The limits of Internet political quizzes aside, my economic philosophy is a bricolage of bits from Wilhelm Roepke’s “humane economy,” E.F. Schumacher’s “Small Is Beautiful,” stray pieces of Catholic social thought, some Bill McKibben, and a dash of Hayek. Market economies are the best mechanism we have for producing and distributing goods, but that they have to be restrained by institutions that reflect non-market values. I’m agnostic about a lot of the details, but anti-monopoly laws, health and safety regulation, environmental protection, and provision of public goods (including health and welfare) would surely be on my list of general responsibilities for the state.

I’m a fan of liberty and decentralization, two things that I’m guessing are essential for a just and sustainable economy, but the typical conservative version limits itself to political decentralization without saying much about economic decentralization. If government institutions are one means (however inadequate) of exercising a degree of social restraint over the market, then they need to be commensurate with the scope of the market.

I’m particularly open to ideas about alternative economies like those McKibben writes about, but the “vulgar libertarian” (to use Kevin Carson‘s phrase) ideal of simply peeling the regulatory and welfare state off the existing corporate capitalist system holds little appeal for me. Democracy means that people have a say over the decisions that impact their lives; there’s no reason, in principle, this shouldn’t extend to the economic realm (or that it shouldn’t expand to include non-human life in some way).