JD Vance: Towards a Catholic Political Economy?
JD Vance’s reception into Catholicism has supplied a moral language for an economic politics he was already developing. In his new book, Communion, and his public speeches, he rejects the assumption that an economy can be judged chiefly by GDP, consumer prices and aggregate efficiency. Work forms character, production sustains communities, and families depend upon secure employment, housing and social continuity. This is closer to Catholic Social Teaching than Reaganite market individualism. It also recovers the valid post-Marxist insight that relations of production shape culture, family life and political allegiance.
Vance’s practical answer is a national developmental capitalism: tariffs, reshoring, restrictions upon cheap imported labour, inexpensive energy, deregulation and technological investment. His strongest argument is that deindustrialisation never merely transferred routine production to cheaper locations. It also transferred skills, supplier networks and production knowledge. The countries that manufacture products become increasingly capable of designing them - China being exhibit A here.
From a Schumpeterian perspective, an economy that stops making things may eventually lose the capacity to invent the next generation of things. Vance’s proposed combination of tariff protection, robotics and higher labour productivity is therefore more serious than simple nostalgia for lost blue-collar factory jobs.
The conventional objection is that protection creates vested interests and preserves inefficient firms. True, but incomplete. Free trade also creates organised beneficiaries: importers, financial institutions, multinational supply chains and professional elites. Olson’s lesson is not that government intervention uniquely produces capture, but that every durable economic settlement generates coalitions able to defend it. Onshoring may consequently be justified despite some loss of immediate efficiency where national security, technological sovereignty or supply resilience are involved.
Vance’s real weakness lies in institutional design. Protection should create capabilities, not pensions for incumbents. Tariffs, subsidies and tax privileges should be conditional upon investment, productivity, training, domestic supply chains and technological advance, with expiry dates and clawbacks. Procurement should remain open to new entrants, while competition policy restrains protected firms from converting strategic support into monopoly rents. Trusted-allied supply chains will often provide greater resilience than national autarky - no one-size-fits-all architecture works well here. Creative destruction must continue inside the protected space.
The same qualification applies to labour. Catholic teaching rightly insists that workers are to be considered persons rather than disposable inputs, but unions themselves easily become Olsonian organisations defending obsolete jobs, restrictive practices and privileged insiders - indeed that is their default position.
The objective should be to protect workers through economic change, not to protect every existing job from change. Portable benefits, wage insurance, retraining targeted to real vacancies, relocation assistance, employee profit-sharing and broad social insurance serve workers’ collective long-term interests better than simply strengthening established unions. Catholic Social Teaching supports worker association, but places it within the wider principles of human dignity, solidarity, subsidiarity and the common good.
Vance’s achievement is to have broken with the fiction that markets are socially neutral: they are not. His weakness is that he still relies too heavily upon superficial solutions: tariffs, patriotic employers and moral exhortation.
A mature Vance programme would discipline both capital and organised labour, support innovation without abandoning communities, and require every protected interest to continue earning its privileges. That would join Catholic moral purpose to Schumpeterian dynamism and Olsonian realism: not the preservation of an inherited industrial order, but the construction of institutions through which workers and communities can prosper amid continual economic transformation.
