While the anti-market Republicans luxuriate in a left-wing lovefest, as Noah wrote, one of the pro-market Republicans is starting a new job.
Former Arizona governor Doug Ducey announced today that he would become CEO of Citizens for Free Enterprise, a free-market political action committee. The group has existed for a few years but has maintained a relatively low profile, with support from Joe Ricketts, a major conservative donor. With Ducey in charge, it will likely attract new funding and play a much larger role in the economic debate.
Ducey was governor of Arizona for two terms, winning reelection by a large margin in 2018. His record of free-market accomplishments is long. During his eight years in office, Arizona passed a flat income tax with a rate of only 2.5 percent, became the first state with universal school choice, reformed occupational-licensing rules, turned a budget deficit into a surplus, and shrank the size of the government workforce.
He paired those economic accomplishments with other conservative victories. Under his watch, Arizona also prohibited transgender athletes from competing in girls’ sports, banned gender surgeries for people under 18 years old, and banned most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy when Roe v. Wade was overturned. He also deployed the National Guard to secure Arizona’s border, which he spoke about at the NRI Ideas Summit in 2021.
Even the AP had to tip its cap in a retrospective piece on Ducey’s time as governor: “At a time when the conservative movement is almost singularly oriented around ‘owning the libs,’ Ducey spent his two terms outmaneuvering Democrats to advance Republican priorities, reshaping his state in a decisively conservative direction.”
Unable to continue as governor due to term limits, and on poor terms with Arizona’s increasingly crazy Republican Party, it’s good to see Ducey remaining in politics in what could be an influential role. Much of the anti-market sentiment on the right is concentrated in Washington, D.C. Conservative governors and state legislators still largely hold to free-market principles and act upon them, attracting new residents fleeing big-government blue states. Ducey knows how that works and did it better than just about anyone else, so he’s a natural fit to lead an organization that advocates those principles. And don’t expect any praise from the New York Times for it.