In an editorial for Reason magazine, Mike Pence pretends to make the case for the free market. The heart of it includes a critique of Governor Ron DeSantis. …

The Reedy Creek district and its intendant privileges are not the product of the invisible hand of market forces. This can’t be emphasized enough. Mike Pence is counseling us to unprincipled surrender here.

Worse is the logic he employs. He dings DeSantis because he “risked billions of dollars of investment and thousands of jobs for the state.” First of all, this is a lie. Common sense tells us that Disney is not in a position to abandon so many billions of dollars of investment in Florida. Secondly, the consumer-boycott techniques that Pence recommends would carry the exact same risks: Boycotts lead to losses which lead to firings, and firings scare off investment. That’s the point of the boycotts — they want to see malefactors restrained or fired, they want to see companies that insist on offending them go broke, and investment to go elsewhere.

[I’m honestly flummoxed as to what Pence is advocating here, other than the knee-jerk gainsay of a competitor. Is it a conservative value to allow corporations to assume sovereign status, and for governments to only grant that to certain corporations? That’s precisely what Florida did with Reedy Creek decades ago, a status that they pointedly did not offer Disney’s competitors or other businesses. That’s not a free market; it’s corporatism. One can certainly criticize DeSantis’ motives for suddenly discovering his inner anti-corporatist at the moment when Disney started opposing his policies, but unwinding Disney’s quasi-sovereign status in Reedy Creek is a conservative policy that at least moves in the direction of the free market. — Ed]