Mackinac Center For Public Policy - Principles

Principles

The Mackinac Center’s work is rooted in the tradition of John Locke and Adam Smith. More recently, the Center has spoken approvingly about the Tea Party movement. The Mackinac Center often cites work by three Nobel Laureates who are unaffiliated with the Mackinac Center: Milton Friedman, who first proposed the concept of school choice, which is now promoted by the Center’s Education Initiative; F.A. Hayek whose ideas about spontaneous order and inability of government central planners to create thriving economies are seen in the Center’s criticism of targeted tax credits and corporate subsidies used by government economic development bureaucracies; and James M. Buchanan, whose work in public choice economics has informed many of the organization’s critiques of state government programs. Although it is sometimes called “conservative” (including by the New York Times and the Raleigh News and Observer), the Mackinac Center characterizes the label as inaccurate, pointing out that it does not address social issues usually identified with modern conservatism including abortion, censorship, and gambling, and that “free market” is a more useful shorthand description of its policy expressions. The Center’s ideology is most accurately described as classical liberal, holding that civil society responses to social and economic problems are more effective than political ones, and that limited government is more conducive to enhancing individual liberty than the welfare state.