It is worth pointing out that Rubio is framing his argument in the Trumpian language of the nation. Loyalty to one’s country is certainly a nobler thing than an obsession with the meaningless abstractions of neoclassical economists, but it is not enough. There are moral questions here that have nothing to do with nations and everything to do with human beings and their inherent metaphysical dignity, to say nothing of our responsibilities as prudent stewards of God’s creation. Free trade, for example, is something that we should reject not only because it has been bad for American workers, but because it allows corporations to exploit their fellows in Southeast Asia. The seemingly endless supply of cheap consumer goods upon which our present economic order depends is possible not only because of what essentially amounts to slave labor but also because we are wasteful and greedy and indifferent to the fate of our oceans and rivers and forests.

The question is where Rubio goes from here. It is not nothing for a Republican in Congress to argue that unemployment is bad not because welfare benefits cost money but because meaningful work is, as St. John Paul II put it so beautifully, “the mark of a person operating within a community of persons,” to acknowledge that “the global trade that makes it cheaper to buy something at Walmart is useless if it destroys the jobs that pay enough to buy it,” and that freedom is not a nihilistic license to define the good but the absence of impediments to its pursuit. These are wholesome instincts. The question is whether Rubio can follow these premises to their logical conclusion in a rejection of post-Goldwater free-market mysticism. Going it alone will not be easy and it will almost certainly be unrewarding.