J.D. Vance, Ownership Advocate
Another 2028 presidential candidate edges toward the ownership economy
I’ve argued before that the ownership economy is a jump ball, politically speaking. And one of my favorite bits at The Stakehold is highlighting when public figures and thinkers get 🤏 this 🤏 close 🤏 to jumping on it. So far the list includes Pope Leo XIV, Tucker Carlson, Jon Stewart & Pete Buttigieg, Jon Stewart again, The Economist, MrBeast, Adam Grant, and Chris Hayes—along with actual supporters Mark Cuban, Kirsten Gillibrand, Scott Galloway, Mike Rowe, Bernie Sanders, Marco Rubio and (in response) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.1
J.D. Vance has entered the chat.2 In an interview with Joe Rogan last week, Vance said
On artificial intelligence, we should “give normal people some power in this system” and “ensure that there’s some broader prosperity from that wealth creation.”
and
Channeling the late Charlie Kirk, stopping Gen Z socialism requires we “give young people a stake…give them ownership…give them a sense of the American dream and of possibility in the future…give workers a real say at the bargaining table.”
And then here’s Joe Rogan, sitting in Austin, just a two-step away from the full argument for employee ownership:
“the problem…is that corporations have a responsibility to their shareholders and they always want to make the most money possible and they have to make more money next quarter than they made this quarter. And one of the ways they do that is by paying people less.”
Watch the segment for yourself below, read on for pull quotes + commentary, and visit r/AskConservatives for further kicks.3
On broad-based ownership as a vaccine against socialism
Vance does not feign nuance when talking about socialism, but he does offer that
…there is this revulsion to socialism that’s totally justified without enough thinking about “how did we get here in the first place?”
So how did we here in the first place?
“Man, we ran the experiment. We ran the experiment of offshoring all of our industrial jobs, of becoming a services and finance economy, and allowing Wall Street to come in and buy every asset of modern life and turn it into an investable, you know, line-goes-up asset. And what has that done? It’s created a generation of kids who kind of are attracted to socialism.
Vance is quick to skip over the step in the middle, the one between “ran the experiment” and “created a generation of socialists,” which is “and that laissez-faire economic experiment made life worse for a lot of people.”
On worker power
“So if the system is f*cked,” Rogan asks, “how do we unf*ck it?” Included in Vance’s pro-union answer:
We should give workers a real say at the bargaining table…if you go back to like why did the United States and Britain weather the industrial revolution better than literally every other western country? [In part,] I think you could make a good argument. Strong religious institutions. Right now, we have very weak religious institutions. Number two, I think you could say strong worker participation institutions and not just private sector labor unions.
[Oren Cass’s] idea is that 20th century labor law presupposes a sort of zero sum conflict between the company and the union and that where you’ve seen unions actually thrive in certain places in Europe, it’s a little bit more cooperative and the unions actually have a little bit more power themselves where they can negotiate with the corporation with a little bit more breadth and a little bit more freedom.
What other prominent Republican politicians openly describe themselves as pro-union, much less in favor of unions having more latitude beyond negotiating for higher wages? This is a major narrative shift on Vance’s part, aimed at a formerly stalwart Democratic power base.
On the danger of concentrated corporate power
Echoing anti-monopolist think thanker Matt Stoller, Vance goes straight for the throat of big business:
So if you go back again to what worked and what was broken about the industrial revolution, hyper monopolist style companies that had way too much power…if a single corporation has monopolized an entire space, then you don’t have a real democracy unless you reign in the power of that company. And I think that is another big risk with AI. It’s that we have a hyper monopolist who dominates the space and then influences the government, influences the nonprofit sector, and then real people are effectively cut out of the bargain.
I’m not going to pretend sitting here that I have all the solutions. I think about this more than almost anything else right now. But the solution has to be giving normal people actual authority over their own lives…one of the big mistakes we made in the early 2000s is we should have gone after the big tech companies with antitrust. There is like a trustbusting mechanism that exists in the US government. We just didn’t use it. We’re going to have to be willing to use it in the 21st century.
Teddy Roosevelt was a Republican, but the political inheritors of his trust-busting cause for most of the 20th century were Democrats, not the free-market Reaganite Republicans. This is another major, populist narrative shift.4
On AI and distributism
Vance starts the segment with a reference to the Catholic social doctrine of distributism (i.e. the ownership economy).
…there’s a Christian idea of political economy that’s actually been lost in American politics, where it’s like we think of it as libertarianism, the hardcore free market, versus socialism or communism. And there actually is a third way that has existed in pretty much all Christian economic thinking going back 2,000 years ago.
Distributism has been around 140 years or so, and is typically traced back to Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum,5 which Vance references later when discussing AI:
…Now, there’s this fascinating encyclical written by Pope Leo XIII. I’ll send it to you. It’s one of the best things that I think has ever been written by a Christian leader where it’s written in the late 19th century. And the basic argument of it is that in the age of industrial churn, there has to be a middle way between six-year-olds working on the factory floor and socialism.
Part of the solution is to give workers a sort of say in what’s going on. Give normal people some power in this system. And I think that’s the thing we have to figure out with AI… Control over what their kids are seeing, control over, you know, the economic forces that are being unleashed by AI, some certainty that they’re not going to wake up in a world where they can’t buy a home, but some other guy owns 35 mansions, right?
That to me is the fundamental challenge of AI. It’s that it’s going to unleash a lot of wealth creation, but if that wealth creation all goes to some segment of people, you’re going to have communism. Like that is the choice before us. A lot of wealth being created—that’s good by the way. I like wealth being created. But if you don’t ensure that there’s some broader prosperity from that wealth creation, like we have run this experiment before and it leads to communism, right?
We’ve had a few things to say (here, here) about who should have a stake and a say in the companies developing generative AI. Vance is staking out a pretty powerful economic message for 2028. Democrats had better catch up quick.
Yes, that is a remarkably white, male list. Please suggest additions!
Quotes lightly edited, then frankly more heavily edited to spare you the fact-free, unnecessary, and historically pretty normal scapegoating of immigration.
For the nerds that read footnotes: Cf. the neo-Republican thought of Philip Pettit defining freedom as non-domination.
Today I learned the idea of distributism as a “third way” was later disavowed by the Catholic church: “‘In Centesimus annus (1991) St. John Paul II insisted that ‘the Church has no models to present’ and that ‘the Christian faith does not presume to imprison changing sociopolitical realities in a rigid schema.’ In his 1987 encyclical Sollicitudo rei socialis, he wrote, ‘The church’s social doctrine is not a “third way” between liberal capitalism and Marxist collectivism…rather it constitutes a category of its own’…there is too much internal diversity among the documents to identify Catholic social teaching with corporatism or any single economic model.”