There is no shortage of complaints about American industry, from progressives on the Left and, increasingly, populists on the Right. But the right’s indictment is fundamentally different. It is not hostility toward wealth for its own sake; it is anger over what they believe American industry has produced: manufacturing shipped overseas, jobs handed to foreign workers, corporations pocketing the profits, and the American worker Left behind.
That diagnosis may not be entirely wrong. But we need to be exceedingly clear about who deserves the blame, and who does not.
For years, conservatives rightly trained their criticism on government. More recently, however, much of that blame has migrated to private industry, the traditional target of the progressive Left. That shift is dangerous, particularly as self-described socialists and communists win elections in more places and gain a larger foothold in public debate.
There is plenty to criticize about corporate behavior. But the right increasingly sounds like the progressive Left, with the two sides mainly disagreeing over which constituency should receive the spoils of government interventionism. The left attacks industry in the name of “marginalized communities”; the right increasingly uses the same indictment on behalf of the American worker. That is not a serious alternative vision. The narrative needs refinement.
While government made it easier to hire foreign workers, and often rewarded companies for putting short-term cost savings ahead of long-term investment at home, here is what the private sector has managed to do for Americans.
The H-1B visa program was created by the Immigration Act of 1990 and broad offshoring accelerated in the decades that followed. And yet, from 2000 through 2026, the United States added roughly 28 million payroll jobs, even after absorbing the dot-com crash, the 2008 financial crisis, a pandemic shutdown that erased more than 20 million jobs in a matter of weeks, and the economic contortions that followed. American households also became materially better off. Census Bureau data show real median household income reached a record $87,460 in 2025, roughly 20 percent higher than its level at the start of the century when adjusted for inflation.
Who is responsible for those gains? It was not government. It was not a federal mandate or tariff compelling companies to onshore production. It was not legislation imposing quotas for American workers. And it was certainly not the exclusion of immigrants from the country. Even during the Gilded Age, an era of extraordinary American industrial expansion, prosperity did not emerge because Washington carefully rationed labor, micromanaged hiring, or insulated every industry from competition.
It emerged because private enterprise drove American success forward in spite of government failure. The problem we discuss now is not failure of prosperity, it is dissatisfaction that there is not more prosperity.
Want to know why the United States did not collapse into an economic wasteland of shuttered factories, vacant office parks, and permanently empty cubicles because of immigrant labor or offshoring? Thank the private sector.
And yet the solution we hear today is not simply to repeal the rules that made it harder to build, hire, and produce in America. It is to add more of them.
Instead of cutting the red tape that hollowed out American companies over decades, the new prescription is to “protect” them with tariffs, mandates, and political favoritism. Instead of making it less expensive to hire and expand, by reducing taxes, compliance costs, and regulatory barriers, the proposal is to constrict the labor supply by abolishing or severely restricting H-1B visas. Instead of asking what government-imposed expense pushed a company toward layoffs, the new instinct is to investigate the company for laying off American workers. Never mind whether the job could have been saved by making it cheaper to operate in the first place.
The increasingly preferred answer is another investigation, another restriction, another agency official peering over the company’s shoulder. That is not a free-market correction. It is patriotic big-government regulation.
The American economy is not a jobs program. It is the beating heart of the country’s entrepreneurial, innovative, and productive spirit. It is the engine that softens the blow of government failure for Americans and seldom gets the credit.
For decades, American businesses and workers have absorbed the costs of bad policy. They have still created jobs, built new industries, raised incomes, developed technologies, and supplied Americans with more choice and abundance than any federal policy ever could. And what is their reward? Greater restriction. More tariffs. More hiring mandates. More investigations. More bureaucratic discretion over who may employ whom, where a company may produce, and what it must pay to prove its patriotism.
That is the central mistake of the new Right. It recognizes that too many Americans have been failed by an economy that should be doing better. But the way to make it better is to embrace free markets, not impose a softer, more patriotic version of progressivism. America does not need a more politically obedient private sector. It needs a freer one.
