When, speaking at the Carrier plant, Mike Pence said, “The free market has been sorting it out and America’s been losing,” Trump chimed in, “Every time, every time.” When Republican leaders denounce the free market as consistently harmful to Americans, they repudiate almost everything conservatism has affirmed: Edmund Burke taught respect for a free society’s spontaneous order would immunize politics from ruinous overreaching — from the hubris of believing that we have the information and power to order society by political willfulness.

The Republican Party is saying goodbye to all that.

Indiana’s involvement in the Carrier drama exemplifies the “entrepreneurial federalism” — states competing to lure businesses. This is neither new nor necessarily reprehensible. There are, however, distinctions to be drawn between creating a favorable climate for business generally and giving direct subsidies to alter the behavior of businesses already operating in the state. And when ad hoc corporate welfare, including tariffs, becomes national policy, it becomes a new arena of regulation, which inevitably corrupts politics. And by sapping economic dynamism, it injures the working class.