In the second symposium of the “We Hold These Truths: America at 250” initiative held at AEI on April 15, 2024, historians, political scientists, and economists analyzed the role that the market economy played in the creation of the United States. The Heritage Foundation’s Chris DeMuth described how the American colonial and founding periods established competitive pluralism as a defining characteristic of American life, while the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Deirdre McCloskey argued that war and independence were not necessary to expand America’s “key peculiarity” of equality of permission that had developed in the colonial period. Richard Epstein of the New York University School of Law traced how the patent system, a national bank, and the Constitution’s lack of protection of national commerce enabled the nation’s economic advancement. The event concluded with a moderated discussion between Florida International University’s Clement Fatovic and AEI’s Jay Cost on how the Revolution both weakened the links between class and power and inaugurated an enduring tension between capitalism and civic republicanism.
