Katie Miller is a conservative podcaster and former spokesperson for the Trump administration. She was briefly involved with the Department of Government Efficiency, but left government employment to work for Elon Musk full time. In August 2025, she quit that job too, and launched her own podcast, The Katie Miller Podcast. She is married to Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy.
One would hope that an individual who has spent so much time in close proximity to high-ranking conservative political figures—and who is married to the avatar of a very particular brand of conservatism, New Right populism/nativism—might be able to properly define classical liberalism, an extremely well-known philosophy that undergirds the entire American project.
Alas, Katie Miller recently issued a warning on X that betrayed a fundamental ignorance about classical liberalism: She is conflating it with leftism, and for good measure, wokeness.
The post in question was an attack on Chris Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, an AI company. Miller expressed concern about Olah’s stated commitment to “the principles of classical liberal democracy.”
“If this is what they say publicly, this is how their AI model is programmed,” she wrote. “Woke and deeply leftist ideology is what they want you to rely upon.”
Co-Founder of Anthropic: “My deep loyalty is to the principles of classical liberal democracy.”
If this is what they say publicly, this is how their AI model is programmed.
Woke and deeply leftist ideology is what they want you to rely upon. https://t.co/OkyxhOPiRU
She is clearly saying that “classical liberal democracy” and “woke and deeply leftist ideology” are one and the same. They are not.
Classical liberalism is the forerunner of modern libertarianism: It is a philosophy that emphasizes individual rights, including civil rights and property rights. Classically liberal thinkers such as John Locke helped establish the notion that government should be accountable to the people. Economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo used classical liberalism as a guiding principle when arguing in favor of free markets and free trade. In the realm of government, the political leaders associated with classical liberalism and laissez faire economic policies are people such as former President Calvin Coolidge, former U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and Argentinian President Javier Milei. Note that these figures are not exactly defined by their love of wokeness. To the extent that “wokeness” is even a coherent set of views, it emphasizes collective rights for various identity groups instead of the individual-rights framework of classical liberalism.
Leftists tend to agree with classical liberals and even most conservatives on some broad principles, like the notion that people should elect their leaders. But modern liberals, progressives, and leftists tend to disagree sharply with classical liberals and libertarians on economics: They want much more government regulation, taxation, and centralized government control of the economy. On these issues, leftism bears a closer resemblance to the version of conservatism advocated by Stephen Miller—who supports tariffs and extreme restrictions on immigrant labor—than it does to classical liberalism.
Katie Miller’s former boss, Musk, seems to understand this much better than she does. In a reply on X on March 8, 2024, he wrote: “I believe in liberalism in the sense [of] supporting freedom of thought and action, but modern liberalism is the opposite of that.” In other words, he was drawing a distinction between the classical liberalism of, say, America’s Founding Fathers and the modern liberalism of former President Joe Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris.
Stephen Miller frequently talks in apocalyptic terms about threats to Western civilization. Given this, one might hope that the Miller household could easily provide the name of Western civilization’s defining political philosophy. Hint: It’s classical liberal democracy.
The results of Argentina’s midterm elections Sunday were not widely expected. Pre-election polls had predicted a tie nationwide. Instead there was a clear win for President Javier Milei’s coalition, La Libertad Avanza (Freedom Advances), which secured 41 percent of the national vote. The Peronist opposition followed with 32 percent, while regional parties divided the remainder. Voter turnout was 68 percent, below typical midterm participation levels.
The vote consolidated Argentina’s increasingly polarized landscape, with centrist and third-party options virtually disappearing between Milei’s libertarian-leaning movement and the Peronist opposition. Beginning December 10, Freedom Advances will increase its congressional seats from 37 to 101 deputies and from 6 to 20 senators, surpassing the one-third threshold Milei had set as his minimum goal for victory. “We will have, without a doubt, the most reformist Congress in Argentine history,” Milei said after the results were announced.
With a stronger representation in Congress, Milei can now block opposition bills that would undermine his veto power and threaten his fiscal austerity program. Although he did not win an outright majority, the results significantly enhance his bargaining power. Milei plans to pursue labor and tax reforms in the coming legislature and will need support from centrist lawmakers and regional blocs to pass them.
The turnaround in Buenos Aires Province, which represents nearly 40 percent of Argentina’s electorate, was decisive. Milei’s coalition got a narrow victory in the region after suffering a 14-point defeat there in the provincial elections held last month, a vote that Peronist Gov. Axel Kicillof chose to schedule separately from the national contest to boost his own standing ahead of the 2027 presidential race. That early timing reshaped the incentive structure of his party’s local apparatus. Once many provincial officials had already secured their positions in September, the networks that typically drive voter mobilization had little motivation to replicate their efforts in October. The Peronists blame Kiciloff for the underperformance.
The financial markets reacted favorably to Milei’s victory. Argentina’s country risk index and the dollar exchange rate both fell sharply, while the stocks of Argentine companies listed in New York rose. The outcome eased investor concerns about a possible Peronist resurgence. President Donald Trump, who earlier this month tied a $20 billion financial rescue package for Argentina to Milei’s success, congratulated him on Truth Social, praising Milei as a strong ally and celebrating what he called a “big win” for Argentina.
But the outcome is not being read in Argentina as a full endorsement for Milei’s politics. The past month has been a political crisis for Milei, and some cabinet changes are already underway. Foreign Minister Gerardo Werthein and Justice Minister Mariano Cúneo Libarona submitted their resignations; Security Minister Patricia Bullrich and Defense Minister Luis Petri were both elected to Congress.
The reshuffle reflects an internal struggle between Milei’s closest confidants: his behind-the-scenes adviser, Santiago Caputo, and his sister and presidential secretary, Karina Milei. Karina has acted as a bridge to the establishment figures within the administration, while Caputo represents the more radical wing of Milei’s libertarian base. A poor electoral result would have strengthened Caputo’s influence, given Milei’s weakened position in recent weeks. The president’s following appointments will likely settle this internal tension in light of the decisive victory he has just secured.
Volatility is a constant in Argentina. The country’s direction now depends on whether Milei can push his central campaign promises, including dollarization, into policy before the 2027 election, when he will be eligible to seek another term.
As frustration with the American political establishment continues to soar across the country and public trust in the two-party system reaches historic lows, independent and third-party candidates are moving to fill that void in state races nationwide.
In New Jersey, residents are preparing to vote in what is one of the most competitive gubernatorial races of the year’s election cycle. The race’s two frontrunners, Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D–N.J.) and former state Rep. Jack Ciattarelli (R–Hillsborough), are locked in a head-to-head race to succeed incumbent Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy.
Sherrill maintains a six-point lead over Ciattarelli, according to a new poll from Quinnipiac University, but Libertarian Party candidate Vic Kaplan is hoping to disrupt the race.
“I am different from other candidates,” Kaplan told WHYY, Philadelphia’s NPR affiliate. “I offer proposals that would improve the lives of the people of New Jersey.”
Kaplan, who is polling just over 1 percent according to the Quinnipiac survey, emphasizes a pragmatic slate of reforms centered on decentralization and municipal autonomy, arguing that local governments—not state bureaucracies—are best equipped to meet residents’ needs.
Kaplan’s platform includes energy deregulation, repealing the state’s Certificate of Need laws, which force health care facilities to receive government permission before they begin construction or renovation, and supporting legislation that limits local cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. He also seeks to expand affordable housing by easing zoning laws and strengthening private property rights by ending the government’s practice of using eminent domain to seize property without the owner’s permission.
While lowering taxes is central to his campaign—he calls for phasing out New Jersey’s income and sales taxes within four years and replacing them with local revenue and user fees—Kaplan diverges from conventional libertarian views in his support for safety-net programs like Medicaid, which could appeal to some moderate and liberal voters.
Over 1,000 miles away, Thomas Laehn, another Libertarian Party candidate, is running for Iowa’s open federal Senate seat, hoping to tap into voters’ growing distrust of both major parties.
Laehn, who describes himself as a “populist” on his campaign website, was elected as the attorney of rural Greene County in 2017—and again in 2021—and is the first Libertarian Party candidate to hold a partisan office in Iowa history. He’s running on a platform that includes decriminalizing marijuana, ensuring a secure and humane border policy, reducing the national debt, and strengthening private property rights by opposing eminent domain.
To Laehn, the campaign isn’t a traditional partisan challenge but an effort to disrupt the American partisan paradigm. “Both parties have worked tirelessly to take power away from the people and concentrate it into their own hands,” he states on his website. “I am not running against a Democrat or a Republican; I am running against the two-party system itself.”
Both Laehn and Kaplan face steep structural hurdles, such as limited fundraising networks and the enduring belief that third-party votes are wasted. Kaplan must stand out in New Jersey’s crowded field, while Laehn confronts Iowa’s entrenched partisan loyalties, shaped by decades of Republican control in rural areas and Democratic strength in cities. Still, both are betting that widespread frustration and the rise of independent voters will help them break through the noise and surpass the Libertarian Party’s typical 1 percent to 2 percent ceiling. Both candidates seem less concerned with winning their elections than with turning voter disaffection into a lasting political force.
Their campaigns also reflect a quiet shift within Libertarian Party politics. After years dominated by ideological purity—intensified by the party’s 2022 Mises Caucus takeover—Kaplan and Laehn represent a turn toward running candidates with a more voter-focused approach. Their brand of libertarianism appears to emphasize civic empowerment and local reform over abstract theory, meeting disillusioned voters where they are. Though their chances of victory are slim, their performance could signal how third-party politics might evolve in an era when voters care less about loyalty and more about limiting centralized power.
Last week, the Trump administration stepped in with a $20 billion financial rescue for Argentina that could reach $40 billion, including a currency swap and a rare direct purchase of pesos to shore up the exchange rate. The intervention briefly steadied the markets, lifting Argentine bonds.
But for Javier Milei, Argentina’s libertarian president who preaches the gospel of free markets, the need for a U.S. bailout has been a public relations disaster, and his political movement is in crisis. For libertarians, the stakes are high. If Milei succeeds, it will show that radical free market reform is possible in the most adverse political conditions. If he fails, critics will say libertarian policies are impossible to advance in the context of real-world politics. Nearly two years into his presidency, Milei’s political movement is struggling.
Milei has been forced to trade ideological purity for political expedience. His party controls only a small fraction of the National Congress, forcing him into uneasy alliances with centrists and leftists who can stall or reshape his reform agenda at will. At the local level, he faces entrenched political machines built on decades of clientelism, which demand concessions in exchange for loyalty and votes.
He staffed his administration with members of the same “political caste” that during the election he had vowed to purge.His chief of cabinet, Guillermo Francos, served under a Peronist administration; former Vice President Daniel Scioli is now the secretary of tourism, environment, and sports; and Patricia Bullrich, a veteran from the old guard, heads security. The revolution against the political class, it seems, is being staffed by it.
The fervor that swept Milei into power has cooled as his administration has collided with congressional lawmakers hostile to his agenda. He has spent much of his presidency arguing that free-market policies could make Argentina the world’s most prosperous nation within a generation. Yet accomplishing his reforms now depends on expanding his slim legislative base.
The midterm elections for the national legislature on October 26 will largely determine the fate of his reform agenda. Voters will elect half the Chamber of Deputies, the Argentine equivalent to the U.S. House of Representatives, and a third of the Senate. Currently, Milei‘s Freedom Advances party controls only 37 of 257 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and 6 of 72 in the Senate. His capacity to advance reforms depends on cutting deals with factions whose incentives run directly counter to his goals. Politics, not economics, dictates the pace of change. For Milei, success would mean reaching a minimal threshold of roughly 86 seats in the Chamber of Deputies—enough to wield veto power.
If Milei prevails, it will be yet another remarkable moment in a wildly improbable presidency. Since Argentina’s return to democracy in 1983, the country has been governed primarily by Peronism—a big government, populist movement named after its founder, Juan Domingo Perón, who served as president for nearly a decade starting in the late 1940s. Over the years, Peronism has become both deeply embedded in Argentine culture and highly amorphous and adaptable, capable of uniting even old-line union bosses with 21st-century activists for transgender rights. At its symbolic center stands former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who governed for eight years after her husband, former President Néstor Kirchner, passed away in 2010. Today, the label “Kirchnerism” refers to a progressive flavor of Peronism. Milei’s predecessor, former President Alberto Fernández—who governed with Cristina Fernández de Kirchner as her vice president—presided over its most chaotic phase.
Milei didn’t take a traditional path into politics. He started out by speaking to student groups about free markets and individual liberty, winning over young audiences with his irreverent humor. He entered Argentina’s world of political infotainment—TV panels that blend news, gossip, and theatrics. On the popular show Intratables, Milei presented himself as a libertarian firebrand in black suits and leather jackets, his unruly hair earning him the nickname peluca (literally “wig”). He shouted down opponents, sometimes calling them “leftists sons of bitches,” and audiences couldn’t look away.
In 2021, he won a seat in the Chamber of Deputies. From there, he led a small bloc of libertarian lawmakers during the final, disastrous years of Fernández’s presidency.
Disillusionment with Argentina’s political class deepened after the country imposed one of the world’s strictest COVID-19 lockdowns. (During a national ban on public gatherings, Fernández hosted a party at the presidential residence.) Milei channeled the public’s frustration into a broad movement. His campaign events, which could easily be mistaken for rock concerts, gave voice to voters’ anger and turned him into a presidential contender.
Este no es un concierto de rock, es el cierre de campaña de Javier Milei, precandidato presidencial de Argentina.
By the time Milei was sworn in, Argentina’s economy was collapsing under the weight of years of Peronist overspending. Prices were rising at a dizzying pace, the peso had lost credibility, and government reserves were running dry.
In the nearly two years since Milei took office, the Argentine economy has improved substantially. Inflation fell from 211 percent in 2023 to a projected 27 percent by the end of 2025. Poverty has also decreased dramatically, from 43 percent of households and 53 percent of individuals living below the poverty line in early 2024 to 24 percent and 32 percent, respectively, by mid-2025.
While he has succeeded at stabilizing macroeconomic indicators, inevitably, the process has caused significant turmoil, and Milei has failed at convincing the voting public to wait out the painful adjustment. In an interview on the Argentine news network A24, journalist Eduardo Feinmann recently confronted Milei: “Since you took office, 26 companies have been closing every day. Eighty percent of people can’t make it to the end of the month. Do you take that into account?”
Milei insists that “the worst has passed” and is asking voters to stick it out. But this has made him highly vulnerable to his political enemies.
Milei once vowed “to hammer the final nail into Kirchnerism’s coffin, with Cristina [Fernández de Kirchner] inside.” Kirchner is serving a six-year sentence in house arrest, and she’s barred for life from holding public office after being convicted on corruption charges. But her movement is experiencing a resurgence. In the province of Buenos Aires, home to 40 percent of the electorate and the beating heart of Peronist politics, Milei’s coalition suffered a crushing defeat in local elections last month, far worse than his advisers had anticipated. Axel Kicillof, Buenos Aires’ governor and Argentina’s former minister of the economy, engineered Milei’s electoral defeat in the province and is positioning himself as the new face of the movement.
Framing the election results as a broad rejection of Milei’s agenda, Kicillof declared: “The ballot boxes shouted that you can’t defund health care, education, universities, science, or culture in Argentina.”
He might be right. Recent polling suggests that Milei is broadly losing support. He may be a committed libertarian, but most of his supporters aren’t. Milei won the presidency because Argentina was desperate for change.
When fears of a Peronist comeback spread, the pesos plummeted, as investors sought refuge in U.S. dollars. The currency exchange rate nearly hit the ceiling set by Argentina’s deal with the International Monetary Fund earlier this year, prompting the Argentinian Central Bank to intervene, selling its reserves to contain inflation. But draining reserves carried its own risk: A further drop could have left the country unable to pay its debt, rekindling the specter of default. A close ally of President Donald Trump, Milei has since relied on U.S. backing to calm Argentina’s jittery markets.
The Trump administration conditioned its support for Argentina on Milei’s victory in the October elections, saying, “If he wins, we are staying with him, and if he doesn’t win, we’re gone.”
Some of Milei’s libertarian allies say that the need for a U.S. financial rescue could have been avoided had he fulfilled his campaign promise to dollarize the economy. As economist Nicolás Cachanosky notes, Argentina’s monetary instability is rooted in political volatility: The country swings between populist and nonpopulist regimes, each producing vastly different exchange-rate expectations. So even small shifts in the perceived odds of political change can trigger currency crises. Cachanosky says the only way to escape this trap is through dollarization.
Milei’s movement has also been damaged by a string of political and corruption scandals. In February, he promoted a cryptocurrency called $Libra that collapsed after its founders cashed out at the peak. In August, leaked recordings implicated Diego Spagnuolo, former head of the National Disability Agency, in kickbacks allegedly linked to Milei’s sister and closest adviser, Karina Milei, whom Milei refers to as el jefe (the male boss). And Milei’s ally, José Luis Espert, was forced to resign after revelations of financial ties to an accused drug trafficker.
According to a leading pollster, corruption ranks among voters’ top concerns—a first under Milei’s presidency. To voters, the scandals suggest that Milei’s “revolution” is starting to look like politics as usual.
If Milei can’t transform his outsider rage into coalition-building skills, stick to his libertarian ideals, prove he’s not yet another corrupt politician, and persuade skeptical centrists that their economic pain has a purpose, his movement may be what ends up in a coffin.
The awful murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk has stimulated interest in the nature and extent of political violence in the United States. We do not yet know the identity and motive of the killer; but there is at least a substantial likelihood the motive was political in nature. My Cato Institute colleague Alex Nowrasteh has a great overview of the available data on political violence since 1975. He finds that the overall incidence of such violence is much lower than many assume. The 9/11 attacks dominate the stats, accounting for 83% of total deaths. Setting that aside, right-wing violence is significantly more prevalent than the left-wing variety.
It should, perhaps, go without saying. But I condemn the murder of Charlie Kirk without reservation. It is utterly indefensible, and I hope the killer is caught and severely punished. I was no fan of Kirk and his ideology. His organization, TPUSA, even once put me on its “Professor Watchlist” (they apparently removed me from the list a few months later, without explanation). But no one should be attacked or killed for their political beliefs. The murder is all the more tragic in light of the fact that Kirk left behind a wife and two small children. They did nothing to deserve this.
Now for Alex’s summary of the data on violence:
A total of 3,599 people have been murdered in politically motivated terrorist attacks in the United States from January 1, 1975, through September 10, 2025. Murders committed in terrorist attacks account for about 0.35 percent of all murders since 1975. Only 81 happened since 2020, accounting for 0.07 percent of all murders during that time, or 7 out of 10,000. Terrorism is the broadest reasonable definition of a politically motivated murder because it is the threatened or actual use of illegal force and violence by a nonstate actor to attain a political, economic, religious, or social goal through coercion, fear, or intimidation….
Eighty-three percent of those murdered since 1975 were committed by the 9/11 terrorists…. The Oklahoma City Bombing accounts for about another 5 percent. Those murdered since 2020 account for just 2 percent. Terrorists inspired by Islamist ideology are responsible for 87 of those murdered in attacks on US soil since 1975…. Right-wingers are the second most common motivating ideology, accounting for 391 murders and 11 percent of the total. The definition here of right-wing terrorists includes those motivated by white supremacy, anti-abortion beliefs, involuntary celibacy (incels), and other right-wing ideologies.
Left-wing terrorists murdered 65 people, or about 2 percent of the total. Left-wing terrorists include those motivated by black nationalism, anti-police sentiment, communism, socialism, animal rights, environmentalism, anti-white ideologies, and other left-wing ideologies. Those murders that are politically motivated by unknown or other ideologies are a vanishingly small percentage, which is unsurprising because terrorists typically want attention for their causes.
“Right” and “left” are somewhat arbitrary and incoherent categories. Thus, people can argue about some of Alex’s coding choices here. For example, I am not sure black nationalists really qualify as “left” and incels as “right.” Nonetheless, the coding here mostly tracks the way these terms are generally used in current US political discourse. Thus, Alex is right to conclude that right-wing violence is more prevalent than the left-wing kind, even though one can quarrel with the classification of a few specific perpetrators at the margin.
Given the outsize weight of the 9/11 attacks in the data, partisans will be tempted to categorize radical Islamists with their political opponents. Thus, left-wingers might argue that Islamists are on the right, due to their extreme social conservatism (they hate LGBT people, want women to be subordinated to men, and so on). On the other hand, one could also argue that they are actually left-wing, due to their hatred of Israel and opposition to American influence in the world. These latter attitudes are more prevalent on the far left, though there are elements of them on the nationalist/MAGA right, as well. In my view, al Qaeda and its ilk don’t really fit on the US right-left political spectrum, and thus Alex is right to group radical Islamists in a separate category from either.
Regardless of the source, it is reassuring that political violence is relatively rare. The average American is vastly more likely to die in a car accident than be a victim of politically motivated murder. And, as Alex notes, such attacks account for only a tiny percentage of all murders. Prominent political figures are probably more at risk. Nonetheless, the overall level of danger is low, even for most of them.
For understandable reasons, Alex’s data does not include death threats, which are surely far more common than actual murders or attempts. While the vast majority of such threats aren’t acted on, they still cause pain and fear to those they target. I have reason to know, having gotten several myself, over the years, including one that turned out to be from “mail bomber” Cesar Sayoc. Better-known activists and political commentators likely get a lot more than I do. The increasing prevalence of social media and other forms of electronic communication have, I suspect, made such threats more common.
I am not aware of any good data on the relative prevalence of death threats by ideology (as opposed to actual attacks). But I suspect that right-wing ones are more common here, as well.
One person’s experience isn’t necessarily indicative. But over twenty years of libertarian commentary on law and public policy issues, I have said many things that annoy people on both right and left. With one arguable exception (a Russian nationalist angered by my condemnations of Vladimir Putin’s regime), every single one of the threats I have gotten was from right-wingers, mostly related to the issue of immigration. By contrast, I have never gotten threats for things like criticizing affirmative action, condemning socialism, opposing “defunding the police,” or attacking student loan forgiveness. Some of these have generated other types of online nastiness. But never any threats of violence.
As already noted, more systematic data is needed here. Perhaps my experience will turn out to be atypical.
I don’t see any ready solution to the problem of politically motivated death threats. Given how easy they are to make, it is probably unrealistic to expect the authorities to track down more than a small fraction of them. Social media firms may be doing a better job of combating them then a few years ago. But that, too, is difficult. All I can say is that we should condemn them, and avoid being intimidated by them.
As for actual political violence, it is good that it remains relatively rare. But we should be wary of the danger that it might become worse.
Vice President Kamala Harris is expected to announce her running mate next week. She is reportedly considering several governors who theoretically appeal to moderate voters in the swing states: Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear. Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg are also in the mix.
Which of these individuals would be best from a libertarian perspective is not as clear cut as it was on the Republican side, where North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum was obviously better than the alternatives. (Unfortunately, former President Donald Trump selected Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, whose distinguishing feature is his contempt for libertarian economic policies.) Nevertheless, it’s possible to parse them.
First, the national figures. Unlike the other names on the list, Buttigieg is actually a member of the current administration and has been responsible for implementing federal policies. Unfortunately, his tenure as Transportation secretary will not be remembered as particularly libertarian. While he has signaled openness to tearing down bureaucratic “barriers” in the wake of transportation-related disasters, he has not made any serious attempts to grapple with said bureaucracy. On the contrary, when things have gone wrong, he has reserved most of his ire for private companies like Southwest Airlines and Norfolk Southern, rather than the outdated and meddlesome regulators who make their jobs more difficult.
Buttigieg comes across as a technocrat rather than a progressive: He appears to believe that smart, capable people like himself should run the government and make things more efficient. When he pursued the presidency in 2020, liberal news site Vox described him as a “product of the meritocracy” and did not intend it as a compliment. He enrages the left, but this does not make him a friend to liberty, amusing though it is. His foreign policy views also seem somewhat more hawkish than other standard-issue Democrats, which is not an improvement.
Then there’s Kelly. As an astronaut and the husband of former Rep. Gabby Giffords (D–Ariz.)—who was grievously wounded after being shot in the head by a deranged gunman—he is certainly an inspiring figure. However, his political positions are mostly in line with his party. He has voted in support of President Joe Biden’s approved policies 95.5 percent of the time. On energy and environmental issues, he has deviated from the progressive wing of the party: He opposes the Green New Deal and has voted in favor of increased oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. On the other hand, he is one of the more outspoken Democrats on gun control.
Arizona’s U.S. senators have tended to be more individual-minded, bipartisan, and independent: see Kyrsten Sinema. For those reasons, Kelly might be slightly preferable to some of the other options.
Now for the governors. Walz and Beshear were both elected in 2018 and thus have longer records than Shapiro, who became governor of his state just last year. Alas, their tenures are not particularly inspiring, as both of them overlapped with the COVID-19 pandemic—providing an opportunity to implement policies that were anathema to liberty.
Walz implemented many of the same heavy-handed, liberty-infringing mitigation policies as other blue state governors; he also maintained a government hotline for people to call and report their neighbors for violating social distancing rules. When Republicans complained about it, he replied: “We’re not going to take down a phone number that people can call to keep their families safe.” This alone should be disqualifying.
For his part, Beshear attempted to keep lockdowns, mask mandates, and school closures in place—well into the pandemic. In fact, he reimposed masks on public school students in August 2021, saying, “We are to the point where we cannot allow our kids to go into these buildings unprotected, unvaccinated and face this delta variant.” This is also disqualifying.
That leaves Shapiro, who has had mercifully less time in office to do things that would offend libertarians. To his credit, he has supported several encouraging initiatives. One of his first actions after taking office was to eliminate the college degree requirement for government jobs. He also made some small progress on reforming the state’s occupational licensing system. He is a supporter, to a degree, of school choice; he ultimately vetoed a voucher bill after facing significant pressure from teachers unions, however.
Given how popular he is in Pennsylvania—a must-win state for Harris—Shapiro has emerged as the likeliest veep pick in recent days. Like Buttigieg, Shapiro seems to make the far-left very upset: The New Republic called him “The One Vice Presidential Pick Who Could Ruin Democratic Unity.” While that sounds entertaining enough, the main knock on him from the left is that he harshly condemned the recent pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses and is vocally supportive of Israel. For libertarians who would like to see the U.S. become less involved in Middle Eastern affairs and stop spending American tax dollars on costly foreign wars, these are reasonable concerns.
At the same time, it’s hard to imagine Vice President Shapiro steering a markedly different course on foreign policy than any of the other options; on most other issues, he is slightly better. All this contributes to a weak—very weak—libertarian preference for Shapiro.
“We’re going to be asking everyone who sells drugs, gets caught selling drugs,” former President Donald Trump said in November 2022 as he launched his 2024 presidential campaign, “to receive the death penalty for their heinous acts.”
That promise was not an offhand remark; it has been core to Trump’s platform. Which made one of his comments yesterday at the Libertarian National Convention all the more interesting. “I will commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht,” he said, referring to the man serving two life sentences plus 40 years for a slew of convictions, including distributing narcotics. Ulbricht’s legal troubles stem an online marketplace he founded and operated called the Silk Road, where users could buy and sell illegal substances.
Ulbricht has long been of interest to libertarians, many of whom have been dogged about their belief that his sentence was perversely disproportionate to his actual conduct. Taking Trump’s words at face value, it would appear the former president agrees, at the very least, that the nearly 11 years Ulbricht has served are sufficient punishment. That is hard to square with his supposed view that people who sell drugs should be put to death.
The inconsistency here may be puzzling, but—as Reason‘s Jacob Sullum highlighted last year—it isn’t new to his remarks on Ulbricht. While in office, Trump famously commuted Alice Marie Johnson’s sentence after she was sent to prison for life without parole for her alleged role in a cocaine conspiracy. He widely touted the move (which was the right one) as a sign his saner approach to criminal justice.
Not long after, Trump signed legislation that bolstered that narrative: the FIRST STEP Act, which lessened several mandatory minimum sentences and increased “good time” credits, among other modest provisions. It remains one of the more lasting and effective parts of Trump’s legacy, particularly when considering the very low recidivism rates for those released under the law.
Now Trump, it seems, would allegedly pursue policies that would have many of those same beneficiaries killed. That would include not only Johnson but also the bulk of the people who were set free by the FIRST STEP Act, the majority of whom were serving time for drug trafficking offenses. It would almost certainly include Ulbricht, one of the more famous drug offenders on the planet.
Trump also attempted to pull off this balancing act while he was in the White House. “We have to get tough on those people. We can have all the blue ribbon committees we want, but if we don’t get tough on the drug dealers, we’re wasting our time. And that toughness includes the death penalty,” he said—in 2018, the same year he commuted Johnson’s sentence and signed the FIRST STEP Act.
It’s possible that the former president’s drug-warrior rhetoric is another part of the flamboyant performance art that has become one of his defining traits. Whether his Ulbricht promise is yet another element of that, just on the flip side of the coin, remains unclear—although one possibly instructive fact is that Trump had the opportunity for four years to sign such a clemency grant and opted not to.
In the course of an interview mostly devoted to other issues, a Japanese reporter recently asked me whether there is a difference between justice and the rule of law. Some of his (understandable) confusion was purely linguistic. Both “justice” and “rule of law”are fuzzy terms that different people use in different ways. It’s easy to see how non-native English speakers could get confused.
Nonetheless, there are differences between the two concepts that go beyond semantics. Sometimes, of course, “rule of law” might be used in ways that preemptively rule out the possibility that legislation that meets rule-of-law requirements could ever be unjust. In the famous Hart-Fuller debate of the 1950s, Lon Fuller argued that gravely unjust rules and regulations (like those of Nazi Germany) could never be real laws. If so, enforcing such mandates can never be squared with the rule of law.
More commonly, however, “rule of law” is used to denote crucial procedural elements of a legal system, particularly that that ordinary people should be able to readily determine what laws they are required to obey, and that whether or not you get charged by authorities depends mostly on objective legal rules than the exercise of official discretion (thus, the contrast between the rule of law and the “rule of men”). We might add that the rule of law bars—or at least presumptively forbids—discrimination on the basis of certain morally irrelevant characteristics, such as race, ethnicity, and gender.
By contrast, “justice” is a broader notion that focuses on the substantive rightness of the legal rule in question. Laws protecting freedom are (at least usually) just. Laws promoting slavery are not. And so on.
Understood in this way, it is easy to see how legislation that meets the requirements of the rule of law can nonetheless be profoundly unjust. Consider a law mandating the death penalty for jaywalking. It’s certainly clear and unequivocal. Assume, further, that there is no enforcement discretion; no discrimination on the basis of race, gender, or any other morally arbitrary trait. Nor is there any favoritism. It is enforced against the rich and powerful no less than the poor and weak. If the governor of the state jaywalks, he or she will be executed just as readily as a homeless person who commits the same offense.
This rule meets the requirements of the rule of law. But it is still blatantly unjust. The death penalty is a hugely disproportionate punishment for the offense of jaywalking, no matter how evenly it is applied.
The same can be true of laws where “crime” itself is something that should not be illegal, even aside from the severity of the punishment. Imagine a law imposing forced labor on a large swathe of the population, such as one requiring all able-bodied adult citizens to do a month of forced labor each year. In Butler v. Perry (1916), the Supreme Court actually upheld a Florida law that required all able-bodied male citizens between the ages of 21 and 45 to either do road repair work for six days each year, provide a substitute, or pay a $3 tax (a much larger amount in inflation-adjusted terms in 1916 than it would be today).
In 1916 Florida, this law was likely enforced much more aggressively against blacks and poor people than against affluent whites. Such unequal enforcement arguably violated rule-of-law principles. Perhaps the rule of law was also undermined by the fact that the law only mandated forced labor for men, exempting women. But we could easily imagine a version of the law that is enforced equally, and also covers women. That version would satisfy the requirements of the rule of law. And, unlike the death penalty for jaywalking law, the punishment seems at least reasonably proportional to the offense.
The forced labor law would nonetheless be terribly unjust, because forced labor (including forced labor for the state) is itself unjust—no matter how equally enforced. Indeed, fully equal enforcement might in some ways make things worse, because it would increase the number of people who are victimized.
If laws that meet the requirements of the rule of law can still be unjust, we might also consider whether justice might sometimes require dispensing with rule-of-law constraints. At the very least, it seems like such a possibility cannot be categorically ruled out.
Because of the vast scope of current law, in modern America the authorities can pin a crime on the overwhelming majority of people, if they really want to. Whether you get hauled into court or not depends more on the discretionary decisions of law enforcement officials than on any legal rule. And it is difficult or impossible for ordinary people to keep track of all the laws they are subject to and to live a normal life without running afoul of at least some of them….
For most people, it is difficult to avoid violating at least some laws, or even to keep track of all the laws that apply to them….
Ignorance of the law may not be a legally valid excuse. But such ignorance is virtually inevitable when the law regulates almost every aspect of our lives and is so extensive and complicated that few can hope to keep track of it….
Most Americans, of course, never face punishment for their lawbreaking. But that is true only because the authorities lack the resources to pursue most violators and routinely exercise discretion in determining which ones are worth the effort….
In this way, the rule of law has largely been supplanted by the rule of chance and the rule of executive discretion.
I think the way to fix this problem is to drastically reduce the number of laws, and the range of behavior regulated by the state. But it’s easy for me to say that. As a libertarian, I would like to abolish a vast range of current laws for reasons unrelated to rule-of-law considerations. I think a high proportion of current laws are substantively unjust; if I didn’t think that, I would not be a libertarian in the first place.
But if you believe that extensive government regulation of many aspects of society is necessary – and especially if you think it’s necessary to promote justice – than you are likely to face serious tradeoffs between justice and the rule of law. In some situations, you might choose to promote the former, at the expense of the latter. Note the implication that a libertarian society could stick to the rule of law much more consistently than one based on most other ideologies.
But even libertarians might sacrifice the rule of law to substantive justice in at least a few situations. What if, for example, giving government broad discretion to suppress potentially dangerous movements is the only way to prevent Nazis or communists from coming to power? Perhaps that was, in fact, the situation faced by the Russian Provisional Government in 1917, or by the Weimar Republic in the years right before 1933. If so, deviating from the rule of law might be the only way to avoid horrific injustice. I think such dilemmas are rare. But the possibility they might arise can’t be categorically ruled out.
If you believe civil disobedience is sometimes justified (as Martin Luther King and others argued), the distinction between justice and the rule of law implies there may be situations where there is no obligation to obey a law, even if it meets rule-of-law requirements. As described above, such a law could still be horrifically unjust. For example, people would be justified in evading a rule-of-law compliant forced labor regime, and in helping others to do so.
Both justice and the rule of law are important values. But they are not the same thing. And there can be situations where the two come into conflict.
Javier Milei campaigned with a chainsaw, promising to cut the size of government.
Argentina’s leftists had so clogged the country’s economic arteries with regulations that what once was one of the world’s richest countries is now one of the poorest.
Inflation is more than 200 percent.
People save their whole lives—and then find their savings worth nearly nothing.
Milei understands that government can’t create wealth.
He surprised diplomats at the World Economic Forum this month by saying, “The state is the problem!”
He spoke up for capitalism: “Do not be intimidated by the political caste or by parasites who live off the state…. If you make money, it’s because you offer a better product at a better price, thereby contributing to general well-being. Do not surrender to the advance of the state. The state is not the solution.”
Go, Milei! I wish current American politicians talked that way.
In the West, young people turn socialist. In Argentina, they live under socialist policies. They voted for Milei.
Sixty-nine percent of voters under 25 voted for him. That helped him win by a whopping 3 million votes.
He won promising to reverse “decades of decadence.” He told the Economic Forum, “If measures are adopted that hinder the free functioning of markets, competition, price systems, trade, and ownership of private property, the only possible fate is poverty.”
Right.
Poor countries demonstrate that again and again.
The media say Milei will never pass his reforms, and leftists may yet stop him.
But already, “He was able to repeal rent controls, price controls,” says economist Daniel Di Martino in my new video. He points out that Milei already “eliminated all restrictions on exports and imports, all with one sign of a pen.”
“He can just do that without Congress?” I ask.
“The president of Argentina has a lot more power than the president of the United States.”
Milei also loosened rules limiting where airlines can fly.
“Now [some] air fares are cheaper than bus fares!” says Di Martino.
He scrapped laws that say, “Buy in Argentina.” I point out that America has “Buy America” rules.
“It only makes poor people poorer because it increases costs!” Di Martino replies, “Why shouldn’t Argentinians be able to buy Brazilian pencils or Chilean grapes?”
“To support Argentina,” I push back.
“Guess what?” Says Di Martino, “Not every country is able to produce everything at the lowest cost. Imagine if you had to produce bananas in America.”
Argentina’s leftist governments tried to control pretty much everything.
“The regulations were such that everything not explicitly legal was illegal,” laughs Di Martino. “Now…everything not illegal is legal.”
One government agency Milei demoted was a “Department for Women, Gender and Diversity.” DiMartino says that reminds him of Venezuela’s Vice Ministry for Supreme Social Happiness. “These agencies exist just so government officials can hire their cronies.”
Cutting government jobs and subsidies for interest groups is risky for vote-seeking politicians. There are often riots in countries when politicians cut subsidies. Sometimes politicians get voted out. Or jailed.
“What’s incredible about Milei,” notes Di Martino, “is that he was able to win on the promise of cutting subsidies.”
That is remarkable. Why would Argentinians vote for cuts?
“Argentinians are fed up with the status quo,” replies Di Martino.
Milei is an economist. He named his dogs after Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, and Robert Lucas, all libertarian economists.
I point out that most Americans don’t know who those men were.
“The fact that he’s naming his dogs after these famous economists,” replies Di Martino, “shows that he’s really a nerd. It’s a good thing to have an economics nerd president of a country.”
“What can Americans learn from Argentina?”
“Keep America prosperous. So we never are in the spot of Argentina in the first place. That requires free markets.”
Yes.
Actually, free markets plus rule of law. When people have those things, prosperity happens.
The United States acquired the island of Key West through neither military conquest nor diplomatic treaty. In good American fashion, it was purchased with private funds.
The island was uninhabited except by foliage and flamingos when John Whitehead spotted it while sailing from Nassau in 1819. It had little to recommend it—not even a source of fresh water—except a deep harbor, fortuitously placed between America’s Eastern Seaboard and the busy gulf port of Mobile, Alabama.
Sensing the potential in that location, Whitehead and a business partner, John Simonton, tracked down the island’s owner, a Spanish citizen named Juan Pablo Salas, and made him a $2,000 offer. “Salas accepted, no doubt believing he’d gotten the better part of the deal,” writes Maureen Ogle in Key West: History of an Island of Dreams.
The island began to fill with settlers and just as soon acquired a reputation as a “deadly nest” of pirates and disease. “In another time and place, such a reputation may have killed the settlement,” Ogle explains. “But in early-nineteenth-century America—alive with the pioneering spirit—that reputation only added to Key West’s allure.” As Simonton himself put it, “Capital and capitalists will always go where profit is to be found.”
Wrecking, or salvaging the cargo of distressed sea vessels, was the town’s chief industry. Wreckers provided an invaluable service, venturing out during violent storms at grave risk to themselves to prevent the loss of both life and goods when ships foundered on the hazardous coral reefs. “It was a vocation regulated by few laws,” writes Victoria Shearer in It Happened in the Florida Keys, “but governed by firm rules of honor: The first wrecking vessel to arrive at a distressed ship became the wrecking master of record, directing the salvage and earning a larger share of the proceeds. Other wreckers received shares in proportion to the amount of tonnage they saved.”
On shore, commission agents waited to receive the cargo and arranged to have it auctioned off—for a cut of the reward, of course.
The construction of public lighthouses (and the introduction of steam-powered ships, less likely to be blown aground) eventually put the wreckers out of business. Sea-sponge harvesting, cigar manufacturing, and tourism took over as engines of the local economy. The second of those was a product of government intervention: In the 1850s, Congress imposed stiff tariffs on Cuban cigars but failed to apply the duty to raw tobacco leaf. Predictably, entrepreneurs took to making bulk ingredient purchases in Havana and then set up factories in Key West, a mere 90 miles away. The workers were largely imported from Cuba as well.
During the 19th century, “a decidedly cosmopolitan city slowly emerged from the mangrove thickets,” Ogle writes. “Because Key West sat at the crossroads of the Caribbean, everyone crossed paths with throngs of what one islander called ‘world wanderers,’” from Bahamians to Irishmen to “Hindoos” to Swedes.
Key West naturally selected for a certain anti-authoritarian disposition. When state health officials responded to an 1896 smallpox outbreak by establishing a quarantine camp and closing the harbor, residents “balked,” Ogle recounts. “At a town meeting, seven hundred people listened as one speaker after another denounced government interference. Key Westers paid taxes and got nothing but grief” from the state capital, they said. Eventually, “the crowd voted to inform the state legislature of their desire to secede.”
It wouldn’t be the last time.
***
By the early 20th century, Key West was gaining fame as a haven of vice. Saloons lined Duval Street. Gambling and prostitution were major attractions.
The situation intensified with the passage of the 18th Amendment, which banned the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcohol. Suddenly, rumrunning became the biggest business of all. “Liquor washed over Key West during Prohibition like high tide under a full moon,” Shearer writes. “Given its proximity to Cuba and the Bahamas, both of which were swimming in booze, the Florida Keys became a wide-open distribution point….Locals considered smuggling liquor a public service.”
In Key West, even the Prohibition agents often left the islanders well enough alone—and for good reason. One story, recounted in both books, involves a 1926 speakeasy raid by a group of federal “revenooers” down from Miami. For whatever reason, this time the townspeople weren’t having it. “Proprietors of the raided properties swore out warrants against the agents,” Ogle writes, “charging them with assault and battery, destruction of private property, and larceny.”
The justice of the peace for the Keys, Rogelio Gomez, “sided with the locals and granted the warrants,” Shearer explains, making him “the only county magistrate in the United States ever to issue an arrest warrant against a Prohibition agent.” The Miami agents, apparently seeing the writing on the wall, snuck out through the back door of the courthouse and escaped aboard a Navy ship. “The mess was finally cleaned up when the two sides—locals and feds—reached a compromise and dropped both cases,” Shearer writes.
Around this time, Key Westers (also known as “Conchs”) rejoiced when the U.S. Coast Guard relocated its headquarters away from the island. “And why shouldn’t they have?” asks Ogle. “From the point of view of Key West rumrunners, the Coast Guard represented unfair competition. As soon as the Guard’s servicemen seized a cargo of contraband booze, they turned right around and sold it….Who wouldn’t be resentful?”
The onset of the Great Depression a few years later hit the island city hard. It’s an exaggeration to say Ernest Hemingway’s personal expenditures single-handedly kept the economy going, but only just. The celebrity writer ate and drank at the city’s taverns; took out-of-town friends on deep-sea fishing expeditions; bought and renovated his now-famous residence on Whitehead Street; and lured in other literary types with disposable income, including the poet Robert Frost, the philosopher John Dewey, and the playwright Tennessee Williams.
But even Hemingway’s largesse wasn’t enough for the struggling town. In 1934, Julius Stone Jr., head of the Florida division at the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, arrived with an ambitious plan: to “turn Key West into a first-class tourist destination” by rehabilitating the historic downtown with a combination of federal dollars and local volunteer labor. Hoping to cultivate the arts scene, Stone also tasked a cadre of writers, painters, thespians, and musicians employed by the Works Progress Administration and the Federal Writers’ Project with beautifying the island.
Perhaps the least libertarian aspect of Key West history, then, is that its fame as a hub of arts and culture was purchased in sizable part with tax money. But that story’s epilogue is worth bearing in mind: After the New Deal programs dried up, locals created an arts league in an effort to maintain their new reputation. Stone himself, “back in town as a practicing attorney and mover-and-shaker, served as one of the organization’s first presidents,” Ogle writes. “Later, he would flee the island when one of his many shady deals turned sour.”
Leading lights such as Hemingway and Frost, lamenting the touristification of the island, decamped. But those who remained bet on the allure of “bohemianism,” producing glossy brochures that, in Ogle’s words, “played up the island’s live-and-let-live attitude and portrayed the community as a hotbed of eccentricity.” Later, the same spirit would make Key West into a gay enclave famous for its drag shows.
There does seem to be something to the notion that Conchs are just different from other folks. In 1962, Americans held their collective breath as the country tottered on the edge of war. News broke that the Soviets had installed nuclear missiles in communist Cuba, putting attack capabilities in the United States’ backyard. But despite being on the literal frontlines of that showdown, Shearer reports, “Life in Key West remained curiously, quintessentially laid back. After all, October in the Florida Keys, the height of hurricane season, had always been fraught with a degree of danger.”
In the 1970s, the Keys emerged as a way station in the international drug trade. The same personal and geographic characteristics that had allowed Key West denizens to flourish during Prohibition (including a high tolerance for risk and hundreds of miles of marshy coastline) made it tough for federal law enforcement officials to keep up with traffickers half a century later—especially when local law enforcement officials were sometimes in on the game.
***
By 1982, the feds had come up with a new tactic for catching drug runners and illegal immigrants entering the country through the Keys. Their move sparked an uprising that, in a sense, continues to this day.
On April 18, without warning, the U.S. Border Patrol set up a checkpoint on U.S. Highway 1 at the top of the Keys—the only road out of town—and began searching all vehicles attempting to pass north onto the mainland. By some reports, the roadblock caused traffic to back up for 19 miles. Motorists, most of whom were vacationers headed home at the end of the weekend, sat for hours in the heat waiting for their chance to pass.
The tourism industry felt an immediate impact in the form of canceled reservations. Proprietors didn’t take that lightly.
Mayor Dennis Wardlow and the island’s Chamber of Commerce initially tried the legal route: They flew to Miami and filed for an injunction in federal court. It was to no avail. So the outraged Key Westers opted for a more dramatic response.
On April 23, Wardlow announced that Key West was seceding from the Union. “They’re treating us like a foreign country,” he said, “so we might as well become one.” Assuming the title of prime minister, he lowered the stars and stripes and raised the light blue flag of the fledgling Conch Republic. “We serve notice on the government in Washington,” he declared, “to remove the roadblock or get ready to put up a permanent border to a new foreign land. We as a people may have suffered in the past, but we have no intention of suffering in the future at the hands of fools and bureaucrats….We’re Conchs and we’ve had enough.”
Wardlow’s cheeky intention was to declare war on America, fire one shot, surrender, and then ask for $1 billion in aid for rebuilding. His countrymen carried out the plan of attack as only Key Westers would. “Using the Conch Republic’s weapon of choice—hard, stale Cuban bread,” Shearer writes, a member of Wardlow’s war cabinet “hit a cooperative young uniformed naval officer over the head, then immediately handed over the loaf.”
The rebellion was part publicity stunt, part genuine protest. (“We’re happy to secede today with some humor,” Wardlow said. “But there’s some anger, too.”) It was effective on both counts: The roadblock was speedily removed, and the gag became a tourism bonanza.
Today, Conch Republic apparel is available at pretty much all of Key West’s many, many T-shirt shops. A 10-day “independence” celebration happens every April, drawing thousands to the island. (The festivities include a mock battle in which combatants pelt naval vessels with water balloons and conch fritters.) Community leaders boast that Conchs are a people with a “sovereign state of mind.” The micronation even sells novelty passports—and there are documented cases of holders successfully using them to travel abroad and reenter the United States. Sovereign, indeed!
In 1994, the Conchs sent an “official” delegation to the Summit of the Americas in Miami. In 1995, when a government shutdown in Washington caused the closure of Dry Tortugas National Park, just off the Florida coast, the Republic “threatened to use three antique biplanes loaded with stale Cuban bread to bomb the park’s Fort Jefferson” unless the popular tourist destination was reopened, Shearer writes.
More recently, in 2006, the fake country “annexed” a stretch of an abandoned overseas bridge after the Coast Guard told a group of Cuban refugees that landing there did not trigger “wet foot, dry foot”—the policy at the time of granting legal status to any Cuban who landed on American soil.
Peter Anderson, who held the title of Conch Republic secretary general, “led a landing party of Conchs who staked miniature flags along the bridge,” wrote Darien Cavanaugh in a 2015 article for the War Is Boring website. “Since the federal government decided in its infinite wisdom that the old Seven Mile Bridge is not territory of the United States, the Conch Republic is very interested,” Anderson told reporters; Washington “chose not to defend” the bridge against the invasion.
And there you have the colorful history behind the Key West motto, emblazoned on everything from sweatshirts to souvenir passports: “We seceded where others failed.”
It’s that special time of year again when we ask you to open your wallets, dear listener, and make a tax-deductible donation to Reason‘s annual webathon.
More Christians in the liberty movement? Is it a weird time for libertarianism? How to best celebrate the 250th birthday of the United States? Plus, Nick’s treasured pen, Katherine’s socks, Peter’s power of the Mai Tai, and Matt’s favorite pizza.
All this and so much more on this week’s extra special episode of The Reason Roundtable.
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Welcome to Day 2 of Reason’s annual Webathon, in which we invite you, dear consumers of our articles, videos, podcasts, newsletters, and art, to consider making a tax-deductible donation so that we may manufacture more and better libertarian products for all the insufficiently free world to see. If you would like to get to the chorus before I bore us, here’s the link to…
But wait! You should know that, as of this here posting, we have a very generous donor—none other than the great Reason Foundation Chairman of the Board, Gerry Ohrstrom!—who will match the next $100,000 in contributions. Here’s how that works: If, from this second to the end of the Webathon, you people give us $75,000, then we will receive a total of $150,000, and Gerry can then spend his extra $25,000 on worse stuff, like, I dunno, statism. (I keed, I keed.) But! If you match that full $100,000, that brings us $200,000 more to produce Remy videos, deep-dive investigations into government malfeasance, and how-to guides for taking illegal narcotics. If you max that match, then—who knows!—maybe another donor will throw down a challenge grant, and we’ll be on our merry way toward the 2023 Webathon goal of $400,000. Bottom line: Give right now, and your impact gets doubled.
Perusing the available swag at various donation points, I’d like to direct your attention to the $1,000 level. There, for the first time in our seven-year history of podcasting, we are offering our four-figure friends a seat at the Zoom table as we convene a privatized version of The Reason Roundtable. Watch those Katherine Mangu-Ward eye-rolls, hear all those Nick Gillespie snorting noises, suffer through Peter Suderman dad jokes, and puzzle through my (allegedly) mixed metaphors in real time! Do it today; you’ll be glad you did.
Since I know you people over-index ever so slightly (*cough*) for mathematical mental processing, and since we were already talking numbers, let me take you down Webathon memory lane. Back when we started this annual pledge drive, in the inauspicious month of September 2008, the haul was modest if—and I cannot stress this enough—miraculous to our eyeballs: 152 donors totaling $13,000 (worth $19,000 in today’s debased scrip). In 2009 we got greedy and asked for 500 donors, and you instead quadrupled the whole shebang, to 625 for $56,000 ($80,000, adjusted). Then in 2014, while reflecting on that season’s opinion-journalism upheavals (a perennial hazard in the biz, alas), we argued that the broader your base of support, the more smooth our sailing: “[Y]ou are adding to the resilience and stability of an institution you value. The more donors we have, at whatever giving level, the better able we are to withstand and avoid tumult.”
That year the donor pool nearly doubled, to 1,178, a level that has been essentially matched or exceeded every year since….Except last.
Sure, the bottom line is the bottom line, and the last three years have seen us crack north of half a million dollars, for which you have our eternal gratitude, and have in return seen batches of new editorial products, which we’ll be bragging about over the coming week. But I’m addressing here especially you newbies, you fence-sitters, you people who have been consuming the product for however long but haven’t yet pried open your digital wallet. You don’t have to be a $1,000 star, baby, to be in our show (figuratively, I mean; you literally do need to pony up four large to grab a seat at the Roundtable); we would be tickled to the point of giggles if we boosted the overall donor number with a bunch of $50 first-timers. A little today could lead to a lot tomorrow after you emerge, dirt-faced, from the Bitcoin mines.
This is how the institution perpetuates, without losing its mind, without turning on an ideological/partisan dime, without zig-zagging wildly to the whims of a single erratic donor.
The magazine ecosystem these days more resembles a killing field than a garden of earthly delights. Texas Observer, gone. Popular Science, presto. Lapham’s Quarterly, napping. Jezebel, jazzoinked. We don’t dance on graves (OK, maybe excepting the latter); we instead count our blessings that we have you, once and future donors, giving us critical fuel to keep making libertarian journalism, commentary, and yuks for 55 years and counting.
In summary: 1) $100,000 matching grant! 2) Private Roundtable Zoom call for the Thousand Dollar Club! And 3) Let’s get you first-timers off the fence, to build a bigger and more stable boat.
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What kind of bang do you get for your voluntary buck at Reason? Our enemies certainly think we’re changing the world. Leading populist authoritarian conservative Sohrab Ahmari recently fancifully wrote about the incoming Argentine President Javier Milei:
Milei is a doctrinaire Hayekian seemingly grown in a secret laboratory funded by the Koch brothers, with the editorial staff of Reason, the extremist libertarian magazine in Washington, serving as the scientists.
Fact check: Reason does not have a Frankenstein lab for libertarian politicians. Yet. It depends on how much you donate! In the meantime, you can read a range of perspectives on Milei in our archives.
You can always count on the libertarians @Reason — and sex workers — to support freedom of speech. The media, the progs, and the supposed 1A defenders? Cowards, for the most part. Thank you @MattWelch and @ENBrown for speaking out when so many have been silent. #BackpageTrialhttps://t.co/XZdjMQyzS4
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With critics like Sohrab Ahmari, the sourpuss cofounder of the conservative social democrat* journal Compact, Argentina’s new president, Javier Milei, is looking better and better even before doing a damn thing.
Writing in The New Statesman, Ahmari bemoans “Maga’s foolish embrace” of Milei, whom too many are mistaking for a real populist—you know, the sort of strongman who embodies the volk, punishes certain businessmen, rewards certain labor unions, appeals to tradition and hierarchy, and generally bosses people around. Indeed, even Donald Trump—whom Ahmari slags for doing “precious little to implement a more solidaristic agenda”—congratulated Milei.
Milei, clucks Ahmari, “rejects nearly everything ‘Maga’ populists in the United States, and analogue movements across the developed world, claim to stand for…. [He] is a doctrinaire Hayekian seemingly grown in a secret laboratory funded by the Koch brothers, with the editorial staff of Reason, the extremist libertarian magazine based in Washington, serving as the scientists.”
That’s flattering, really. Milei’s perfidious agenda includes such horribles as reducing tariffs in a country that is battling 140 percent annual inflation and has seen poverty climb from 5 percent a decade ago to over 40 percent. Milei—who does indeed quote libertarian economists such as Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Murray Rothbard—also wants to “dollarize” the economy as a way of hemming in an incompetent central bank and spendthrift government. This is bad, Ahmari says, because it “would leave the country without its own central bank and at the mercy of the US Federal Reserve System.” Maybe, but such a complaint simply ignores the existing reality, which is beyond untenable.
Ahmari is aghast that Milei, who was called a “Trump-like radical” by The Washington Post, has said he supports markets for organs (which are always in short supply) and the use of cryptocurrencies that escape the state’s machinations. Despite being a practicing Catholic, Milei has had sharp words for the Pope, Ahmari reminds us, calling Francis, a “son of a bitch preaching communism” and “the representative of evil on Earth.” Though a surrogate spoke of severing ties with the Vatican, Milei has, says the National Catholic Reporter, walked back such comments after victory.
Whether Milei’s agenda has any chance of being implemented, much less finding any success, is far from clear. As Arturo C. Porzecanski has written, his party holds just 37 seats in the House (out of 257) and a mere eight out of 72 in the Senate. Assuming he is able to take a figurative chainsaw to various agencies, it is uncertain whether his policies will yield quick and decisive results.
But Milei represents a break from Argentina’s past, which for a century has been ruled by a series of left-wing and right-wing authoritarians who crush opposition and initiative in the name of the people they abuse.
That’s a start, in and of itself. There are reasons to be worried about Milei, not least of which is his predilection to downplaying past governmental violence, but to the extent that he confounds proponents of “real” populism, he might just be exactly what his country needs.
CORRECTION:The original sub-headline of this article referred to the Sohrab Ahmari as a “national conservative” and the first line identified Compact as a national conservative publication. He wrote me to say “I’ve repeatedly said I’m not a ‘national conservative.’ Nowhere in COMPACT’s ‘About Us’ page or in our pages generally will you find celebration of national conservatism. And I’ve personally written numerous pieces on why I’m not a nationalist.” He suggested the two descriptor phrases marked by asterisks, noting,”Any of those descriptors would still be odious among your readers, but they’d be more accurate than natcon.“
In summer 2023, American progressivism was spending big and riding high. Despite razor-thin majorities in Congress, Democrats had spent the last two years enacting hundreds of billions of dollars in new subsidies—for green energy, public transportation, domestic manufacturing, scientific research, and more. This progressive pork was now in the hands of Democratic President Joe Biden to distribute as his administration saw fit.
Yet when California Gov. Gavin Newsom looked upon the piles of fresh federal cash, all he could do was despair.
“We’re going to lose billions and billions of dollars in the status quo,” he complained to New York Times columnist Ezra Klein in June. “The beneficiaries of a lot of these dollars are red states that don’t give a damn about these issues, and they’re getting the projects.”
Newsom was right about the distribution of the funds: More than 80 percent of the new federal funding for clean energy and semiconductors was headed for GOP districts, according to the Financial Times. His outburst spoke to the anxiety of much of liberal America.
Despite a string of progressive policy victories at the federal level, a Democratic Party under the grip of progressives, and ironclad Democratic control over some of the country’s largest and wealthiest cities and states, blue America just wasn’t delivering what its boosters said the country needed.
“We need to build more homes, trains, clean energy, research centers, disease surveillance. And we need to do it faster and cheaper,” Klein himself had written a few weeks before his Newsom interview was published. Yet “in New York or California or Oregon…it is too slow and too costly to build even where Republicans are weak—perhaps especially where they are weak.”
The blue strongholds’ failure to build had added countervailing losses to all their wins.
These states aren’t just losing federal grants. They’re losing residents to states where housing construction is easier. They’re losing companies to places where the regulatory burden is lighter. They’re losing voters, tax dollars, congressional seats, and more to places that build the things people want. If the trend keeps up, the progressive vision for America may be lost as well.
This threat has provoked some surprising self-reflection from liberal wonks, writers, and officials.
America, and particularly blue America, has consciously wrapped itself in red tape, regulations, and special-interest carve-outs, to the point that it has become nearly impossible to convert either government subsidies or private capital into needed physical things.
As Newsom said to Klein, “We’re not getting the money because our rules are getting in the way.”
A hodgepodge coalition of legacy publication columnists, traditional think-tankers, upstart Substack writers, and obsessive Twitter posters have rallied around the straightforward idea that what the country needs is more stuff, and it isn’t going to get it with that thicket of rules standing in the way. Their call to action is what Atlantic writer Derek Thompson calls the “abundance agenda.”
According to Thompson, America has produced a lot of technology that allows people to complain about problems, but not much in the physical world to actually solve those problems.
Our “age of bits-enabled protest has coincided with a slowdown in atoms-related progress,” he wrote last year. “Altogether, America has too much venting and not enough inventing.” Thompson’s complaint echoes entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel’s famous 2013 quip that “we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” What we need instead, argues Thompson, are policies that will kick-start material growth and technological development here in reality.
For libertarians and free marketers, this new abundance agenda has a lot to offer. Many of its intellectual forefathers and policy foot soldiers are themselves libertarian-leaning. Even when they’re not, the abundance agenda remains a directionally deregulatory affair. Once seemingly fringe libertarian hobbyhorses such as abolishing zoning, occupational licensing, and immigration restrictions are now being aired prominently in mainstream center-left and progressive spaces.
At the same time, most of those who favor the abundance agenda are either agnostic about big government or actively supportive of it. In its most statist iterations, the deregulatory elements of the abundance agenda are mostly about clearing away the bureaucratic and constitutional obstacles to government-provided services and government-sponsored megaprojects.
For some abundance-agenda adherents, it’s a partisan project as well: The goal is to make blue America more efficient, more effective, and more appealing in the service of making America more Democratic.
And yet: The fundamental policy goal of abundance agenda liberalism is to clear away bureaucratic and political obstacles to useful projects, especially in the housing market. Is this a devil’s bargain that libertarians should be willing to make?
Getting the Public Out of Public Policy
Discussions about the abundance agenda quickly get bogged down in wonky specifics. But its pursuit of limitless individual potential powered by limitless growth and energy is nothing short of utopian.
In a 2022 essay for Works in Progress, Benjamin Reinhardt described this futuristic end point through the eyes of someone living in a world of abundant energy “too cheap to meter.”
You would wake up on your artificial island off the coast of South America, commute to work via a flying car and Singaporean space elevator, put in a few hours working on new longevity drugs in zero-gravity, and then jet off to Tokyo for a quick dinner with friends before commuting home.
As you return home, Reinhardt writes, you hope that one day you have “the resources to pull yourself out of the bottom 25 percent, so that your kids can lead an even brighter life than you do. Things are good, you think, but they could be better.”
In order to achieve this sci-fi world of abundance, we have to unshackle ourselves from growth-phobic institutions riddled with “veto points” stopping new housing, energy, and more.
The American government of today is a highly participatory one. Individual people have substantial opportunity to have their say in public hearings and courtrooms on everything from new housing projects to new power plants.
It wasn’t always this way.
As recounted in Yale historian Paul Sabin’s book Public Citizens, this level of citizen input was the product of laws passed in the 1970s inspired by slow-growth activists such as Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, and Ralph Nader.
This group of writers, lawyers, and activists argued that the midcentury liberal era’s love of growth and bigness had left corporations free to pollute the environment and flood the market with dangerous products. Meanwhile, unchecked, opaque government bureaucracies built or approved harmful megaprojects that bulldozed private property, often without the owners’ consent, and devastated nature in the name of “progress.”
To hold fundamentally untrustworthy bureaucracies accountable, citizens were empowered to sue bureaucrats when they didn’t follow new environmental regulations or disclose enough information about the projects they approved.
The thinking at the time, writes Sabin, was that “aggressive litigation might make the government work better.”
These anti-growth, anti-bigness policies also drifted down to the state and local level. Throughout the 1970s, state legislatures passed their own, often much more expansive environmental reporting laws that allowed citizens to sue to stop private projects such as new housing and businesses, as well as major infrastructure projects.
Local governments, meanwhile, tightened existing zoning codes to drastically reduce the amount of housing that could be built. They also gave local residents (via public hearings, referendums, and discretionary approval processes) more say over the approval of housing that was still technically allowed.
Empowered to sue over projects they didn’t like, local “not in my backyard” (NIMBY) activists grew increasingly successful in stopping everything that smacked of progress in their neighborhoods.
Free marketers have been critical of these laws from day one.
The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), which has enabled citizens to challenge the approval of both large infrastructure projects and single-family homes, was enacted in 1970.
By 1979, Reason was accusing the law of having “done more damage to home building in that state than anything since the last ice age and the San Andreas Fault.” It took several decades for mainstream Democrats like Newsom to start making similar complaints.
Indeed, these laws initially sparked little pushback from liberals. But as their costs have continued to mount in terms of housing units not built and energy not generated, a growing chorus of progressive voices has started demanding reform.
One example is the rise of California’s rabidly pro-development “yes in my backyard” (YIMBY) coalition in the mid-2010s. Irritated by ever-rising housing costs, the new YIMBYs started to demand that restrictive zoning laws and procedures that gave neighbors the ability to say “no” to new housing be abolished.
These largely left-wing YIMBYs were fighting for property rights and freer markets in building. Yet their rhetoric is more likely to stress left-wing notions of equality and inclusion: The privileged few shouldn’t get to say “no” to housing for the hard-pressed many.
Zoning reform has since become a core of the abundance agenda. Its critique of citizen veto points over housing has quickly spread to other areas of the regulatory state.
When it comes to the approval of infrastructure projects, community input is “fundamentally flawed,” wrote Jerusalem Demsas for The Atlantic last year. “It’s biased toward the status quo and privileges a small group of residents who for reasons that range from the sympathetic to the selfish don’t want to allow projects that are broadly useful.”
Riddling the system with these “veto points” has also given rise to a related criticism of modern American governance: what the Times‘ Klein calls “everything bagel liberalism.” (That’s a reference to the all-consuming “everything bagel” from the 2022 film Everything Everywhere All at Once that sucks up so much of the universe that no individual thing ends up mattering.)
The policy implications of the metaphor are clear. If everyone can say “no” to your project, then everyone is going to demand something before they say “yes” to it. That in turn weighs down projects, public or private, with prohibitively costly carve-outs and payoffs.
The abundance agenda’s criticisms of excessive veto points and the special-interest carve-outs they breed has made its supporters more friendly to the libertarian view that market incumbents often convert regulation into a protection racket.
In addition to NIMBY housing regulations, abundance agenda supporters criticize occupational licensing laws for propping up the earnings of incumbent day care workers and hair stylists at the expense of consumers and excluded workers. They criticize immigration restrictions that keep out high-skilled foreigners to protect the wages of native-born Americans. They attack “Buy American” laws that force businesses to purchase domestically sourced materials.
“I think a lot of people don’t know how much the government does to restrict access to a lot of kinds of goods that we don’t have serious disagreements about whether people should have access to them,” says liberal pundit Matt Yglesias. “There’s a lot of pretty pure rent seeking in the system.”
On the flip side, the growing popularity of the abundance agenda has seen free marketers use that framing to pitch their longstanding deregulatory beliefs to a wider left-of-center audience that might otherwise tune them out.
Discourse, a publication of the pro-market Mercatus Center at George Mason University, has published a series of essays on the abundance agenda, most of which argue that a long list of free market policies are necessary for true abundance.
Both libertarian and progressive abundance-agenda supporters have reached back in history to find forgotten strands of liberalism that prioritized growth and progress.
An Abundance of Takes
In Neal Stephenson’s sci-fi novel Anathem, there exists an order of rationalist monks whose whole purpose is to explain that every supposedly new idea was actually discussed to death centuries ago. If these monks existed in our universe, they’d likely say that, actually, there’s nothing all that novel about a progressivism that extols the virtues of growing the private sector and government.
As recently as the mid-2000s, there was a boom in this kind of thinking. Writers like Brink Lindsey (then a vice president of the Cato Institute) and Gene Sperling (one of President Bill Clinton’s economic advisers) made their respective cases for a “liberaltarian” or “pro-growth progressive” coalition.
The liberal-libertarian fusionists saw dynamic markets as necessary for the good jobs and tax revenue progressives wanted. They also recognized redistribution as a just and politically necessary means of shoring up popular support for the economic dynamism the libertarians prized.
As a bonus, a growing economy would convert everyday people to socially liberal values, or at least make them less willing to go in for reactionary politics. “It is easier to have a melting pot if it is a growing pot,” Sperling wrote in his 2005 book The Pro-Growth Progressive.
Nevertheless, there’s a lot that distinguishes today’s abundance agenda from the pro-growth progressives of old. The most obvious one is the contemporary group’s means of communication and organization. Notwithstanding Thompson’s admonition about too much venting and not enough inventing, the abundance agenda is definitely “too online.”
Today’s abundance-agenda liberals own a lot of real estate at legacy media outlets: Klein writes a column at The New York Times, while Thompson and Demsas write for The Atlantic. More often than not, the prestige publications’ version of the abundance agenda is a filtered, polished rendition of broad ideas and specific policies first circulated on social media and in digital newsletters.
Where else but #EconTwitter would thousands of professional wonks and interested laypeople gather to chew the fat about the latest National Bureau of Economic Research working paper explaining low growth rates, or dunk on clips of anti-housing activists saying a new apartment building will ruin their neighborhood?
Where else but in subscriber-supported Substack newsletters could writers find it possible (and profitable) to pen thousands of words on the particulars of energy-permitting regulations or international variation in public transportation project costs?
Out of this wonky internet churn, individual failures to build get synthesized into a coherent group identity around an abundance agenda and its larger call to action.
A representative episode was the uproar over La Sombrita.
La Sombrita was Los Angeles’ “radical” new design for shading its bus stops that, on closer inspection, turned out to be a mostly useless piece of metal that cast almost no shade.
Its primary virtue was that it was so small and ineffective that city workers could just go out and hang them from bus stop signs. More substantial shade structures would need multiple sign-offs and approvals from L.A.’s sprawling city bureaucracy.
A quarter-century ago, this small-scale boondoggle might have attracted little notice. Instead, it quickly went viral in the abundance-agenda corners of Twitter, which then produced thinkier Substack pieces about how La Sombrita explained America’s material stagnation, which were then followed by coverage in major traditional news outlets.
No “failure to build,” no matter how small, would escape the movement’s all-seeing eye.
Yglesias, who writes the Slow Boring newsletter on Substack, argues that the online nature of abundance-agenda liberalism has helped rehabilitate market-friendly centrist “New Democratic” thinking from its low ebb in the late 2000s and early 2010s.
That kind of proto–abundance agenda “had a lot of purchase and a lot of institutional backing 20 years ago and then came to be discredited because the particular institutions associated with New Democrats came to be associated with the invasion of Iraq” and the Great Recession, he says.
Thanks to new voices and institutions online, he adds, “there’s been a rebuilding and rediscovery of what was correct in that political tendency.”
As a sign of its success, the online movement has started to spawn traditional brick-and-mortar institutions in the real world.
One can see this in the rise of an abundance-agenda-adjacent think tank, the Center for New Liberalism (CNL)—previously known as the Neoliberal Project, and before that r/neoliberal. (In its earliest forms in the mid-2010s, CNL was just a humble subreddit, or online forum.)
“It was making really wonky memes about the federal funds rate,” says CNL co-founder Colin Mortimer. “It very quickly turned into a community and refuge for non-Bernie [as in socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders] Democrats who wanted a place to talk about still wonky but general politics.”
That subreddit community followed the upward ape-to-man trajectory of any successful internet-spawned political movement, growing into a successful Twitter account, a podcast, a website, local in-person meetups, and eventually acquisition by a decadesold center-left think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute, in 2020.
The CNL has since spun off into its own independent organization, where a large part of its mission continues to be convincing center-left policy makers that “we just don’t have enough stuff” and “we should make it easier to replace that stuff or build new stuff.”
That’s not the only abundance-agenda institution to grow beyond the confines of simple posting.
For a time, billionaire Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison was content to write about the causes of and obstacles to economic growth on his personal blog. His company has since plowed significant resources into more traditional publishing endeavors to expand on those ideas.
It has launched Stripe Press, which publishes and reprints a number of books helping to lay an intellectual groundwork for growth-obsessed abundance agenda-ers. That includes J. Storrs Hall’s Where Is My Flying Car?, which pins our stagnation on regulations that crushed energy production, and Stubborn Attachments, by George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen, which argues we have a moral duty to future human beings to increase economic growth by as much as possible.
The abundance agenda and libertarianism have a significant natural overlap. Nevertheless, the former’s goals are higher growth and “more stuff” generally, not a smaller state.
That goal has created an odd-bedfellows coalition of big-government liberals and small-government libertarians and conservatives, all interested in some pruning of the regulatory state. But the progressive members of this coalition want that pruning to unleash the best big government has to offer.
If free markets or small government institutions are seen as an impediment to higher growth and empowered, competent government, then they too have to go.
Klein’s “everything bagel liberalism” is a useful framing for discussing the problems of excessive process and special interest carve-outs. He first deployed it in the context of all the cost-increasing regulations attached to affordable housing development in San Francisco. The development he profiled managed to escape a lot of these regulations by relying exclusively on private money.
Nevertheless, Klein’s column made it clear he wanted the government to play a significant role in solving the state’s affordable housing problems, and indeed, its problems generally.
“Government needs to be able to solve big problems. But the inability or the unwillingness to choose among competing priorities—to pile too much on the bagel—is itself a choice, and it’s one that California keeps making,” he wrote. That’s a far cry from the libertarian view that government will inherently get bogged down with needless process and/or get captured by special interests.
Even where liberal adherents of the abundance agenda support getting rid of government regulation on market actors, it’s often part of a larger political project of making progressive policies work and progressive-dominated regions more powerful.
The abundance agenda in many ways started as an effort to liberalize zoning regulations on new housing construction in expensive coastal metro areas. A large part of that was early YIMBY activists and writers correctly understanding that restrictions on market supply are driving up market prices.
At the same time, this focus on zoning speaks to a progressive anxiety that blue America is losing people, power, and influence to places where housing costs are cheaper.
“The population center of gravity keeps shifting to places where they let houses get built is something everyone understands. The political economy consequences of that are dire,” says Yglesias. “Do you want to concede that the overall model in Texas is just better or do you want to zero in on how much of that excess growth is caused by housing elements and then do something about it?”
The libertarian political project is to shrink the state generally, not just reduce permitting times for federally approved infrastructure projects.
Many activists and policy wonks who support the abundance agenda argue it’s often undesirable and certainly a waste of time for anyone to pursue those larger changes to the nation’s political economy.
That’s the view taken by Alec Stapp, co-founder of the Institute for Progress. Stapp got his start working on the big questions of tech policy, such as antitrust and privacy regulations.
“It’s trench warfare,” he says. “Both sides are really well-funded. They’ve been having these arguments for decades. Has legislation been passed? Have rules and regulations changed? Not really.”
Stapp launched his institute with the goal of sidestepping those bigger policy fights in favor of focusing on the “inputs to innovations,” such as high-skilled immigration and federal science funding.
“Lots of people talking about should we give [the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation] more billions of dollars or take away their funding,” says Stapp. Instead, his group asks: “For any given budget, whether it’s a little smaller or a little bigger, how are they spending it?”
That could well be the best way to be an effective policy entrepreneur. But it requires one to make peace with a state far larger and more intrusive than any libertarian could be comfortable with.
Even some abundance-agenda adherents who share the goal of freer markets and a less intrusive state have nevertheless embraced the idea that the modern world requires us to have a better functioning government before we can have a smaller government.
“Our governments cannot address climate change, much [less] improve K-12 education, fix traffic congestion, or improve the quality of their discretionary spending. Much of our physical infrastructure is stagnant or declining in quality,” wrote Cowen in a 2020 blog post advocating “state-capacity libertarianism.”
“Those problems require state capacity—albeit to boost markets—in a way that classical libertarianism is poorly suited to deal with,” he continued. “Even if you favor education privatization, in the shorter run we still need to make the current system much better. That would even make privatization easier, if that is your goal.”
Old-school libertarians have criticized this notion. David R. Henderson of the Hoover Institution perceptively replied to Cowen that “the latent power that a large-capacity state would have could more easily be drawn on than the power that a small-capacity state would have.”
“Even if large-capacity libertarians wouldn’t want the state to throw people in prison for producing, distributing, or using drugs,” Henderson warns, “they might not get their wish.”
The Liberaltarian Moment?
The liberaltarian movement never quite panned out. Will the abundance agenda be a similar flop? It’s always tough to read the tea leaves, but there’s reason to think a “liberalism that builds” might be a stickier concept.
The pandemic era’s trifecta of huge spending, high inflation, and empty shelves has reinforced the notion that you can’t just spend your way out of material deprivation. Center-left policy wonks and lay policy enthusiasts are increasingly hungry for ideas about how to grow the pie, not just subsidize and redistribute it.
Pandemic-era migration from blue to red America has made clear the role liberal states’ homebuilding regulations are playing in pricing people out. That has helped keep liberalizing zoning reforms on the top of the agenda at the state and local level.
Lastly, the success of congressional Democrats and the Biden administration at squeezing through big spending bills has, ironically, removed one source of friction between the big- and small-government sides of the abundance agenda. Like it or not, those billions in subsidies have already been approved. That’s one less point to argue about.
Provided it does stick around, where will an abundance agenda lead us?
One optimistic view is that an abundance agenda will succeed in smashing the veto point–riddled institutions of the 1970s. The inherent inefficiencies of government will mean that its schemes will still flounder, while private capital is at last unshackled to build our housing- and energy-rich future.
Or perhaps Henderson’s pessimism is on point. Abundance-agenda liberals (and a few useful-idiot libertarians) will succeed in making a more effective state only to see it slide its interfering tentacles into more and more areas of the economy and individuals’ lives.
Maybe the abundance agenda will be truly transcendent, as in Reinhardt’s energy-rich utopia. With the problems of material scarcity basically solved, questions about government control versus private initiative will become hopelessly archaic. Taxation will still be theft, of course. But when energy is too cheap to meter, who’ll even notice the state pirating a few electrons?
Most likely, we’ll end up somewhere in the middle, with the abundance agenda adding another pro-growth, deregulatory spice to the “everything bagel” of Democratic governance. Regulations will become less burdensome, but they won’t disappear. Progressive politicians will have to be more mindful of the costs of permitting procedures and “Buy American” rules, but they won’t get rid of them entirely.
That seems to be the direction where Newsom’s California is headed. After complaining bitterly about CEQA, the governor unveiled some incredibly mild tweaks to the law. They weren’t earth-shattering stuff by any means, and they won’t fix the state’s failures to build.
But directionally, they’re deregulatory. Perhaps real abundance starts on the margins.
As Jennifer Burns writes in her excellent new biography of the libertarian economist Milton Friedman, “Many aspects of our contemporary world that today seem commonplace have their origins in one of Friedman’s seemingly crazy ideas. If you’ve had taxes withheld from a paycheck, planned or postponed a foreign holiday due to the exchange rate, considered the military as a career, wondered if the Federal Reserve really knows what it’s doing, worked at or enrolled your child in a charter school, or gotten into an argument about the pros and cons of universal basic income, you’ve had a brush with Friedman.”
Burns, a Stanford University–based historian who also wrote a good biography of Ayn Rand, emphasizes the intellectual over the personal—rarely does her book seem interested in understanding Friedman the man as opposed to Friedman the mind. But Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative shines as an exploration of Friedman’s ideas and accomplishments.
Sharply intelligent, a great arguer, and inclined toward math, this son of Jewish immigrant New Jersey shopkeepers got his master’s degree in economics at the University of Chicago, where his destiny was shaped by his professors and fellow students (including his eventual wife and writing partner, Rose Director) and by the Chicago school of economics’ yen for applying price theory to as many aspects of life as possible. Burns detects a thread of Chicago price theory spun through Friedman’s lifework, which led him to craft “a dizzying array of policies with a consistent theme: setting prices free. This idea underlies everything, from Friedman’s support of school vouchers and his calls to abolish the draft to his insistence that governments stop controlling the price of their currencies.”
Burns guides the reader handily through Friedman’s New Deal and wartime years. She details some of his innovations in statistical analysis, and she relates one of the first times he raised fellow economists’ hackles by coming to overly libertarian conclusions (a paper that fingered the American Medical Association as a price-raising cartel). She also covers his role in helping the Treasury Department develop income tax withholding as an emergency measure for war financing—a temporary policy that, to Friedman’s regret, became permanent.
Burns is impressively effective for a noneconomist at explaining how “monetarism,” Friedman’s philosophy of how a central bank should behave, clashed with the Federal Reserve’s real-world practice and with economic orthodoxy over the last half of the 20th century. The core of monetarism was the belief that the supply of money, mediated by how often it changed hands, is the key factor in price levels—or, in slogan form, that “inflation is everywhere and always a monetary phenomenon.”
This led Friedman to believe it would be better if the Fed did not practice discretionary monetary policy at all, with the money supply simply growing a bit every year based on preset rules. While the Federal Reserve never embraced all of Friedman’s recommendations, Burns skillfully explains how his ideas did importantly shape the inflation-busting efforts of Fed Chair Paul Volcker in the early 1980s.
The tight connection between money supply and inflation that Friedman and Anna Schwartz detailed in their epochal 1963 A Monetary History of the United States seemed to slip in the post-Reagan decades. This worried Friedman, but he ultimately satisfied himself that the connection between money supply and inflation could be rescued by shifting the particular measure of money supply to watch, and by admitting that the rate at which money changed hands was more variable than he first thought. The inflation of the past two years has helped revive the world’s belief in Friedman’s connection between growth in the money supply and growth in prices.
Inevitably for a book published in 2023, this biography at times adopts a modern race-and-gender lens. On race, Burns upbraids the economist for opposing the 1964 Civil Rights Act: While Friedman, as Burns notes, opposed Jim Crow laws, he did reject the aspects of the 1964 law that would give the government the power to compel private citizens to associate with those they did not wish to. He preferred, again, the course of setting prices free: Friedman expected that racial prejudice would be largely priced out of the market in a freer economy.
When it comes to women, Burns sees Friedman relying heavily, and often with insufficient credit, on various female collaborators, stressing Schwartz’s vital role as the original driving force of the research project that led to A Monetary History and the person who gave literary verve to what could have been just a series of historical data charts. When it comes to one of the books that built Friedman’s professional reputation, A Theory of the Consumption Function (1957), Burns provides evidence that two female researchers, Dorothy Brady and Margaret Reid, likely deserved co-author credit.
Friedman’s relationship with his wife Rose is presented (with a couple of personal tragedies and some intellectual disagreements along the way) as solid and vital to his success as a popular writer—though big aspects of it will remain forever opaque, as Rose burned all her correspondence with her husband.
Having written a book this smart and detailed about a libertarian thinker, Burns is oddly reluctant to explain to her readers that there was such a thing as a distinctly American libertarian movement from World War II on.
She notes, for example, that Friedman worked in the 1940s and ’50s with the Foundation for Economic Education and the William Volker Fund. She writes that these groups “were part of a broader backlash against Keynesian economics.” While calling them “important early manifestations of modern American conservatism,” she acknowledges that “neither identified as a conservative organization.”
Yet she does not adequately explain that these organizations were foundation stones of a distinct, nonconservative, more radically pro-market and freedom-oriented libertarian intellectual and activist movement. Nor does she stress that Friedman moved near or in this movement from the time it first coalesced after World War II, alongside his more respectable Republican affiliations. (Friedman had advisory relationships of various levels of closeness with Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan.)
As Friedman told me in a 1995 interview, “I have a party membership as a Republican, not because they have any principles, but because that’s the way I am the most useful and have most influence. My philosophy is clearly libertarian.”
Burns recognizes that after Friedman worked near the libertarian economist F.A. Hayek at the University of Chicago in the 1950s, Hayekian ideas and phrases began showing up in Friedman’s writing, and that “shifts in Friedman’s thinking emerged clearly in 1956, during a series of summer lectures at Wabash College.” These events “were one of several invitation-only summer conferences sponsored by the Volker Fund,” and they eventually “would form the seedbed of Capitalism and Freedom,” one of Friedman’s most influential books. She does not adequately explain, though, that those “shifts” represent a more full-hearted slotting, after some early conflicts and disagreements, into the libertarian movement’s beliefs.
That shift in a more libertarian direction is an important part of Friedman’s intellectual evolution. From education to monetary policy, the more integrated he became in libertarian communities of affinity that he valued—from the Mont Pelerin Society to the New Individualist Review—the less he believed government should do. (One of his more radical areas of libertarian activism in later years, arguing against the war on drugs, is not mentioned in this book at all.)
Burns’ discussion of Friedman’s family is thinner than you might expect from a biography of this heft. In one of a mere handful of sentences on his son David, she notes the younger Friedman was an advocate of “anarcho-capitalism” without explaining what that meant in the context of his father’s thinking. But Milton Friedman was part of a movement of intellectuals and organizations in which anarchism was an idea he had to grapple with and be judged against. Friedman, truly no conservative, told me in that 1995 interview that he “would like to be a zero-government libertarian” like his son but was discouraged that he didn’t see enough “historical examples of that kind of a system developing.”
Appearing as it does in the post-Trump era, it is natural that this book would adopt a subtitle like “The Last Conservative.” Donald Trump’s presidency—based on restricting international trade, refusing to touch entitlement spending, hostility to immigrants (Friedman thought illegal immigration was the best kind), and loose Fed policy to goose the economy for the president’s short-term political benefit—was wildly anti-Friedmanite.
Stressing that Friedman was in fact a libertarian would have helped a reader understand how and why he seems a relic to the conservative movement. The current American right has no use for what Burns characterized as an early 21st century “world closer to [Friedman’s] ideal, where capital moved freely across borders, governments retrenched from social spending, and a culture of expressive individualism celebrated freedom above all else.”
Javier Milei, the firebrand libertarian candidate for Argentina’s presidency, surprised the world with a first-place finish in the primaries this August. But in the presidential election this past weekend, he finished second behind Peronist candidate Sergio Massa, Argentina’s current economy minister. Neither candidate passed the threshold needed to become the next president, so they will have a head-to-head rematch on November 19.
Does Milei still have a chance? Why did Argentina’s markets falter after Milei came out ahead this summer? And why are Massa’s allies in the government handing out money to voters?
Join Reason‘s Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe this Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern on Reason‘s YouTube channel or Facebook page to discuss these questions and more with Marcos Falcone, a political scientist, project manager at Argentina’s Fundación Libertad, and podcast host.
Javier Milei—the Argentine presidential candidate who rose to fame with a shock win in August’s primary election—is popular among libertarians, who join him in wanting to eliminate the central bank, lower taxes, and privatize some state-owned industries. Yet as we near Sunday’s elections, an in-depth look at his rhetoric and policy proposals raises questions about Milei’s commitment to libertarian principles.
Milei’s personal style is reminiscent of populist authoritarians such as Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and Viktor Orbán of Hungary. Populists, whether from the left or the right, capitalize on social discontent, and Milei is no different. In his case, the economic turmoil in Argentina has created a political opportunity.
The economist and TV pundit claims to fight against Argentina’s “political caste,” a group he defines as “those who are in politics but are immoral” because they implement policies that harm people while safeguarding their personal privileges. Yet a closer look at his own policies suggests he might be part of the same “caste” he opposes.
Consider, for instance, his new alliance with one of Argentina’s most powerful union leaders, Luis Barrionuevo. The collaboration reveals Milei’s plan to entrust his new unemployment insurance program to the same unions that have overseen the country’s mandatory health insurance since the mid-’60s. Even the current Minister of Economy and left-wing political candidate, Sergio Massa, has placed his own candidates on Milei’s list of congressional candidates.
Milei is famous for talking about the importance of private property, a fundamental libertarian principle. Yet he is being accused of plagiarizing his books, copy-pasting passages from renowned authors such as Ludwig von Mises, Henry Hazlitt, Friedrich Hayek, and Murray Rothbard.
Milei offers a unique combination of national-Catholic populism and anarcho-capitalism. “God is a libertarian, and His model is the free market,” he claims. But his rhetorical style makes it hard to tell whether he would preserve a key principle of liberalism: the separation of power of the state from religion. Instead, Milei and his running mate, Victoria Villarruel, advocate for their union. Earlier this year, for example, Milei posted a tweet saying that he and former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, whom news outlets have dubbed the “Trump of the Tropics,” would “fight based on the values of ‘God, homeland, and family.’”
Milei has claimed that God, along with his deceased dogs, personally asked him to be president and carry out the divine mission to “fight the forces of evil on Earth.” Milei interprets this mission as “reducing public spending” and leading a culture war. His campaign is embodied by the slogan “The Forces of Heaven,” which is prominently featured on hats worn by his supporters.
Milei and Villarruel oppose abortion and LGBTQ rights, which they call “cultural Marxism.” During a recent interview with journalist Luis Novaresio, Villarruel stated: “Milei and I are against abortion because there are no human rights without life.” Milei has similarly critiqued sectors that promote women’s right to terminate their pregnancies, referring to them as “individuals with brainwashed minds in murderous policy.”
When asked whether he believes that a woman who becomes pregnant through rape is committing aggravated homicide if she chooses to end her pregnancy, Milei responded, “I defend life. Biology states that life begins at conception. At that moment, a new being with a completely different DNA is created.” In Argentina, however, abortion is legal nationwide. Milei is proposing to either repeal the abortion law or hold a referendum.
When asked about her opinion on same-sex marriage, Villarruel deemed it “unnecessary” because it was “already guaranteed through civil union.” She even questioned the use of the term “marriage,” suggesting it is related to religious institutions, instead of being a civil institution that has been secular throughout history. Ricardo Bussi, Milei’s top candidate for Congress, recently stated that “homosexuals deserve our full respect, like people who can’t walk, blind people, deaf people or just like people with other disabilities.”
Villarruel also recently took to X (formerly Twitter), lamenting the end of military service in Argentina. She argued that this change “deprived the country of having its citizens trained in defense and made subsequent generations of men [and women] crybabies,” adding that “compulsory military service prepares our citizens for the defense of our extensive and rich territory, nothing more.” Yet, it is important to acknowledge that compulsory military service infringes upon the right to self-ownership, limiting the freedom to make decisions about one’s own life.
Milei and Villaruel oppose the legalization of drugs, even marijuana in medicinal contexts. In September 2021, in response to a video shared by a journalist on X addressing the drug situation in Philadelphia and other U.S. cities, Villarruel commented: “That is our future if we approve drug legalization proposals.” Later, in May 2022, Villarruel tweeted: “They’re voting in two minutes on the law for ‘medicinal cannabis,’ where, without scientific evidence, they want to quasi-legalize marijuana. A millionaire business that thrives on consumption…It’s encouraging addiction.” A social media follower responded to her comments, arguing that cannabis can help alleviate pains from certain illnesses. Villarruel replied by saying that such a claim only “applies to refractory epilepsy” and that “the rest is pro-drug lobbying.”
Milei has said that “consuming drugs is committing suicide slowly.” When asked about the topic, he claims to be “against the public spending that could come with the legalization of drugs” and never says he would legalize. In fact, Villarruel has proposed a law to seize all drugs—and thereby, continue the war on drugs.
Other politicians, such as Mariela Weimer, Milei’s candidate for vice mayor of Ramírez, shout Milei’s slogan “Long live freedom, damn it” while simultaneously asserting that “if the military forces were in charge, there wouldn’t be as much insecurity, drug issues, inflation, and social assistance programs,” and that “with 40 years of military rule, we’d be better off.” Milei has refrained from condemning Argentina’s most recent military dictatorship: He characterizes it as a “war” and questions the official death toll figures. Villaruel goes a step further, claiming to support the military forces.
Milei’s stance on several policy issues has changed over time. Consider his stance on dollarization. Despite having rejected the idea in the past, he has now made it a main pillar of his platform. But dollarization would require dollars to pay off the Central Bank’s liabilities, and the dollars are simply not there.
Contrary to previous statements, Milei said in an interview with Radio Perfil, “If I become president in 2023, I will maintain social assistance programs.” Similarly, after calling for fewer ministries and public employees to reduce public spending, he now claims that he would only eliminate managerial positions.
Milei argues that the core problem plaguing his country “is essentially moral” because “Argentina has strayed from the moral values of the West.” The argument resembles those put forth by Jordan Peterson, an influential figure among these politicians, who claims that “culture is losing, and a cultural war is necessary” and that “the Russians have the highest moral duty to oppose the degenerate ideas of the West.” But as Tom Palmer claims in “Jordan Peterson: Putin’s Useless Idiot“: “It turns out that there are people who believe that Putin was forced to invade Ukraine because Russia is a part of the West and, therefore, has a stake in its culture war whose Ground Zero is somehow Ukraine.”
Villarruel insists on “national sovereignty,” a slogan used by Hugo Chávez, Fidel Castro, and the left they claim to be battling. As his national profile gains popularity, Milei reveals himself to have all the characteristics of a traditional populist who claims the cult of his personality. Milei is not the “crazy libertarian” people make him out to be, instead he could pose a threat to the very liberalism he claims to protect.
