Fred Bauer is a writer from New England.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent caused heads to explode across the Beltway when he declared in a recent speech to the Economic Club of New York that “access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American Dream.” A mushroom cloud surely bloomed over the Cato Institute. Mike Pence took to X to rebut Bessent. “Actually,” the former vice president wrote, “it is. Tariffs are good as a means to bring nations like China to the table, but free trade lowers the costs of goods and improves the quality of life for every American.”

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The thrust of Bessent’s comment was not to disregard the importance of affordability for working families but to set consumption in a bigger context: “The American Dream is rooted in the concept that any citizen can achieve prosperity, upward mobility, and economic security.” Obviously, being able to afford a range of consumer goods is part of all those things. However, a successful economic policy cannot be reduced to the imperatives of the dollar store. Bessent’s speech offers a window into a bigger and much-needed policy transition, as policymakers seek to venture beyond the horizon of consumerism.

For decades, policymakers in both parties were tempted to see cheap stuff as the holiest of economic holies. Proponents of expanding international trade claimed that it would provide new export opportunities for American companies as well as help lower costs for consumers, as inexpensive imports from other countries would reduce the price of various goods. An oft-quoted Milton Friedman appearance at Utah State University in 1978 distills this approach to trade and economics in general. The Nobel laureate celebrated the potential loss of domestic steel-industry jobs as a win for the environment, as it would let Japan “subsidize the export of clean air to the United States” by displacing American-made steel. Friedman claimed that foreign-government subsidies to their exporters were, in effect, a form of “foreign aid” that would help the American economy by reducing the costs of consumer goods as well as of the inputs for domestic manufacturing.

The past five years have revealed the limitations of this kind of thinking and exposed the fragility of the global order it rationalized. Embodiment—manufacturing capacity, the location of jobs, and lived social commitments—actually matters for economics, the social order, and national security. The shortages of the pandemic era and its aftermath illuminated how brittle many globalized supply chains have become. Many countries on the European continent “exported” their dirty, energy-producing jobs to Russia, which gave Moscow major leverage over the European Union. It might have seemed a short-term victory for the environment by Friedman’s standard, but it had long-term costs for European consumers and policymakers. Since launching his invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has inflicted grave economic pain on Europe by cutting off energy supplies. That invasion has also aimed a spotlight at the vulnerability of defense supply chains for the United States and some of its key allies. For many policymakers today, the growing export subsidies of the People’s Republic of China seem less like “foreign aid” and more a missile targeting domestic industry. For example, the heavily subsidized Chinese battery and electric vehicle sectors could overwhelm the American market and cause mass layoffs at car plants at home. While the automobile industry is important in itself, it also intersects with many other economic sectors, such as steel and electronics. The loss of the domestic auto industry would almost certainly be a catastrophic shock to the strategic position of the United States.

As Bessent points to, we need something different. A post-consumerist economics sets the means and the ends of the economy in a broader context. This kind of economics is more material and more (geo)political. Attending to production rather than only consumption, it invests in industrial infrastructure and technological innovation, while also promoting uplift for working families. For this kind of economics, cheap goods for consumers cannot be the singular aim of economic policy, which also needs to help secure national sovereignty and democratic self-governance.

Current policy challenges highlight the need to look at that bigger context for economic policy. The withering of the American manufacturing ecosystem has caused considerable economic and social turmoil, but it also increasingly poses an acute national security threat, too. Reinforcing critical components of the manufacturing sector is important both for foreign policy and for economic innovation at home. In addition to inflicting pain on American workers and consumers today, a weakened industrial ecosystem also represents a major geopolitical vulnerability.

For instance, the pandemic illustrated how much the United States relies upon imports from Asia for medical supplies, and this dependence has continued, if not deepened, since then. In American Affairs, Garrett Murch and Scott Maier write that the “U.S. health care system now relies on Chinese producers for more than 50 percent of our most critical medical supplies—including such essentials as gauze, gowns, needles, syringes, catheters, and…nitrile gloves.” As they note, making the People’s Republic of China “the most crucial link of our supply chain” places major constraints on the ability of the United States to maneuver abroad. How many battalions do righteous think pieces about the moral duty to defend Taiwan command when the PRC could eviscerate the American medical system by cutting off medical supplies?

Policies to help reshore important medical components could sometimes involve supposed “economic inefficiencies” that, in fact, promote strategic imperatives. For instance, “buy American” requirements for certain federal medical procurements could help ensure that there is a vestigial American manufacturing base for some of those medical supplies. Yes, those requirements would likely drive up the price the federal government would pay for some of those medical supplies, but that economic infrastructure would be a backstop during a time of global geopolitical instability. Other efforts—such as favorable tax treatment for domestic manufacturing or driving down energy costs—could also boost manufacturing for medical supplies as well as other goods.

Moving beyond consumerism also means harnessing the power of technological innovation. As David P. Goldman has argued, investing in basic research can help spur on economic growth, and cutting-edge technologies have high strategic stakes. Vice President Vance’s recent speech on AI not only stressed the importance of the United States being at the forefront of that technology—it also indicated the way that technological innovation could and should be used to supplement human workers rather than replacing them entirely.

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Recovering the value of work in this sense can help redress the blindspots of neoliberal consumerism. Reducing the American dream to cheap stuff subordinates the good life to the Target run. Just like we cannot shop our way to happiness (no matter how great the deals might be), people want to be more than consumers. They also want to demonstrate agency, which means responsibility at work and at home. Rewarding work through tightening the labor market and opening pathways to economic opportunity would be an important component of a more robust economy.

And part of that expansion of opportunity also means geographic dispersion. In his New York remarks, Bessent called for more flexibility for local banks. Empowering community banks could be a way of diffusing prosperity while boosting overall economic growth. As Bessent observed, “despite holding only 15% of industry assets and deposits, community banks make up 40% of loans to small businesses, 70% of agricultural loans and 40% of commercial real estate loans.” Investing in local communities and small businesses can help power bottom-up growth.

Whereas the abstractions of a unified global market might have seemed more plausible during the sunny days of post-Cold War unipolarity, we live in a more complicated, tempest-tossed geopolitical world today. The multipolar drift of contemporary geopolitics highlights the advantages of some domestic, or at least regional, resilience. Vast global supply chains are more vulnerable to disruption and, in their fragility, could themselves be a source of international instability. These complications upend arguments from Friedman and others that we should be indifferent to whether goods are made at home or abroad.

This post-consumerist economics would exhibit a shift in priorities, but it would be better to see it as an adaptation to evolving circumstances than as some apostasy from the “pro-growth” policies of the past. The high neoliberal era of 2001 to 2015 delivered subpar results for both median incomes and overall GDP. Inflation-adjusted GDP growth per year during that period was only a little more than half the annual rate of the second half of the 20th century. It took until 2016 for the inflation-adjusted median household income to get significantly above where it was in 1999—and often it was lower.

Investing in the nation’s industrial base, boosting its working families, and prioritizing long-term investments could unlock new economic energies and secure the “American Dream” for the next generation. Beyond benefiting our economy, a post-consumerist turn would reorient our thinking about the aims of economic policy. A conservatism of the future, a renewed United States, and the fate of American families depend on understanding the distinction between discount goods and the good life.

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A Post-Consumerist Economics