chips and whether Huawei can efficiently mass-produce them.

Huawei hasn’t commented on the details of the chip. Huawei also succeeded in developing its own operating system after it was restricted from using Google’s Android system.

The case of AI newcomer DeepSeek provides a counterexample to China’s state-led strategy. DeepSeek was built by a Chinese math geek who had founded a hedge fund. Many economists have argued that China could better rev up its economy by easing controls on its private sector without many of the downsides of its state-led model.”

Next time: China Aims to Build a Fortress of Economic Self-Sufficiency