The first one, “The Enemy is Power, Wherever You Find It,” anchors the series in the ideas of Henry Simons. Simons was a free-market economist at Chicago in the 1930s whose distinctive contribution had less to do with the standard apologetics for capitalism than with a question that comes before them: how does a free society keep any single institution, whether corporate, governmental, ecclesial, or union, from accumulating enough power to dominate the rest? Markets earned their place in the liberal order, on his view, because they happened to be among the few institutional arrangements human beings have devised that resist consolidation. Once you see it that way, a lot of liberal political economy reorganizes itself around the question of what other institutions do that work, and where they fail.

The second, “The Power of Wealth,” asks why classical liberals should care about wealth inequality. I’m not making the standard modern-liberal case from distributive justice or fairness. My argument runs through what happens when wealth converts into political power. Once private fortunes grow large enough to capture the institutions that are supposed to constrain them, the classical liberal commitment to limited government has nothing left to push against. Eric Schliesser wrote a sharp response to the piece that I’m still working through, and that I’ll be returning to in future essays.

The third, “The Power of Public Unions,” just went up today. It applies the diagnosis to a domain where classical liberals and modern liberals typically arrive at very different conclusions. The case studies are teachers unions and police unions. The argument is that the standard countervailing-power defense of unions doesn’t translate from the private sector to the public sector, because in the public-sector case the union is bargaining with politicians it helped elect, against a taxpayer constituency that isn’t in the room. The costs, predictably, fall on the diffuse and unorganized: poor and minority kids in the schools case, the victims of police misconduct in the policing case. Classical liberals have been making versions of this critique for decades. The argument I’m making to modern liberals is that they have the conceptual framework to recognize it too, the same framework they bring to pharmaceutical influence at the FDA or fossil-fuel influence at EPA. The piece is, among other things, an effort to get both wings to recognize each other on the question.

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Several other essays are in progress. Zoning, the administrative state, and higher education are all on the list. I’ll flag them here when they appear.

In the meantime, here are few other recent Liberalism.org pieces worth a look:

• Radley Balko, “Federal Courts, Local Wrongs.” Balko’s specific subject is how federal courts have systematically narrowed the avenues for holding local police accountable, but the larger argument is about what federalism actually requires when local institutions go wrong. He has been writing the most careful work on this material for twenty years.

• Jacob Levy, “Liberal Neutrality and How to Fight For It.” On the much-maligned doctrine that the state shouldn’t take sides on contested questions of the good, and why the maligning has run ahead of the arguments.

• Lauren Hall on liberalism and the family. Hall has written some of the best work in print on intermediate institutions. The piece is a corrective to liberals of any stripe who treat the family as a leftover from pre-liberal politics rather than as one of liberalism’s load-bearing institutions.

• Sarah Skwire, “The Enemy of My Enemy Is a Really Big Dragon.” Skwire pulls literature into political argument better than just about anybody, and if this title doesn’t intrigue you, I’m sorry but I just don’t know what to say.

• Janet Bufton, “The Liberal Spirit of System.” Bufton gives a new spin on Adam Smith’s old warning about the “man of system,” and uses it to think through some profoundly important issues related to utopian thinking and liberal politics.

• Michael Munger, “Yours, Mine, or Ours? Liberals Need a Theory of the State.” Munger argues that liberalism has been getting by on too little theory of the state and proposes the beginnings of one. The central move is to treat technology as a moving part in the justification for state action: what the state needs to do depends on what voluntary association and the market can or can’t accomplish, and technological change continually shifts that line. The piece draws explicitly on Jason Kuznicki’s 2017 Technology and the End of Authority, which is the place to start for the longer version of the argument.

• Ilya Somin, “Immigration Restrictions Restrict Americans’ Liberties.” Somin returns to one of the central themes of his work: the question of who is allowed to live where is also a question of whose liberty is being constrained, including the liberty of native-born Americans who would like to associate, hire, rent to, or marry the people in question.

More soon.

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Gordon and Bissell argue that libertarianism really does have a fixed philosophical essence — “you own your justly-earned property and your body and your labor, and no one else may rightfully deprive you of it. The non-aggression principle reigns supreme and without exception.” Anyone who departs from this, on their view, is not really a libertarian at all.

Let me grant what’s true in this. The term “libertarian” isn’t infinitely elastic, and my piece did not claim it was. The label picks out a recognizable lineage, and definitional boundaries exist. But there is a deeper problem with their argument.

The problem is that their reply performs the very move my piece described. I argued that when libertarians disagree, the standard maneuver is to declare the other side not really libertarian and decline to engage their argument. Gordon and Bissell take precisely that maneuver and offer it as a refutation. They don’t engage the historical record showing the term “libertarian” used by anarcho-communists in the 1850s, by single-taxers and mutualists at the turn of the century, by Read and Rothbard and Friedman across the twentieth. They don’t engage the property rights disputes I laid out — between Spencer and Tucker on intellectual property, between George and Rothbard on land, between Tucker and Nozick on original appropriation — in which all parties accept self-ownership and the NAP and still reach opposite policy conclusions. They offer arguments for the boundary they prefer but decline to engage the disputes the boundary itself is meant to settle. As empirical confirmation of the original argument, it would be hard to improve on.

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Gordon and Bissell do, however, raise several arguments that deserve direct engagement. The first is about the Lewis brothers’ framework itself. Tribes, they argue, hold together while their substantive positions shift; libertarianism is splintering rather than holding together, so the model doesn’t fit. But this misreads both the framework and the data. Conservatism is the Lewis brothers’ canonical example: conservatives went from free traders to protectionists, hawks to doves, opponents of federal power to its champions, all while continuing to call themselves conservatives. Tribal identification persists across radical shifts in substantive position. The libertarian case fits the pattern exactly. Bleeding-hearts and paleolibertarians, left-libertarians and neoreactionaries, open-borders absolutists and immigration restrictionists disagree with each other about almost every contested question of contemporary politics — and every one of them insists they are the real libertarians. That isn’t tribal fracture. It’s the persistence of tribal identification across radical substantive disagreement, which is exactly what the framework predicts.

Their second argument turns on a concession in my piece itself. I grant that libertarian principles “rule out the more extreme forms of state socialism,” and they argue that this is enough to establish a real essence — making my “no fixed essence” claim overstated. But the concession does less than they want it to. Principles that exclude the maximally extreme cases are not the same as principles that settle the contested ones, and the disputes my piece catalogues are not disputes about whether liberty matters. They are disputes among self-identified libertarians, all of whom accept the framing principles, about what those principles require in practice. An essence too thin to settle those disputes is just what my essay claims libertarian principles to be.

Their most philosophically substantive objection is that I have conflated two kinds of pluralism: Berlin’s pluralism about goods in personal ethics, which they accept, and political pluralism, which they take to license the state in balancing competing goods on behalf of individuals. But the pluralism my piece appeals to isn’t pluralism about goods in the Berlinian sense. It’s pluralism about how libertarian principles themselves should be applied, among people who all accept those principles. Tucker and Nozick are not disagreeing about how to balance liberty against welfare. They are disagreeing about what liberty itself requires. The charge of category confusion misfires.

* * *

Chris Sciabarra’s response comes at my argument from a different direction, and I want to engage it at greater length. Sciabarra is among the most careful philosophers working in the libertarian tradition. His trilogy on dialectical libertarianism — culminating in Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism — is the most serious sustained attempt I know of to think about liberty in genuinely contextual, non-axiomatic terms. Anyone who wants to take the philosophical project of libertarianism seriously should read it. So I pay close attention when Sciabarra tells me my framework is missing something.

The first part of his response argues that I have misrepresented Ayn Rand as a deductive monist. He shows that Rand’s actual method is more contextual and dialectical than I suggested — that her concern with the cognitive effects of force depends on a broader integration of psychology, culture, and political institutions. The point is well taken, and Sciabarra knows Rand better than I do. I probably did misinterpret her, and his reading is more careful. Anyone who wants the deeper picture should read his Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical.

The second and harder part of his response is more pointed. If my framework treats libertarianism as a tribe with sociological anchors rather than a doctrine with deductive content, what stops Peter Thiel — whose company builds the surveillance architecture for ICE deportations — from claiming the label? An ideology, Sciabarra argues, that cannot exclude figures whose actions directly contradict its supposed core commitments has been “emptied of meaning.”

This is a sharp critique. The right response, I think, is partly to accept Chris’s point and partly to refine it.

First, the acceptance. My framework is descriptive about how the term “libertarian” actually functions in the world, not normative about who counts as a real member of the tradition. I argued that “libertarianism” picks out a sociological lineage rather than a deductive philosophy, and that the disputes inside the lineage don’t admit of clean resolution by appeal to first principles. None of that licenses moral indifference about Thiel. The substantive case against what Palantir does — the surveillance state, the deportation infrastructure, the entrenchment of corporate-state collusion — is a case I’d make, and one any liberal worth the name should make. The framework doesn’t deliver Thiel’s exclusion from the libertarian tribe, but it also doesn’t deliver his inclusion. It simply observes that the term is doing less philosophical work than libertarians like Gordon and Bissell think it is doing, and concludes that we should be having the substantive arguments rather than the membership ones.

On the substantive arguments, Sciabarra and I agree. Our difference is methodological. Sciabarra thinks the label “libertarian” retains enough normative force that maintaining its boundaries against figures like Thiel matters. I think the term’s gatekeeping function distracts from the substantive work, and that the arguments worth having are about what freedom requires, not about whose claim to the label is legitimate.

Here is where the disagreement gets interesting. The case that distinguishes our approaches isn’t Thiel. On Thiel, the two frameworks converge on the same negative judgment: Sciabarra concludes that Thiel is not a libertarian; I conclude that Thiel is a libertarian whose actions are indefensible. The disapproval is shared even though its form is not. Where that difference in form starts to matter is the case of Hans-Hermann Hoppe.

Hoppe is a self-identified libertarian with deep institutional standing in the tradition: books published by libertarian presses, decades of writing for libertarian journals, a major position at one of the field’s most prominent academic centers for libertarian thought. His substantive views, however, are exclusionary in ways that I and many other libertarians find deeply authoritarian — a stridently restrictionist view of immigration, a defense of the right of property owners to physically remove democrats and homosexuals from covenant communities, a politics that would license much of what Sciabarra and I would both strongly reject.

The question for Sciabarra is whether the framework he’s used to exclude Thiel from the libertarian tradition also excludes Hoppe. If it does, then Sciabarra has done what Gordon and Bissell did to bleeding-heart libertarians — used his own substantive judgments as the test for membership, and read out figures whose substantive judgments he disagrees with. If it doesn’t, then the framework doesn’t deliver the exclusions Sciabarra wants it to deliver. Either way, the dialectical procedure does not by itself produce the verdict. The substantive judgments that Sciabarra brings to the procedure do. And the substantive judgments are themselves contested among self-identified libertarians.

The deeper point is that Sciabarra’s focus on Thiel’s actions doesn’t really resolve the underlying problem. An action counts as non-libertarian only if its goals or consequences are non-libertarian, and that judgment is itself substantive. Sciabarra’s verdict on Thiel — that Palantir’s contracts with ICE undermine the conditions of freedom — rests on the prior judgment that mass deportation is an aggression against the deportees rather than an enforcement of citizens’ property rights, and that the surveillance architecture is an authoritarian project rather than a defensive one. I share both judgments. But neither is delivered by the dialectical procedure itself; both are substantive commitments about what freedom requires. Once we see that action-based evaluation is values-based evaluation in disguise, the structure of the Hoppe case is the same as the structure of the Thiel case. Whether Hoppe is in or out of the tradition turns on whether his substantive views are, and his substantive views are themselves the contested terrain.

This is not a knock-down argument against Sciabarra’s project. The dialectical framework, as he develops it in Total Freedom, is more careful and more substantive than the bare-axiom approach. It does real work in helping us think about how concrete actions interact with the broader institutional context of liberty. But on the question of who counts as a libertarian, I think the framework runs into the same difficulty mine does. The disputes about who is in the tradition are downstream of substantive disputes about what freedom requires, and the substantive disputes are themselves the live ones.

Where does this leave the disagreement? In a smaller place than the rhetoric suggests. Both Sciabarra and I are committed to having substantive arguments about what freedom requires rather than definitional arguments about who counts. Both of us think Thiel’s actions deserve criticism on substantive grounds. We disagree about whether the libertarian label retains enough normative force to be worth defending against figures who use it in bad faith. I think it doesn’t. Sciabarra thinks it does. Reasonable libertarians — and I count Sciabarra among the most thoughtful — can disagree about that.

Sciabarra ends Total Freedom with a line I would happily borrow: that any serious project of liberty “can only proceed with a deeper understanding of the context, the real social conditions that inhibit — or promote — those values necessary for the sustenance of a genuinely human existence.” That is the orientation I am trying to defend, and it is the orientation that the original piece was meant to encourage. The dispute isn’t about whether to ask the questions. It’s about what work the labels can still do once we are asking them.

My original post made a simple observation. The logic of Hale’s argument applies just as much to bodily integrity as it does to property rights in external objects. If property’s state-enforced exclusionary structure makes property coercive, bodily integrity rights are coercive too. A person who refuses to donate a kidney is, on this Halean view, coercing the dying patient who needs it. That looks like a reductio.

I’ve thought about Hale’s argument a lot since that post. And the result of that thinking is a new paper out today in Politics, Philosophy & Economics (open access via Sage): “Are Markets Coercive?”.

The paper argues that both the libertarian and the Halean analysis of market coercion fail, in mirror-image ways. The libertarian answer — that voluntary exchange is non-coercive by definition — moralizes coercion and strips it of any evaluative force independent of rights. Hale’s answer goes the other direction: it de-moralizes coercion and makes it ubiquitous, which strips the concept of any discriminating power. If coercion is everywhere, it cannot pick out the arrangements worth criticizing.

The positive proposal is a graduated framework. Identify coercion non-moralistically — yes, property restricts options under state-backed power; that’s coercion in a perfectly real descriptive sense — but evaluate its moral significance in degrees. On this view, the question isn’t whether markets are coercive — they are — but whether their coercion is of the kind that should worry us. Sometimes (company towns, monopsony, mandatory arbitration in bad faith) it is. Often (a competitive market with a decent safety net) it isn’t.

The upshot — and this may surprise libertarian readers — is that the graduated framework supplies a better defense of markets than the moralized libertarian one it replaces:

The libertarian who insists that voluntary market exchange is non-coercive by definition will persuade no one who does not already accept the moralized premise — and will have no resources to explain why competitive markets are preferable to monopolistic ones, since neither involves ‘coercion’ on the moralized view. The graduated framework, by contrast, can explain precisely why well-functioning markets deserve support: competitive markets with adequate safety nets minimize the moral significance of coercion by expanding alternatives, protecting vital interests, and dispersing power.

The paper’s open access. So have a look and let me know what you think!

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The most challenging response so far has come from Eric Schliesser, in a Substack post titled “Against the Generality Principle and Pro Politics; Or why I am a Machiavellian and not a Classical Liberal.” Schliesser objects to the move I make through Buchanan and Congleton’s generality principle — the idea that constitutional rules should apply non-discriminatorily so as to collapse the returns on lobbying. His worry is that this kind of impartiality is the wrong virtue for political life, that politics is not a domain that can be neutralized in the way classical liberals (and economists) want to neutralize it, and that the very norms classical liberals try to install above politics function in practice as elite bargaining mechanisms — which is to say, as politics by another name.

I am, I should say, very sympathetic to a lot of this. There is a recurring tendency among philosophers, libertarians very much included, to treat the political as something to be ruled out, contained, or routed around — to design our way out of contestation rather than to think clearly about what contestation requires of us. Schliesser is pressing on a real weakness in classical liberal habits of mind, and a weakness I am not sure I have entirely escaped. He is also too deep a thinker to be answered quickly or casually, and I am not going to try here. There will be more to say in future essays.

After the wealth piece was published, Samuel Bagg reached out on Bluesky and pointed me to his book The Dispersion of Power. I’ve since been reading it more or less straight through, and it has already substantially shaped how I think about the next set of essays in the series — about countervailing power, state capture, and what democracy actually has to do to function. If you have any interest in these questions, the book is worth your time.

I’ll also flag a thoughtful response thread from Paul Crider of Liberal Currents — another voice working through some of the same terrain, and worth following on Bluesky for anyone who wants to see this conversation continue in close to real time.

More soon.

If you had asked me in 2015 to describe the core commitments of American libertarianism, I could have done it in about a minute. Free markets, limited government, individual rights, skepticism of state power, free trade, open or liberal immigration, some version of non-interventionism abroad, a strong preference for constitutional constraints on executive authority. There would have been edge cases and internal disputes, sure, but the center of gravity was clear enough that you could gesture at it.

Try to do the same today, ten years later, and you run into trouble almost immediately. In the public-facing, movement-adjacent side of libertarianism — the one that reaches audiences through podcasts, YouTube, X, and the tech-intellectual networks of the last few years — the center of gravity has shifted in ways that would have seemed inconceivable a decade ago. Peter Thiel, perhaps the most influential libertarian-adjacent figure in American finance, funded J.D. Vance’s Senate campaign and helped bring him into the Trump orbit, where Vance now openly describes himself as post-liberal. Dave Smith and Tom Woods, two of the most-listened-to libertarian podcasters in America, have made common cause with Trumpism on immigration. A significant fraction of their audiences has gone along for the ride.

The picture is different in the academic wing of the movement, which is where many of the readers of this Substack will have encountered libertarianism. Classical liberals and libertarians in universities, at Reason, and at institutions like Catoand the Institute for Humane Studies have largely stayed where they were — defending open immigration, free trade, limited executive power, and constitutional constraints, and most of them have been among the administration’s sharper critics. Ilya Somin has spent the last year writing essentially without pause about the administration’s assaults on constitutional limits. Justin Amash, still the most prominent libertarian politician in recent memory, has been unsparing. These sticky ideologues now find themselves watching former fellow travelers in the popular movement make arguments that would have gotten them laughed out of libertarian circles in 2015, and some of them feel like strangers in a movement they thought they belonged to.

What’s going on?

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One answer — the one most libertarians instinctively reach for — is that whichever side has drifted isn’t really libertarian anymore. Depending on who’s telling the story, either the Thiel-Vance wing has abandoned libertarianism for reactionary nationalism, or the Reason wing has sold out to the very liberalism it was supposed to oppose. Each camp accuses the other of being fake libertarians who’ve misplaced the true principles of the movement.

I want to suggest a different diagnosis: that both camps are real libertarians, and that the reason libertarianism can’t settle the question of who counts is that libertarianism was never as philosophically coherent as libertarians have tended to assume. The current fracture isn’t an aberration. It’s what libertarianism has always looked like. We just didn’t notice, because for a brief window in the late twentieth century the sociology of the movement happened to produce the appearance of a consensus.

The most useful framework I’ve found for describing this phenomenon comes from a recent book by Hyrum and Verlan Lewis called The Myth of Left and Right. The Lewis brothers’ central claim is that “left” and “right” are not coherent ideologies. They’re tribes. The political positions associated with left and right don’t hang together because of any underlying philosophical essence. They hang together because they happen to be the positions currently held by the left-wing and right-wing tribes. Conservatives went from being free traders to being protectionists, from being hawks on Russia to being doves, from championing federal power to hating it, and the shifts aren’t puzzling once you see that the tribes came first and the ideologies came second. People anchor into a tribe, usually for sociological reasons — family, friends, a formative book, a single resonant issue — and then pick up the tribe’s positions as a matter of social conformity. The positions change as the tribe changes. The “essence” that’s supposed to link them all is a story told after the fact.

The Lewis brothers aren’t writing about libertarianism — their target is the essentialist reading of the political spectrum as a whole. But their framework gave me a vocabulary for something I had already come to suspect, both from years inside the libertarian movement and from tracing its intellectual history. Libertarianism isn’t an exception to the Lewis thesis. It’s a smaller version of the same phenomenon, and if anything its philosophical pretensions make the tribal dynamics easier to see once you know to look.

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Let me start with a brief version of the history (the longer version of which is laid out in The Individualists). The term “libertarian” began in the 1850s as a self-description for a French anarcho-communist named Joseph Déjacque, who believed that private property and the state were two sides of the same coin and that a real commitment to liberty required the abolition of both. Through most of the nineteenth century, “libertarian” was used by anarchists of various stripes — some who favored private property, some who rejected it — to distinguish themselves from authoritarian socialists. The term was consciously positioned on what we’d now call the left.

By the early twentieth century, the label had broadened into something close to a generic anti-authoritarianism. Charles Sprading’s Liberty and the Great Libertarians (1913) used “libertarian” to cover “Republicans, Democrats, Socialists, Single-Taxers, Anarchists, and Women’s Rights advocates” — a genuinely big tent united only by the commitment not to impose one’s views on others by force. A few decades later, under the influence of figures like Leonard Read and the Foundation for Economic Education, “libertarian” had been narrowed to mean support for free markets and limited government. By the 1970s, the Nozick-Rand-Rothbard synthesis had narrowed it further, to the point where many libertarians treated the label as synonymous with a particular form of rationalist, rights-based free-market absolutism.

That’s not where things stayed. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the label fragmented again. Bleeding-heart libertariansstarted talking about social justice. Left-libertarians drew on Tucker and Proudhon to critique actually-existing capitalism. Paleolibertarians went in the opposite direction, making alliances with the cultural right. And now, in the 2020s, the rise of the tech-right, the neo-reactionary movement, and the Thiel-Musk orbit has produced another set of self-identified libertarians whose views on immigration, trade, executive power, and free speech would have been nearly unrecognizable to the libertarians of twenty years ago.

The Lewis framework predicts this kind of drift. An essentialist framework doesn’t. If libertarianism were really defined by a fixed philosophical essence, you wouldn’t see these kinds of swings. You’d see the label getting more precise over time, not less. You’d see cumulative convergence on what libertarian principles actually require, not recurring bouts of fragmentation and re-fragmentation. The pattern we actually see — a label whose meaning shifts as the sociological composition of the movement shifts — is exactly the pattern the Lewis brothers describe for left and right.

* * *

The second piece of evidence is theoretical, and for me it’s the more decisive one. It’s that libertarianism’s foundational principles can’t actually do the work libertarians sometimes claim they do. They’re too open-ended to yield determinate answers to concrete political questions.

Take property, which is the closest thing libertarianism has to a settled core. Libertarians who all claim to be defending property rights disagree radically about what those rights require. Herbert Spencer and Lysander Spooner thought intellectual property was a straightforward extension of property rights; Murray Rothbard thought it was an affront to them. Henry George thought land was categorically different from other property, justly owned by the community; Rothbard called that view “intellectually and morally beneath contempt.” Benjamin Tucker thought legitimate property in land required ongoing occupancy and use; Robert Nozick thought the original appropriation of unowned land, once performed, generated permanent rights. These are libertarians all claiming to defend the same foundational commitment while disagreeing about what that commitment actually is.

The same story plays out for every other core libertarian principle. Does the non-aggression principle permit pollution? That depends on how you define “aggression” and whose property rights you recognize, and libertarians disagree sharply about both. Does individualism require open borders or permit the kind of restrictive “covenant communities” that Hans-Hermann Hoppe defends? Libertarians who share the same foundational premises reach opposite conclusions. Does skepticism of authority lead to anarchism or just to minimal government? Libertarians have been arguing about that since the 1970s and will still be arguing about it in 2075.

The deeper point isn’t that libertarians happen to disagree about these questions. It’s that the foundational principles underdetermine the conclusions. A commitment to property rights doesn’t tell you what property is, how it gets acquired, whether it’s inheritable across generations, whether it applies to ideas, whether land is a special case, or what happens when property-based claims conflict. A commitment to non-aggression doesn’t tell you what counts as aggression, what counts as a defense against aggression, or how to weigh the competing claims of parties who each believe themselves aggrieved. A commitment to individualism doesn’t tell you how to think about collective action problems, inherited obligations, or any of the other ways individual lives turn out to be embedded in structures.

The principles do some work. They rule out, for example, the more extreme forms of state socialism or totalitarianism. But they can’t do anything close to the work of generating determinate libertarian positions on the contested questions of our politics. Which means that when libertarians arrive at positions on those contested questions, the real work is being done somewhere else — by a particular interpretation of the principles, combined with a particular reading of history, a particular set of empirical assumptions, and a particular constellation of intuitions about which tradeoffs matter. And those interpretations, readings, assumptions, and intuitions are, for most of us, not the product of independent philosophical reasoning. They come from the particular sociological path we took into libertarianism — the books we read, the teachers we had, the institutions that trained us, the peers we argued with at a formative moment.

* * *

This is why the current fracture in libertarianism is so illuminating. The tech-right wing and the academic classical-liberal wing aren’t disagreeing about libertarian principles. Both sides are drawing on the same vocabulary of property, liberty, individual rights, and skepticism of power. The disagreement is about how to interpret that vocabulary and apply it to the contested questions of the current moment — and the interpretations track the sociology of the sub-tribes, not the logic of libertarian philosophy. The tech-right lineage came into libertarianism through a particular set of institutions (Founders Fund, certain podcasts, a distinctive set of internet intellectuals), and it’s going in one direction. The classical-liberal academic lineage came in through a different set of institutions (IHS, Cato, the Liberty Fund seminar circuit, Mont Pelerin), and it’s going in another. Both sides are doing what libertarians have always done, which is to reason from shared premises to conclusions consonant with the sensibilities of their particular intellectual community.

The essentialist view can’t account for this without calling one side fake. The sociological view doesn’t have to. It just says that libertarianism, like every other ideological identity, is held together primarily by a set of sociological anchors — institutions, readings, friendships, conventions — and that when those anchors shift or diversify, the views do too. When one of my friends finds himself newly sympathetic to Trump-style immigration restriction while still describing himself as a libertarian, he isn’t being incoherent. He’s responding to a shift in the sociological composition of the tribe he’s part of, and reverse-engineering a philosophy to fit. So, for that matter, are the rest of us — the ones who feel we’ve stayed put. Our “staying put” is itself the product of a different but equally sociological anchoring. None of us is reasoning from pure libertarian axioms to specific political positions. The axioms aren’t powerful enough to do that kind of work, and we aren’t disembodied philosophical agents to begin with.

* * *

There is a version of this argument that ends in nihilism — if libertarianism is mostly sociology, why bother? That isn’t the conclusion I draw, and it isn’t the one the Lewis brothers draw either. Their own recommendation, at the end of The Myth of Left and Right, is a kind of particularism. If the political spectrum isn’t tracking any real essence, we shouldn’t try to think our way through politics by locating positions on a single axis. We should disaggregate — take issues one at a time, think them through on their own terms, and let our conclusions go where the specific case takes us, even when the resulting pattern doesn’t fit any existing ideological mold.

I find that broadly congenial, and not only because it’s where the present argument pushes. It aligns with a pluralistic, non-ideological sensibility about moral and political philosophy that I’d want to defend on other grounds anyway. Isaiah Berlin‘s value pluralism, Bernard Williams‘s skepticism of systematic ethical theory, the long tradition that insists there are many goods, that they don’t reduce to one another, and that practical wisdom about particular cases can’t be replaced by the application of a master principle — all of that sits much more comfortably with me than the monism of an Ayn Rand or a Murray Rothbard, for whom political philosophy is the deductive application of a single axiom to every case that comes along.

So the right response to seeing libertarianism as partly sociological isn’t to stop holding libertarian views. It’s to hold them in a different spirit — less as conclusions derived from an axiom, more as provisional positions arrived at by thinking as carefully as I can about particular issues, with libertarian principles as one important input rather than the only one. On some questions — mass incarceration, occupational licensing cartels, the drug war, closed borders — I’m confident. On others — climate policy, labor organizing, antitrust, the regulation of AI — I’m much less so, because the tradition I’ve inherited offers multiple defensible answers and I’m not sure I’ve landed on the right one. That kind of issue-by-issue tentativeness can feel like weakness next to the certainty of the ideologue. I’ve come to think it’s the stance that actually follows from taking libertarian principles seriously, once you see they were never powerful enough to do the work that ideological certainty requires of them.

Suppose you think the state should be much smaller than it is. It doesn’t follow that any cut is good, or that we should just start hacking away with a chainsaw at a stack of programs. The details matter — and they’ve rarely been thought through. Libertarians, classical liberals, and conservatives have all made the case for a smaller state. But what we still lack is a theory of how to shrink it.

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The most obvious task for such a theory will be to distinguish between those government programs that should be eliminated from those that shouldn’t. Of course, this is also where we will find the most well-trodden divisions between established political theories. Those on the political left will want to keep or expand most existing welfare programs and environmental regulations, for instance, but maybe to cut corporate welfare and military spending. Moderate libertarians like me will want to cut or eliminate some but not all of the above. And anarchists are happy to put the whole turkey on the chopping block.

But it’s once we get past these initial questions that things get more interesting, and complicated. Because even if we could all agree in theory what an ideal government would look like, the fact that we need to transition there from where we are makes the whole process much more difficult and morally fraught.

For instance, suppose you thought that there’s no principled reason why government should be in the business of regulating food and drugs. Or caring for the poor and elderly. Or whatever. Maybe the market or civil society could do those things just as well if not better. Even still, it doesn’t follow that if you could push a button and eliminate those functions today that you should do so.

Why not? Consider the following (incomplete) list of the problems with which a theory of shrinking the state would need to grapple.

(1) The Expectations Problem - Even if you think a particular government program shouldn’t exist, the fact that it does exist arguably creates a reasonable expectation among people that it will continue. That reasonable expectation, in turn, arguably creates both moral and pragmatic reasons for a gradual transition, rather than an immediate one. The most obvious example here is something like Social Security, where immediate abolition would seem to be both unfair and disastrous in its effects. That said, there’s a lot more to say about this issue. What makes an expectation “reasonable” rather than “unreasonable”? My sense is that there is a moral dimension to reasonableness, not merely an epistemic one. I’d want to say that slaveholders did not have a reasonable expectation that slavery would continue in 1860. Or, alternatively, even if they did it is not one that ought to have carried much weight in deliberations about how and when to abolish the institution.

(2) The Distributional Problem - Suppose the state has a bunch of policies which, in theory, ought to be abolished. These policies impose costs and benefits on different groups, with some policies conferring net benefits on one group, other policies benefiting some other group. Now suppose that a reformer arrives and starts eliminating some, but not all, of these policies. But the policies he cuts are all ones that benefit group X, while the policies he keeps are ones that benefit group Y. Even if, like me, you’re skeptical about most claims of distributive justice, you’ll probably think there’s something objectionable about this situation. It seems to run afoul of the idea of equal treatment that is central to the rule of law. Still, there are puzzles here. If the government is unjustly coercing everybody, and then shifts to unjustly coercing only 20% of the population, is that better or worse? How do we balance the concern to minimize coercion with the belief that when state coercion is applied, it ought to be applied in a way that is compatible with norms of equal treatment and non-discrimination?

(3) The Vacuum Problem - It’s tempting to think that when we abolish government programs or agencies that we are destroying power. The reality, however, is that power is never really created or destroyed. It is merely redistributed. Sometimes, to be sure, that redistribution can be enormously beneficial. Taking power from the state and putting it into the hands of ordinary people is almost always good, both in terms of giving people more control over their lives and in terms of avoiding the dangers inherent in concentrated, centralized authority. But ending a government program doesn’t always mean that power goes back to the people. Sometimes, the vacuum created is filled by powerful private interests (think Russian oligarchs after “privatization”). And sometimes it is filled by other elements of the state, as when the weakening of independent federal agencies is used to concentrate power in the hands of the unitary executive. As Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rusenblum write in their important book, Ungoverning, sometimes “what replaces governing is not more freedom but the arbitrary rule of personal will.” See also Stephen Hanson and Jeffrey Kopstein’s recent book, The Assault on the State, along with this fascinating Reason interview with Mark Pennington about his new book on Foucault and classical liberalism.

(4) The Politics Problem - As an effort to dramatically cut back on wasteful government spending, DOGE was a failure. Some of my libertarian friends were surprised that Musk wasn’t able to do more. But they shouldn’t have been. DOGE was never about reducing government spending in the most effective way possible. DOGE was a political operation, and everything it did was shaped and constrained by the political needs of the administration it served. “Condoms for Gaza” had nothing to do with shrinking the state. But it sent exactly the right signals to the president’s MAGA base — and that was the point.
Most readers of this Substack will be familiar with the ways that public choice theory explains the growth of government programs. Public choice theory teaches us that government programs grow because they invite rent-seeking — and rent-seeking shapes policy to benefit insiders rather than the public. But here’s the problem: the same forces operate in reverse. Just as the growth of government is determined by political factors that have little to do with the public welfare, so too will any effort to shrink government be shaped by those same factors. There is no magic button that allows us to avoid the political problem.

I don’t pretend to have ready-made answers to every question I’ve raised here. I wrestled with some of them in a paper about ten years ago, but most of the work remains to be done. What DOGE showed us is that it’s possible to cut government in ways that are shallow, partisan, and ultimately counterproductive. We probably won’t see another initiative like DOGE for some time. But when it comes, we should be ready with something more than slogans, stunts, or ideological purity tests. Shrinking the state without a plan is just vandalism; doing it right is the harder, but ultimately much more important work.

In fact, there was much less disagreement between the two of them than I expected. It turns out that Sheldon has come to distance himself from many of his former left-libertarian positions. Not, to be clear, because he thinks they’re mistaken. For him, it’s more of a matter of emphasis. Left-libertarians are correct that real-world capitalism can sometimes promote inequality and hierarchy, but they’re wrong to talk as though those were the most common or important features of a capitalist system.

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I have a long and friendly history with left-libertarianism. Or at least with many left-libertarians! Roderick Long is a fantastic philosopher, and the most thoughtful and sophisticated proponents of the view of whom I’m aware. He was also a regular contributor to the old BHL. So was Gary Chartier, about whom I have nothing but nice things to say. We had a lot of great discussions of left-libertarian ideas at the old blog, including this symposium which we co-ran with the left-libertarian Center for a Stateless Society.

That said, I have never identified myself as a left-libertarian. I am a sympathetic fellow traveller, in many respects. But at some point in the road our paths diverge. Still, I’ve never really explained exactly where that point lies. So in this post, I’d like to rectify that by explaining first, what I think left-libertarianism gets right, and then, where I think it misfires.

What Left-Libertarianism Gets Right

1. Vulgar Libertarianism - Like Sheldon, I find the idea of “vulgar libertarianism” compelling. The idea behind this term is that many people conflate the libertarian idea of free markets with actually existing capitalism - but only when it’s convenient. So, for instance, libertarians will sometimes respond to left wing criticisms of inequality in the United States by arguing that whatever inequalities exist are simply the natural results of the market process. But then, when the US economy produces an outcome they don’t like, they’re quick to dismiss it by pointing out that we don’t live in a truly free market economy.
   The thing about this point is that you don’t have to be a left-libertarian to make or endorse it. It’s simply a point about being clear on the difference between ideals and reality. It’s one thing to defend capitalism as an ideal type. It’s another to defend the mixed system we call “capitalist” in the United States. Both of those things might be worth doing. Or maybe one’s worth doing and the other’s not. The point is simply that they’re different, and it’s important to be clear about those differences.

2. Socialist Ends, by Liberal Means - The main rhetorical conceit of left-libertarianism is that many of the goals favored by socialists will be better achieved by libertarian means. So, for instance, if you care about inequality or poverty, or the rights of women and racial minorities, then you really ought to be a capitalist, because that’s the system that’s actually going to make those goals a reality.
   Now, I think there is an awful lot to be said for this argument. Indeed, something like this idea was one of the main ideas behind Bleeding Heart Libertarianism too. Capitalism really is the world’s most successful anti-poverty program. And I think there’s a lot to be said for its tendency to promote tolerance, to reduce discrimination, and to improve the well-being of vulnerable people. But it’s also possible, as we’ll see below, to take this idea way too far.

What Left-Libertarianism Gets Wrong

1. Implausible Predictions - Left-libertarians argue that life would be radically different under a regime of truly “freed markets.” How one assess these predictions will depend in part on how one assesses the current mixed system in which we live. If who think that the United States is a mostly capitalist economy with some areas of cronyism and unfreedom, then you’ll probably think that a fully free system won’t look radically different. On the other hand, if you think (as most left-libertarians seem to) that the current system is mostly unfree with some small areas of freedom, you’ll be more likely to see full freedom as involving a radical upheaval of the status quo.
   Of course, your predictions will depend not just on the quantity of freedom and unfreedom, but on the particular mechanisms you think are in play in bringing out various social outcomes. Many left-libertarians, for instance, predict that in a system of freed markets many more people will be self-employed, or will choose to work in worker-managed firms. That’s because they think that our current mixed economy artificially suppresses those options, while propping up traditional hierarchical firms. To me, this seems like a mistake. The reason most people don’t work in employee-managed firms isn’t that the state makes it hard for them to do so. It’s that they don’t want it, period. A lot of people are happy to have someone else be the boss, and to leave the headaches of management and risk-bearing to somebody else. That’s not cronyism; it’s just the division of labor.
   Similar questions arise for other left-libertarian predictions. Would economic inequality mostly disappear? Would landlordism? Would Walmart? Left-libertarians seem to believe that these phenomena only exist (or as only as common as they are) because of the pathologies of crony capitalism. Those of us who think they might be more deeply rooted in features of human nature or in economic logic will tend to disagree.

2. Implausible Foundations - The empirical predictions outlined above are the most distinctive features of left-libertarianism. In terms of its underlying philosophical principles, left-libertarianism is basically just plain old Rothbardianism. And as I’ve argued elsewhere, that’s simply not a very plausible view. The arguments for individual self-ownership aren’t that compelling; the implications of a libertarian theory of property in a world of massive historical injustice and constant boundary-crossing are unclear or absurd; and none of these ideas has much to say regarding what we have overwhelming reason to care about in designing our political and economic reasons - whether they help people to live together in ways that are peaceful, productive, and flourishing. Call those consequentialist concerns if you want, but they’re the kind of consequentialist concerns that any plausible version of deontology is going to have to take into account. (And the best do).

Don’t get me wrong, if I have to choose between a left-libertarian and a right-wing Hoppean, I’ll take the former any day! But neither of those approaches strikes me as plausible as the classical liberalism of Hayek, Buchanan, or Schmidtz.

A lot of libertarians, however, seem not to be concerned at all. In fact, many of them are positively reveling. As they see it, Trump and Musk are tearing down a system that is fundamentally corrupt. And if the methods they employ are somewhat unorthodox, well, what do you expect? The whole system is rigged against reform, so the only way to get the change we need is to operate somewhat outside the normal rules of the game.

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The fact is, most libertarians just don’t think all that highly of democracy. This isn’t new. And they’re not that subtle about it. Book titles like Against Democracy and Democracy: The God That Failed don’t leave much room for guesswork even if, in the former case, the actual position advocated is a good deal more nuanced than the title suggests.

The libertarian aversion to democracy stems from two sources, which correspond to two types of libertarian moral framework. Some libertarians operate within a framework of individual rights, and believe the only legitimate government is one that is constrained to the protection of a narrow set of rights to life, liberty, and property. For these libertarians, democracy is at best instrumentally valuable, and at worst a threat to freedom. The only thing that matters is what government does - does it respect individual rights or not? The question of whether that government is democratically elected is beside the point. In Hayek’s notorious words, “it is possible for a dictator to govern in a liberal way. And it is also possible for a democracy to govern with a total lack of liberalism. I personally prefer a liberal dictator to a democratic government lacking in liberalism.”

Other libertarians take a more consequentialist approach, judging both markets and politics according to the outcomes they are likely to produce. For these libertarians, the problem with democracy is that it simply doesn’t “work.” Individual voters know their votes don’t matter, and so remain stunningly (but rationally!) ignorant about the most basic of political facts. And political institutions are captured by powerful special interest groups that have learned how manipulate the system for their own private advantage. Democracy is rife with rent-seeking, myopia, and other forms of “government failure.”

One group of libertarians sees democracy as fundamentally unjust. The other sees it as irredeemably inefficient. Both are all too ready to hand over the keys to a “liberal dictator” who promises to make government smaller and more rational. Especially if that dictator can portray himself as a Randian superman - the smartest guy in the room who is not afraid to speak truth to power and who will not sacrifice his individuality under pressure from the woke mob.

It is at this point that the libertarian disdain for democracy blends in to a lingering strand of elitism. Ayn Rand never quite entirely shook off her early Nietzchean phase, but nor was she unique in this respect. A similar idolization of the great man of genius is apparent in early libertarians and quasi-libertarians such as H.L. Mencken and Albert Jay Nock. It pops up in the anti-egalitarianism of Murray Rothbard (“Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature” is the revealing title of one of his essays). And it even, surprisingly, shows up from time to time in the writings of Friedrich Hayek. I say “surprisingly” because it seems that Hayek’s insights into the fundamentally dispersed nature of knowledge is one of the best arguments against epistocracy and other forms of elite political dominance. But here we are.

The problem with all of these anti-democratic arguments is not that they are wrong, exactly. The criticisms of democracy are valid. It really is unjust and inefficient, at least a lot of the time. The problem, of course, is that all the other systems are worse. It’s easy enough to imagine a system that might perform better. But constitutional democracy has a pretty impressive track record of actually delivering the goods when it comes to securing the blessings of peace, prosperity, and liberty. Democratic constraints undoubtedly limit the ability of well-intentioned, smart people to make sweeping reforms that make all our lives better. But they also limit the ability of those same well-intentioned, smart people (not to mention their less benign or intelligent fellows) to make all our lives remarkably worse.

Democratic institutions are some of the most effective tools we have for constraining power by, in the words of Madison, forcing “ambition to counteract ambition.” Libertarian critics of democracy sometimes argue as though the problem of power can be avoided if we simply shrink the size and scope of the state. But this, as Mike Brock has pointed out in damning critique, is to fundamentally misunderstand how power works. Power removed from the state does not magically evaporate into thin air. Instead, the removal of state power often simply opens up possibilities for that power to reconcentrate in private hands. (Check out Mike’s longer take on libertarianism and democracy here)

With all their talk of rent-seeking and cronyism, libertarians of all people should be sensitive to this point. And the better ones are. But at least in the popular movement, libertarianism often gets conflated with anti-statism, leaving a blind spot for the dangers of private, non-state power. However, as the late Steve Horwitz pointed out in a different context, being anti-state is not the same as being pro-liberty. And opposition to democracy hardly seems well-suited to either of these goals. For all its flaws, constitutional democracy remains our most reliable safeguard against the concentration of power—public or private—and our best hope for preserving true liberty in the face of the rising authoritarian temptation.

There’s this old school — and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way — that you love your family and then you love your neighbor and then you love your community and then you love your fellow citizens and your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.

In response, a number of theologians have pushed back, arguing for a more cosmopolitan position according to which we should view all human beings as our equally worthy of love.

Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex was equally unimpressed.1

I’m not going to get into what Jesus said or meant, or what different Christian traditions have had to say on this matter. And I certainly don’t want to defend the nationalist political agenda which Vance has in mind in making this argument. Instead, I just want to make two simple interventions on the fundamental moral question at issue.

First, the idea that we owe more to friends and family than we do to strangers is obvious and commonplace among diverse moral traditions. You owe things to your child that you don’t owe to your neighbor’s child, like feeding them regularly or providing them with an education. And you probably owe things to your neighbor’s child that you don’t owe to a complete stranger, like watching after them when they’re playing in front of your house.

All of this is so obvious that one of the main objections to utilitarianism as a moral theory is that it seems on its face to be incompatible with such special obligations. (Utilitarians, for their part, typically scramble to show that no, actually if you just understand the theory correctly, you actually can get to the conclusion that it’s OK to sometimes spend money on your own family). In other words, the idea that we have special obligations to friends and family is one of the fixed judgments that we used to test whether a moral theory makes sense. It’s not controversial; it’s bedrock.

The second point is this: the fact that we owe more to friends and family than we do to strangers doesn’t imply that we owe nothing to strangers. It doesn’t imply, contra Scott Alexander, that we should simply let them die. X > Y does not imply that Y = 0.2

This means that those of us with more cosmopolitan (or Effective Altruist) leanings don’t need to reject Vance’s basic point. It’s OK to save up tens of thousands of dollars to pay for your own children’s education, and not to do this for other people’s kids. It’s OK to buy your wife an anniversary present, and not to give anything at all to your neighbor’s wife.

But it doesn’t follow from this that it’s OK to keep out foreign immigrants in order to prevent a small decrease in wages for some domestic workers. Or that it’s OK to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a luxury car when that money could have been used to save many, many lives. Even if we’re not required to care as much for them as we do for us, at some point the benefits for us become so small, or the costs to them become so large, that the scales tip. Figuring out where exactly that point lies is tricky. But figuring out that it exists is not.

My essay, “Libertarianism, Oversimplified,” is now available free and ungated. You can also listen to me discuss it with Caleb Brown on the Cato Daily Podcast.

The short version of my argument is this: even if you think libertarianism is true, proving it is not as easy as Rothbard makes it out to be.

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For example, Rothbard tries to prove the principle of self-ownership by arguing that our only options are to embrace it, or to accept some form of slavery. Either we accept self-ownership, which logically entails (according to Rothbard) anarcho-capitalism; or we reject it, in which case we’re stuck with some form of totalitarian socialism.

But it’s obvious that those aren’t our only options. It’s obvious, in the first instance, because almost nobody on earth lives in a society that is purely libertarian or purely socialist. So if Rothbard’s argument assumes that those are the only two options, it’s clearly at odds with the world in which we actually live. You might not like the kind of mixed economy we have in the United States and most of the rest of the world, but arguing against it requires engaging with substantive moral and economic reasoning. You can’t simply declare it impossible by logical fiat.

More fundamentally, Rothbard’s argument rests on a mistaken understanding of what it means to “own” something. For Rothbard, either we own something or we don’t, full stop. So, with respect to your own body, either you’re a full self-owner or else you’re some kind of slave. But the reality is more complicated. As Barbara Fried pointed out some time ago in her critique of left-libertarianism, what we call “ownership” refers not to any simple natural kind but rather to a bundle of rights and duties, any of which might or might not be present in some particular instance of property.

Here’s an example from the paper:

Consider the ownership rights one might have over a piece of land. At its core, we might think, to own a piece of land is to have the right to use the land as one sees fit, and to exclude others from using it without one’s permission. But even if we grant this “core” concept of ownership, it leaves a great number of questions unanswered. What rights does one have to, say, the minerals located below the surface of one’s land, and how deep do one’s rights go? How high above one’s land do they go? High enough to prohibit planes from flying over it? Satellites from orbiting above it? Does your ownership give you the right to dam any rivers that might flow through your land and onto mine? If your land blocks the only path between my land and some valuable unowned resource, like an ocean, do I have the right to cross your land without permission to get there?

Once again, deciding which particular rights go into the bundle of ownership we have over a factory, a piece of land, or our own bodies is something that requires substantive engagement with moral and economic reasoning. The point isn’t that all options are equally good. The point is that deciding which one is best requires argument, and Rothbard simply hasn’t given us any on behalf of his favored position.

There’s much more about this issue in the paper, as well as a discussion of the problematic relationship between property and freedom in Rothbard’s philosophy. Read the whole thing here.

Not according to Andressen.

The view of American C.E.O.s operating as capitalist profit optimizers is just completely wrong.

That’s like, Goal No. 5 or something. There’s four goals that are way more important than that. And that’s not just true in the big tech companies. It’s true of the executive suite of basically everyone at the Fortune 500.

I would say Goal No. 1 is, “I’m a good person.” “I’m a good person,” is wildly more important than profit margins. Wildly. And this is why you saw these big companies all of a sudden go completely bananas in all their marketing. It’s why you saw them go bananas over D.E.I. It’s why you saw them all cooperating with all these social media boycotts. I mean, the level of lock step uniformity, unanimity in the thought process between the C.E.O.s of the Fortune 500 and what’s in the pages of The New York Times and in the Harvard classroom and in the Ford Foundation — they’re just locked together. Or at least they were through this entire period…

These people aren’t robots. They’re just not. They’re members of a society. They’re members of an elite class. They either come from the top, most radical education institutions, or they are seeking as hard as they can to assimilate into that same class.

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The second story comes from a really interesting lecture by the excellent Musa al-Gharbi. His topic is censorship in academia, and why so few conservative academics are willing to speak out in that setting. Is it that they’re afraid of getting fired? Or denied tenure? Partly, perhaps. But far more important than institutional censorship, according to al-Gharbi, is self-censorship. And self-censorship tends to be driven by a very different sort of concern.

When you look at polling and survey data about why people self-censor, the main thing that they're concerned about typically isn't formal sanction. They're not so much worried about being fired; they're not so much worried about getting bad grades. They are worried about those things, but the main thing that people seem to be worried about is social sanctions. They want to be included. They want to be liked. They don't want to be the person where they walk in the room and before they even start talking everyone's like, “Oh, God…” They want to get invited to things and … these these social concerns, these concerns about being liked and included and whatever seem to drive a lot of censorship and self-censorship.

These points caught my attention because I think they’re important both for understanding why people behave the way they do, and what we need to pay attention to if we want to change that behavior.

Economists like to say that people respond to incentives. And by “incentives,” they usually mean to refer to some kind of self-interest, whether narrow or “enlightened.” If incentives are what ultimately matter, then it follows that "institutions” (the humanly devised constraints that shape incentives) are going to pop out as the most obvious lever we have for changing people’s behavior. If you want more of some behavior, make it pay. If you want less of it, make it costly.

If you push really hard, you can cram the phenomenon of wanting to be liked until it fits into this model. But that’s probably not the easiest or most helpful way of understanding things. Wanting to be liked be others isn’t just one preference among a whole bunch of others, like a taste for chocolate ice cream, that we collectively refer to as a person’s “self-interest.” It’s something more fundamental and unique - something that competes with (and often defeats) self-interest as we usually understand it. And taking it seriously suggests that social change is at least as much a matter of culture as it is of institutions, as those are typically understood.

One final point. While al-Gharbi speaks of wanting to be liked, Andreesen’s point is about wanting to think of oneself (or to be thought of by others as) “a good person.” These are not the same. And the contrast between them naturally brings to mind Adam Smith’s famous line that “man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely.” We don’t simply want to be liked by others; we want to be the kind of people who are worthy of being liked - i.e. we want to be ‘good.'

Fair enough. But while being loved and being lovely might indeed be conceptually distinct, they are often very hard to disentangle in the real world. After all, our beliefs about what counts as lovely are driven to a very large degree by what those around us happen to love. If everyone around you thinks that being a SJW is part of what it means to be ‘good,’ it’s going to take an unusual degree of independence for you to conclude otherwise. Even if you’re inclined to disagree, the pressures for rationalization and self-deception are going to be huge. If a big part of what you want is to be accepted by others, it’s easy enough to tell yourself a story about why their view about what’s lovely is actually correct.

In other words, the pressures toward conformity are enormous.

But I’m not so sure. On their face, a lot of Khan’s reforms seem pretty consumer-friendly. With “click to cancel,” Khan made the process of cancelling memberships and subscriptions easier and more transparent. Her ban on Non-Compete agreements has made life easier for workers and arguably unlocked new potential for entrepreneurship and innovation (see research by colleague Orly Lobel here and here). She even made it possible for owners of McDonalds franchises to repair their own ice cream machines, rather than forcing them to work with a monopolistic service provider. I mean, geez. What’s not to like about that?

But to understand the big picture of what Khan is up to, we need to dive a bit more deeply into her underlying philosophy of antitrust, as well as the seemingly more “free market” philosophy of antitrust she’s seeking to replace. I’m going to argue that while there might be some serious problems in Khan’s approach, the core of it is based on an important insight. It is, moreover, an insight that libertarians in particular should be able to appreciate.

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A Very Brief History of Antitrust1

Back in the bad old days, the story goes, antitrust policy was relatively divorced from economic reasoning. Bigness was a problem, not primarily because of its effects on the economy but because of its effects on society. The key figure here is Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, whose 1914 essay “The Curse of Bigness” expressed concern about the effect of size not just on smaller competitors and prices, but on the healthy function of a democratic republic.

The Brandeisian approach to antitrust was dominant up to about the early 1970s, when it was overshadowed by the Harvard structuralist school and its “SCP paradigm.” SCP stands for “Structure, Conduct, Performance,” and holds that market structure (especially market concentration) leads to market conduct (e.g. anticompetitive behavior), which in turns leads to market performance (lowered innovation, higher prices, etc.). While the Brandeisian model saw antitrust as a kind of socio-political philosophy, structuralism cemented antitrust’s new role a a technical tool of economic regulation.

Then, in the late 1970s, the clouds parted, and Robert Bork descended from the Heavens. Bork’s 1978 book The Antitrust Paradox led scholars and practitioners alike to reject the structuralist framework, and to embrace a new vision of antitrust based on the standard of consumer welfare. He and his colleagues in the Chicago school of antitrust argued that the alleged relationship between structure and performance was nowhere near as tight as the structuralists had imagined. Highly concentrated markets were often a byproduct of economies of scale, not anticompetitive practices. But if bigness doesn’t necessarily make consumers worse off, then bigness as such isn’t really the problem. Antitrust policy, according to Chicago, should target only behaviors that actually reduce consumer welfare, and otherwise leave the market alone.

The Chicago view was profoundly influential on American antitrust law. Bork’s book was cited approvingly by the Supreme Court almost immediately after it came out, and the consumer welfare standard is still the dominant consideration in antitrust law today. As a result, government started to take a much more laissez-faire approach to mergers and acquisitions than it had for most of the twentieth century.

Market Coercion

Then came Lina Khan. Long before Khan was appointed to head the FTC, she was a business journalist. One of her projects involved looking into the practice of chicken farming. According to Khan, the poultry industry is dominated by just a handful of processing companies. This means that farmers are often in a “take it or leave it” situation with respect to the processors, on whom they depend for their livelihood. About a decade ago, the federal government was running a series of listening sessions to learn more about problems faced by farmers in the industry. But many of the chicken farmers simply didn’t show up. The reason? The processors had threatened to retaliate against them if they did, and that was a risk they simply couldn’t afford to take. The processing companies were using their market power to silence workers, effectively undermining both their freedom of speech and their ability to improve their working conditions.

Stories like this aren’t unique to the poultry industry. And they aren’t exclusively told by those with left-wing sympathies. Todd Zywicki, a libertarian law-and-economics professor at George Mason University, tells the story of how he wound up suing his university when it tried to force him to get the COVID vaccine against his wishes. And he and many other conservatives have lately expressed growing concern about the power of big social media companies who seem to have used their power to silence or marginalize dissenting voices on issues pertaining to COVID, the Hunter Biden laptop story, and more. Conservative Texas even passed a law trying to regulate social media companies to prevent them from censoring based on viewpoint, which wound up in the Supreme Court earlier this year.

Now, in theory, market competition could handle all of this. If your university has rules you don't like, you can just quit and get a job at another one. If the big social media companies are silencing conservatives, just start your own and take their disgruntled customers. But in reality, we all know things aren’t that easy. Markets are sticky, network effects are real, and market processes take time to do their work. Meanwhile, while we wait for some new equilibrium to be reached, people’s livelihoods are being destroyed.

Neo-Brandeisianism

All of this brings us to Khan and her “neo-Brandeisian” approach to antitrust. Notice that none of the cases above are really about consumer welfare. They aren’t even about “bigness” per se. They are about power, specifically unchecked private power, and the coercion that such power makes possible.

For Khan, reigning in this power is the primary and proper goal of antitrust policy. She calls this a “republican” concept of antitrust, meaning that the highest goal of antitrust should be the protection of individual freedom. Importantly, “freedom” here means not being subject to the arbitrary will of anyone else - whether that person is a government bureaucrat or a corporate overlord.

So, for instance, here’s Khan approvingly summarizing Tim Wu, another neo-Brandeisian scholar of antitrust:

The analysis focuses on how having one’s life largely governed by unaccountable private power tends to undermine liberty and self-determination. “We like to speak of freedoms in the abstract, but for most people, a sense of autonomy is more influenced by private forces and economic structure than by government,” Wu writes, explaining that Justice Brandeis viewed “real freedom as freedom from both public and private coercion” (p. 41). The threat to liberty posed by monopoly — which can be understood as a form of private sovereign — remains a “major blind spot for contemporary libertarianism, which is rightly concerned with government overreach but bizarrely tolerant of mistreatment or abuse committed by so-called private actors.”

I’ve written with appreciation about the republican idea of freedom before and the role that it plays in Friedrich Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty. It’s not the same concept of freedom that you find in Nozick or Rothbard. But it is a deeply attractive one, and one that (as folks like Robert Taylor have demonstrated) can do a lot to support the ideals of free markets and limited government to which libertarians are attracted. That it might also provide a theoretical basis for limiting markets in cases where they fail to promote individual freedom seems to me to be a feature, not a bug.

So Why Only Two Cheers?

Endorsing a republican conception of freedom, however, does not automatically amount to an endorsement of activist antitrust policy. Even if we think that the protection of republican freedom is a worthy normative goal, it might turn out that antitrust policy is not the best way of achieving that goal.

For instance, one thing we want out of antitrust policy is clarity. A good system of antitrust should provide clear standards so that judges have some relatively objective factual basis for their decisions, businesses have clear expectations for how the law will respond, and opportunities to “game the system” are minimized.

Changes in prices or output are relatively easy to measure and assess. Changes in “coercion” or “freedom” or “fairness,” on the other hand, are notoriously difficult to pin down. And the more vagueness there is in antitrust standards, the easier it will be for powerful private actors to manipulate those standards for their own interest.

Moreover, as D. Daniel Sokol notes in his review of Wu, it’s easy to underestimate just how difficult is to anticipate how markets are going to develop, which winners are going to stay winners, and which minor players are about to make a big move. And with highly imperfect information, antitrust policy runs the risk of stifling dynamism and innovation, rather than facilitating it.

Maybe these concerns can be managed. Maybe not. I’m still making up my mind on this issue. But one thing I’m sure of is that libertarians should not be so quick to reject Khan’s approach simply because she is of the left. Private power is still power. And private threats to freedom are still threats to freedom. If libertarians want to be credible in their commitment to individual liberty, we need to take these issues seriously.

This is remarkable not only because Trump is an affront to every professed libertarian commitment—individual freedom, openness, cosmopolitanism, free enterprise, fiscal restraint, limited government, a tightly constrained executive—but also because libertarians have always seen themselves as the least partisan and most irreverent leg of Ronald Reagan’s fabled “three legged-stool” of the Republican coalition. Yet when the most authoritarian Republican in history came along, they became quiescent, lost their mojo. Libertarians haven’t donned MAGA hats—except at the Libertarian Party—but they have abdicated just when they were most needed.

In some cases, libertarians have gone beyond mere silence and positively advocated for another Trump presidency. Daniel Klein, a libertarian economist at George Mason University, is one of the individuals behind the “Professors’ Statement” endorsing “the Republican candidate for the Presidency in 2024” on the ground that Republicans are the lesser of two evils. Todd Zywicki, a libertarian law professor at GMU, agrees. So do Walter Block, and David Henderson.

I count all of these people as friends. And I admire their scholarly work tremendously. But on this issue, I think they are deeply mistaken. From the perspective of someone who cares deeply about individual freedom, a second Trump presidency would be a disaster.

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The libertarian philosopher Michael Huemer sets out clearly what seems to me to be the major issue:

There’s really only one thing that I care about. The U.S. President, for the first time in the history of the country, made a concerted and credible, illegal attempt to not leave office after he was voted out…
The first thing that every American should know about their society is that it is vastly better than the overwhelming majority of societies that have existed in human history or that exist today. Nearly everyone throughout human history lived in conditions of horrifyingly severe poverty, oppression, and misery.
Any normal policy issue that we debate within our political system is trivial by comparison. The difference between (the U.S. with good policies) and (the U.S. with poor policies) is negligible in comparison with the difference between (the U.S.) and (a typical society in human history).

But if you’re still on the fence about Trump, and you’re only going to read one piece on the subject, I implore you to read Ilya Somin’s essay at Reason, which makes a careful and detailed libertarian case against Trump (and for Harris).

One of Somin’s key arguments is that from a libertarian perspective, Trump is worse on many issues than Harris. And the issues where Harris is worse are likely to matter less in terms of the kind of policy outcomes we actually get.

Trump's record of trying to overthrow constitutional democracy after he lost the 2020 election creates a strong presumption against him. In addition, he is worse on key policy issues, most notably, trade, immigration, federal spending, and maintaining the Western alliance in the face of threats from authoritarian powers.

This outweighs Kamala Harris's significant weaknesses on some other issues, especially because Trump is more likely to be able to implement his worst policies through unilateral executive action, while Harris's worst ideas require hard-to-secure new legislation.

In normal times, elections are hard for libertarians. There are some things we like about Democrats, and a lot of things we dislike about them. Ditto for Republicans. But these are not normal times, and Trump is not a normal candidate. Trump is a danger to the institutional structures on which our individual freedoms depend. For a libertarian, everything else should pale in comparison.

This week, I’m attending a conference sponsored by George Mason University’s Law & Economics Center. The topic is a recent movement of leftist legal academics called “Law and Political Economy.” Not being based in a law school myself, I hadn’t previously heard of this phenomenon. But now that I’ve slogged through about 1,200 pages of assigned readings (Good Lord do lawyers like to pile on the readings!), I thought I would share some of what I learned with you.

The Law and Political Economy (LPE) movement started at Yale Law School back around 2017. Its core ideas are summarized in this 2017 blog post and explored in more depth in this 2020 essay published in the Yale Law Journal. In short, LPE is based on the belief that we are facing multiple, interconnected crises: rising inequality, environmental disaster, worker instability, threats to democracy, and more. According to LPE, these crises were caused or made worse by the "neoliberal" policies of the late 20th century. Those policies, in turn, were supported by key legal ideas like economic efficiency, neutrality, and formal equality. LPE rejects all of this and aims to replace the neoliberal paradigm with one that focuses on equality, democracy, and social justice.

The LPE movement is still small, in absolute terms. But its influence on legal ideas is spreading. The LPE Project promotes a series of conferences, and in 2020 a new academic journal devoted to LPE was launched at UC Berkeley. Many of the leading figures in the movement are fairly high-profile academics. Jedediah Britton-Purdy is one of the most prolific authors among the group, and a professor at Duke Law. Amy Kapczynski is a professor at Yale Law, and K. Sabeel Rahman is a professor at Cornell.

In terms of public influence though, LPE’s brightest star is Lina Khan, a law professor at Columbia and chair of the Federal Trade Commission since 2021. Under her leadership, the FTC has taken a much more aggressive stance on antitrust issues, in keeping with LPE thought on this issue (more on which below).

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What Does LPE Believe?

One of the core theoretical ideas of LPE is that both law and economics are fundamentally embedded in politics, in a way that has been neglected by previous legal scholarship. One of the implications of this embeddedness, they argue, is that there’s no such thing as a free market, where “free” is understood to mean the absence of government interference. On this point, LPE draws explicitly on the ideas of Robert Hale (which I’ve discussed earlier) and the legal realist movement. All economic arrangements are coercive, and so they argue there’s no reason to prefer the coercion of so-called “laissez-faire” to the coercion a redistributive welfare state or even a more actively and more centrally managed economy.

Related to this point, but on a more practical level, most LPErs think that the state should be doing much more to reduce economic inequality. Almost every LPE piece I’ve read cites favorably the work of Thomas Piketty, and the movement takes as a starting point his claim that income and wealth inequality have exploded since the 1970s, leading to all sorts of disastrous effects.

Finally, as mentioned above, the LPE movement generally supports a much more aggressive approach to issues of antitrust. They reject the Borkian, Chicago-school, technocratic emphasis on consumer welfare, and advocate a more populist approach which some of them call “Neo-Brandeisianism.” On this view, the main purpose of antitrust law is seen as political rather than economic, guided by the republican ideal of preventing domination.

I find this last idea especially intriguing, and hope to have more to say about it in a future post. For now, let me just point out that the concern underlying this view is not too far afield from one I’ve recently heard expressed by some libertarians (like Randy Barnett and Todd Zywicki). I doubt those libertarians are quite ready to sign onto the “Brandeisian” platform, but they do share the worry about the power wielded by certain private corporations, especially when those corporations are already deeply enmeshed with the power of the state (think big tech, big banking). Traditional libertarian theory, they worry, hasn’t yet come to terms with the “private coercion” this power makes possible.

Problems with LPE

The LPE program is not without its critics. The best papers I’ve seen so far are this one by Peter Boettke and Rosolino Candela, and this one by Roger Meiners and Andrew Morriss. The critics raise a number of distinct points, but to my mind the two most telling objections to the LPE Project are the following:

1. Insularity - As Meiners and Morriss point out, the LPE approach rests on a number of contentious empirical claims. But the empirical evidence cited in support of these claims is strikingly weak. LPE scholars almost exclusively cite “within the family” sources such as Piketty’s Capital. And they generally ignore challenges to that evidence (which, in the case of Piketty, is abundant). Even in cases where there might be some intellectual overlap, such as the congruence between the LPE’s emphasis on power and politics and traditional public choice accounts of regulatory capture, LPE scholars are silent - either unaware of, or unwilling to acknowledge, insights originating outside of their own ideological camp.

2. Compared to What? - LPE is at its best when critiquing existing ideas and institutions. But of course we can’t really conclude that those ideas and institutions should be discarded until we have some sense of what to replace them with. And here, just like the critical theorists before them, LPE flounders. “Are we liberals or low-key Marxists?” asks Samuel Moyn in a sympathetic criticism of the project. What is LPE’s theory of capitalism? Of the role of law in society? Most significantly - what is its account of how the law can be used to reliably achieve its vision of equality and social justice? If law is politics, and politics is power, how can LPE ensure that this power will be used for the purposes they admire, and not for those they decry?

There’s a lot more to explore in the LPE Project, and I’m sure I’ll have more to say after the conversations at this week’s conference. So stay tuned for more!

A few weeks ago, I mentioned a famous 1923 essay by Robert Hale, which argues against the defenders of laissez-faire that property rights and capitalism are inherently coercive.

Applied to property in something like land or a factory, the argument has intuitive appeal. If I own a piece of land, then I have the right (backed up by state violence) to prohibit your use of it. Or to make your use of it contingent upon your acting according to my will. That certainly looks coercive, especially if there aren’t many other landowners around to whom you could look for a better deal.

However, things look very different if we’re talking not about ownership of a piece of land, but of one’s self. Notice that the logic of Hale’s argument is just the same. My ownership of my body means that I can prohibit you from using it, or make your use of it contingent upon your acting according to my will. But do we really want to say that it is coercive to require employers to pay laborers for their work? Or to require that sex be consensual?

These counterexamples suggest that something’s gone wrong with Hale’s analysis. But what, exactly?

2. Coercion, Rights, and Obligations

Here’s a hypothesis. The reason we don’t think of A’s ability to restrict B’s access to A’s body as coercive is that we feel very confident in our judgment that A has a moral right to control his own body. And withholding something that you have a right to withhold is not generally regarded as coercive.

This idea is what underlies the ordinary distinction between threats and offers. A pay-for-service doctor who tells you he’ll perform a surgery you need if you give him $10,000 is making you an offer. On the other hand, a surgeon who is obligated to perform the surgery for you (maybe because it’s covered by national insurance) and who says he will only do it if you pay him $10,000 is making a threat. What’s the difference? The first surgeon is proposing to do more than he is required to do if you give him money. The second is proposing to do less than he is required to do unless you pay him money.

So, back to self-ownership. We feel very confident in our moral judgment that people have no obligation to work for or be physically intimate with others without consent. Therefore, proposing to withhold the services of one’s body unless the other does what one wants is not usually coercive. Our intuitions about the ownership of land and factories are perhaps not quite so clear, and so Hale’s argument seems more plausible applied to these objects.

But sometimes our intuitions about such kinds of ownership are clear. And when we shift to such a case, that plausibility disappears. Suppose that you’re a farmer who’s grown a bunch of potatoes on your land, through your own hard work. You offer to sell me a potato for a dollar. I’m not starving, and there are lots of other places I could buy food if I wanted. Does anyone really think that it’s coercive of you to withhold access to the potato unless I pay you for it? Of course not.

3. Baselines and Nihilism

The reason Hale doesn’t see (or agree with) all of this is because he’s operating with a somewhat different understanding of coercion. The account of coercion I’ve provided above relies upon what philosophers like Alan Wertheimer call a “moral baseline” test. Hale, in contrast, is using a “nonmoral baseline.”

We can understand the difference by going back to the distinction between offers and threats. We usually think of offers as expanding options (“Give me $100 and I’ll fix your toilet”), and threats as reducing them (“Give me a $100 or else I’ll shoot you”). But expanding or reducing relative to what? We need some baseline against which to compare the proposal in order to determine whether it is a coercive threat or a non-coercive offer. A moral baseline compares the proposal to what would happen if people acted as they are morally obligated to act. A nonmoral baseline compares it to some other standard, making no reference to the moral obligations of the parties involved.

Hale doesn’t spell out his theory of coercion explicitly, so we have to infer it from what he says about particular cases. But he seems to hold the view that an institution like property is coercive if it reduces someone’s options relative to any other possible institutional arrangement. From this view, it follows that private property is coercive because it limits some people options. Of course, it also follows that any other conceivable system of assigning rights over objects is coercive. Indeed, coercion on Hale’s view seems to be entirely zero-sum. Giving one person or group rights over an object always enhances their options by precisely as much as it limits others’. Sweden, The Soviet Union circa 1950, the United States circa 2024, the United States circa 1850 - all are equally coercive societies, according to Hale’s view.

Lest the reader suspect I am misinterpreting Hale for purposes of reductio, here he is in his own words on the coercive power wielded by factory owners in a capitalist economy:

To take this control by law from the owner of the plant and to vest it in public officials or in a guild or a union organization elected by the workers would neither add to nor subtract from the constraint which is exercised with the aid of government. It would merely transfer the constraining power to a different set of persons…Neither [arrangement] can be said to be ‘freer’ than the other in the sense that it involves less coercion on the part of human beings, official or unofficial.

Thus coercion, on Hale’s understanding, turns out to be a completely worthless moral concept. We cannot use it to evaluate any system as better or worse than another, since the overall level of coercion is always constant. And so it simply drops out of the analysis altogether.

And for Hale, that was completely fine! Hale was a legal realist who was deeply suspicious of all talk of “rights,” “liberty” “coercion.” What exactly Hale wanted to replace these concepts with was never quite so clear. But those of us who still hold some attachment to them need not follow Hale down this particular slope. Hale’s argument against capitalism appears to have power only because readers naively assume that Hale is condemning capitalism by calling it coercive. Once we realize that Hale’s argument implies that every social system is equally coercive, the argument loses almost all of its normative force.

[For further reading on Hale, here’s a nice critical review by Richard Epstein of Barbara Fried’s (Yes, SBF’s mom!) sympathetic book on Hale.]

In my last post, I started to look at an argument against libertarianism that’s popular among academics. The argument claims that a free market is a bad political ideal, not because it’s undesirable or unjust, but simply because it’s impossible. There’s no such thing as a free market, and so it doesn’t make any sense to hold that we should pursue that ideal as a goal.

As I noted, this argument takes a couple different forms. The first, which I examined last time, holds that there’s no such thing as a free market because all markets are backed up by coercion, and hence unfree.

The argument I want to consider in this post takes almost the opposite approach. This second version of the argument holds that there’s no such thing as a free market because there are actually lots of things that could count as a free market. So a “free market” is not a single, identifiable ideal, and therefore does not provide us with useful guidance on what we ought to change if we want to move in its direction.

For instance, the economist Ha-Joon Chang, in his book 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, argues that “there is no objective way to define how free a market is.” Whether a given rules counts as an interference with the market or as part of the market depends simply, he claims, on whether we reject or endorse the moral values behind it.

Here’s an example. Suppose the federal government places restrictions on the emission of carbon dioxide above a certain level. Is this a restriction on the free market? Well, if you think that the government has no business restricting CO2, then you’re likely to see it that way. If, on the other hand, you see this kind of CO2 emission as a violation of the rights of others, then you’ll view the regulation as simply part of the legal infrastructure of a free market - just like other laws protecting property rights, upholding contracts, and so on.

Here’s a trickier one. Suppose that a river runs through a piece of land you own. Should the law prevent you from erecting a dam in the river, and thereby restricting the flow of water on to your neighbor’s land? For most libertarians, the answer will depend on whether you think that erecting the dam would infringe in some way upon the rights of your neighbor. If it would, then the law prohibiting such activity is simply upholding property rights. It’s part of the market. If not, then the law is government overreach, and hence interference with the market.

So what should we make of this? Like the first version of the argument, this second version reflects an important truth. But ultimately, I think, it doesn’t do the work its proponents want it to do.

The truth in the argument is that there’s a kind of open-endedness involved in the definition of a free market. Cases like the two I gave above can be multiplied indefinitely, and it seems silly to suppose that they can be resolved by locking yourself in your study, scratching your chin, and deducing answers from the logic of self-ownership. Even if you came out of your study and looked at the empirical world around you, it seems silly to suppose that there is some unique right answer waiting for you to discover. There are a variety of morally acceptable ways in which societies might deal with issues of riparian rights, easements, rules regarding lost or abandoned property, and so forth. Reason alone cannot determine a single right approach.

But it’s one thing to say that there’s some open-endedness in the concept of a free market. It’s quite another thing to say that it’s all open-ended. And this is where Chang (and Nagel and Murphy, in their book on property rights) go wrong.

Suppose you thought, along with Locke, that unowned resources could be legitimately appropriated by mixing your labor with them. As is well known, that principle leaves a lot of questions unanswered. What does it mean to mix one’s labor? Does mixing your labor with land give you rights to water or minerals below the land? The airspace above it?

One way of sidestepping the philosophical puzzles involved in these questions is to simply stipulate an answer through the establishment of a convention. The Homestead Act of 1862, for instance, stated that families could claim up to 160 acres of land once they’d lived on it for five years. Why 160 and not 180? Why five years and not three? Obviously it’s not because those numbers are uniquely mandated by the correct theory of natural rights.

Does that make the theory of natural rights worthless? Of course not. A theory of natural rights establishes general principles, and those principles demarcate a range of morally acceptable solutions to the problem of appropriation. Within that range, societies are free to choose. But the open-endedness is not unlimited. It doesn’t really matter if you specify that families can claim 160 acres or 180. It matters a lot that you specify that they can’t take land that somebody else is already living on.

So what does all of this mean? It’s true that there is no one, unique set of rules and institutions that costs as a “free market.” Neither natural law nor economic theory can tell us exactly what a libertarian utopia should look like. But that doesn’t mean that anything goes. It might be impossible to specify in a non-arbitrary way exactly where blueish-green shades into greenish-blue, or when a child becomes an adult, or when a free-market ceases to become free. But only someone who has allowed philosophical puzzles to blind them to the world in front of them would conclude from this that there’s no difference between green and blue, or a child or an adult, or capitalism and socialism.

The argument takes two different forms. Each version contains an important grain of truth, which libertarians ought to take seriously. But neither argument gets critics to where they want to go. Neither gives us reason to reject the libertarian ideal of a free market. Or so I’ll argue. I’ll deal with the first version in this post, and the second in a later one.

The first version of the argument centers on the idea of coercion. “There’s no such thing as a free market,” the argument goes, “because all markets involve coercion, just like regulated markets or socialist economies do.”

You can find this argument in Tyranny Inc., the recent book by the socialists’ favorite conservate, Sohrab Ahmari. Ahmari draws on a famous article by Robert Hale, the thesis of which is that “the systems advocated by professed upholders of laissez-faire are in reality permeated with coercive restrictions of individual freedom.” Private property rights are backed up by the threat of physical force. The factory owner can boss his worker around, and his orders are backed up by the coercive power of the state. A propertyless worker who tries to eat food that does not belong to him, or sleep in a bed that is not his, will find himself on the wrong end of an officer’s billy club.   

All of this is true, as far as it goes. Indeed, I’ve made basically the same argument myself in the past. The core of a property right is the right to exclude. And the right to exclude means that other people’s ability to do what they want with your property is limited. The more a person’s actions are limited by other people’s fences, the fewer options they have. It doesn’t seem to me to be too much of a stretch to call that a limitation on their freedom.

But what should we conclude from this? All legal property arrangements involve coercion. So is there no difference then between the coerciveness of a laissez-faire economy and a more heavily regulated one? Is an economy based on free labor just as coercive as a Stalinist, centrally planned one?

That seems silly. Even if all systems of ownership involve coercion, surely there are important differences between the degree and kind of coercion involved. We can start by noting, with Friedrich Hayek, that coercion based on general rules is very different from coercion based on the imposition of someone’s arbitrary will. People can learn the rules of property in advance, and plan their lives around them. A Stalinist dictator, in contrast, is much harder to predict - or avoid.

Coercion can also limit options that are more or less central to a person’s interests. It’s one thing for me to tell you that you’re not allowed to walk on my lawn. It’s another thing for me to tell you that you can’t practice your preferred religion. It’s yet another thing if everyone is telling you that you’re not allowed to walk on their lawn, or in their store, and doing so deprives you of access to essentially needed resources.

So where does this leave us? The argument scores a point, I think, against a simplistic version of libertarianism - one which holds that libertarianism stands for freedom and against coercion, full stop. That’s nice rhetoric. But it’s bad philosophy. Libertarianism is for certain kinds of freedom, and opposed to others. It is against certain kinds of coercion, and in favor of others.

There are no solutions; there are only trade-offs. Libertarians believe that the kind of freedom protected by property rights are important, both intrinsically and for their instrumental benefits. And they believe the coercion necessary to uphold those property rights is worth it, morally speaking.

This way of thinking about coercion makes certain issues less black and white than libertarians tend to want them to be. For instance, it opens up the door for Spencerian worries about the possible coercion involved in the private ownership of land. On a more practical level, it complicates issues about public accommodations doctrine, or anti-discrimination law, or even (as I’ve argued elsewhere) the Universal Basic Income.

Once you grant that a free market society doesn't eliminate coercion but simply tries to minimize it, then the door is open to ask whether some regulatory tweaks to the system here or there might not do a better job of striking the right balance. Maybe the least coercive system is a market economy with an income floor, or with legal protections for disfavored minorities, or…

Figuring out which exceptions to the general principle of laissez-faire are justified is difficult. But that’s as it should be. The questions are hard because the problem is hard. Ignoring the difficulty of the problem by making oneself blind to it with an overly simplistic philosophy doesn’t make the problem go away.

Of course, the Republican Party was never really as committed to limited government as popular mythology held it to be. Whatever their commitment to individual freedom in the marketplace (and even that was more rhetoric than reality), Republicans were quite willing to deploy the power of the state in defense of “Family Values” and a broadly traditionalist conception of social morality. And, on the other side, the Democratic Party always contained a technocratic element that could embrace market-oriented reforms if and when they could be shown to be an efficient means for realizing progressive ends – an element exemplified most clearly in the presidency of William Jefferson Clinton.

            It is true that for most of the twentieth century, American conservatives portrayed themselves as defenders of the free market. Driven by the threat of militarist socialism abroad, and worries about creeping socialism under the guise of the New Deal at home, conservatives formed an uneasy alliance with libertarians in defense of the free market. The marriage was never an entirely happy one. As John Tomasi and I chronicle in The Individualists, libertarians’ commitment to the free market was based upon a radical commitment to individual rights – one which, if it had been consistently applied, would have called not for a defense of the status quo but for a wholesale revolution in the political and economic institutions of society.

Still, even if the simple story was not entirely accurate, most people saw it as at least a good enough approximation to make it stick. That is, up until 2015. In that year, the campaign and subsequent presidency of Donald Trump appeared to change everything about conservative politics in America. Gone were the Republican commitments to international free trade, replaced by a nationalist, protectionist economic policy. Gone, too, was the conservative deference to long-standing public institutions, torn down by an angry populism with little but disdain for the elite establishment.

            Responses to this development have ranged from befuddlement to outrage, as book after book has appeared attempting to explain, diagnose, or contextualize the current state of conservativism in America. Occasionally, as with the response to Sohrab Ahmari’s recent book, Tyranny, Inc., the response even veers into a kind of surprised delight, with progressive commentators celebrating conservatives’ apparent newfound appreciation for the shortcomings of the market, and the salvation of social democracy.

            So far, most commentators have treated Ahmari’s social democratic flirtations as something distinct from the populist nationalism of contemporary American conservatism. This, despite the fact that Ahmari has been one of the leading proponents of both developments. But in fact, the connection runs much deeper than any single individual. Socialist interventions in the economy have long been a mainstay of populist movements of the left. And there is a much greater overlap between left-wing and right-wing populism than most people appreciate. It is therefore worthwhile to try to understand what both varieties of populism have in common on a philosophical level, and how these philosophical commitments have played out in terms of the kinds of economic and social policies that have defined populism both historically and in the present day.

            First, and perhaps most significantly, both left-wing and right-wing varieties of populism share a fundamental commitment to nationalism, understood here as the idea that the interests of the nation are superior in some sense to the interests of individuals and groups outside the nation. To illustrate, consider two seemingly disparate ideas: “America First” and “Social Justice.” Most people associate the first of these ideas with right-wing politics, and the latter with the political left. But in fact the ideas are complementary, both philosophically and politically. Social justice - a term popularized, let us remember, by the populist Catholic priest Charles Coughlin in the 1930s – has always referred to standards of fairness and distribution within a well-defined society. Social justice is justice for members of a particular group. The commitment to social justice is thus distinct from and in tension with the cosmopolitan idea that the interests of all people are worthy of equal consideration, regardless of which tribe or nation they happen to have been born into. As we will see below, this has important implications for debates about free trade and immigration policy.

            Second, populists of all ideological stripes tend to have a similar suspicion of open-ended, decentralized social change, and a similar longing for stability and control. To borrow a distinction from Virginia Postrel’s 1998 book, The Future and its Enemies, populists tend to be stasits, rather than dynamists. On the right, this tendency will often manifest itself in a reactionary desire to stop change – to restrict migration, to limit the development of new technologies, to preserve traditional ways of life against waves of social change. On the left, the more common manifestation is a technocratic impulse to control change through regulation and bureaucratic oversight. But neither group is willing to countenance the idea of social change as an organic, evolutionary process – one that emerges from the choices of various individuals without management and direction from a higher authority.

            There is, of course, more to populism than just these two philosophical commitments. Even by themselves, however, nationalism and stasism go a long way to explaining many of the positions that populists take on a range of social issues. For instance, while we are accustomed to seeing criticisms of capitalism from the left, it should not be at all surprising to see similar criticisms coming from right-wing populists like Sohrab Ahmari or Patrick Deneen. The latter’s 2018 book, Why Liberalism Failed, is filled with a mix of paeans to localism, traditionalism, and even environmentalism that many found puzzling. But why should it be? Whatever else might be said for or against it, capitalism as an economic system is a dynamic, internationalist force which tends – as even Marx recognized with a kind of grudging admiration - to tear down both national borders and traditionalist ways of life. The constant, churning creative destruction of markets has never been a comfortable fit with the conservative emphasis on traditionalism and localism. We’re already used to seeing right-wing opposition to free trade in the United States. Deneen’s insight that the right also shares common ground with anti-growth environmentalists may well prove to be a harbinger of political alliances still yet to come.

            Stasism and nationalism also explain populist hostility toward immigration. We are accustomed to thinking of immigration as a right-wing issue, with charges that immigrants are undermining American culture, or stealing American jobs. And both of these arguments are, of course, prominent among right-wing populists today. But in fact there is a long history of anti-immigration sentiment from the left as well, from the Progressive Era in the early twentieth century, to the Sierra Club in the 1990s, to Bernie Sanders declaring open borders a “Koch Brothers proposal” in the 2010s. Sometimes, these left-wing arguments draw upon the same (dubious) claims as the right that immigration will lower wages for domestic workers. But progressive critics of immigration have also long argued that high levels of immigration are at odds with their commitment to social justice. After all, high levels of redistribution within a group can only be maintained if not just anyone can become a member of that group. Thus while Milton Friedman took the incompatibility of open borders and the welfare state to be an argument against the welfare state (and, most people have failed to realize, in favor of illegal immigration), progressives have often taken it to be an argument against immigration.

            In both its right-wing and its left-wing forms, populism stands opposed to the kind of classical liberalism championed by figures like Adam Smith, Karl Popper, and Friedrich Hayek. A liberal society is, in Popper’s famous phrase, an “open society” – one which that welcomes the influx of new ideas, new technologies, and new people. It is a society committed to the belief that economic and social order can evolve from the bottom up, rather than be imposed from the top down. It is a liberal society insofar as it prioritizes individual freedom, either as an end in itself or as an important means to the achievement of larger social goals.

            Importantly, liberalism in this sense is not in any way opposed to the kind of conservatism associated with Burke, Oakeshott or, despite his protestations to the contrary, Hayek. It is entirely possible to put one’s confidence in individual liberty and spontaneous order while still maintaining the importance of tradition and custom – both of which are often themselves examples of decentralized, evolved social norms. It is possible to be a liberal and nevertheless reject what Hayek called the “crude rationalism” of the Enlightenment, which seeks to tear down all that it does not understand, without recognizing the immense limitations to which its own understanding are subject.

            Indeed, for this reason, both liberals and conservatives alike will have reason to oppose the extreme anti-institutionalism of populism. Populist distrust of “elite” institutions – from the Supreme Court, to traditional political parties, to large corporations, to the “mainstream media,” is often based on a dislike of the outcomes those institutions happen to be producing at any given moment. But this stasist focus on outcomes tends to ignore the underlying dynamic processes that give rise to those outcomes, and the ability of those processes to evolve and adapt over time in response to feedback and changing circumstances.

            The fact that left-wing and right-wing populists overlap to such a significant degree is bad news for champions of the open society. It means that our enemies are not split, but united against us. But the fact that there is greater overlap than we have appreciated between conservatives and liberals in opposing this populism should give us cheer. We have already seen this overlap at work in major public intellectuals like George Will, whose magnum opus The Conservative Sensibility contains little with which a classical liberal could not embrace, and who has spoken out strongly against populist trends on the right. New times and new challenges to liberty call for new ways of thinking about political ideologies and alignments. If the left/right spectrum is no longer as meaningful as it once seemed to be, this is because the main threats facing a liberal political order have changed. We cannot necessarily look for the friends of liberty in the same places we used to search at the height of the Cold War. But if we look carefully, perhaps we will find new friends, and new opportunities, in different and unexpected locales.

After the book launch, the Ratio Institute was kind enough to host me for a dinner discussion of the book. Dan Klein of George Mason University led the discussion, and asked me a question about something we talk about in the book that hasn't yet gotten a lot of attention from commentators: an idea that we call the moral parity thesis.

The moral parity thesis holds that governments have no rights that are not identical to or derivable from the rights of individuals. In other words, if something is wrong for individuals to do, then it's wrong for governments to do as well.

You can find expressions of the moral parity thesis throughout the libertarian intellectual tradition - going at least as far back as John Locke, and popping up in Bastiat, Rothbard, Huemer, and many others. But while the idea might sound commonsensical, it actually has fairly radical implications. For it implies that almost everything that governments do - from drug criminalization to social welfare to taxation itself - is morally illegitimate. Taken seriously, the moral parity thesis tilts very strongly toward anarchism.

For me, and I suspect for many others, the moral parity thesis has powerful intuitive appeal. When I first encountered it, it was a real "Emperor Has No Clothes" moment. I felt like I had discovered a way of seeing through the facade of government authority. All the technical details of day-to-day public policy arguments now seemed largelyirrelevant. The moral parity thesis made politics simple: if it's wrong for you or me to do, then it's wrong for government too. End of story.

Today, though, I no longer think the moral parity thesis works. The basic problem, as I see it, is that we can't base macro-level conclusions about politics and social organization (solely) on the basis of micro-level examples. Politics actually is more complicated than that, and the details really matter.

To see this, think about issues where there's an important difference between the effects of your individual action, and the cumulative effect of a lot of individuals acting similarly. One example (which I’ve written about before) is environmental pollution. Some kinds of pollution are individually harmless, but extremely harmful in the aggregate. If I drive my car past your house, the effect of my emissions on you or anyone else are negligible. But thousands (or millions) of people driving their cars produces a very different set of effects - air pollution, climate change, etc.

Since one individual driving a single car is generally harmless, most of us have the intuition that it would be wrong for some other individual to forcibly prevent him from doing it - or to force him to ensure his car meets certain emission standards. But does it really follow from this that it's wrong for governments to do so? The harms from driving that we are considering here are social problems, not individual ones. Or, to put it another way, they are a kind of emergent phenomenon - one which is grounded but not manifested in the behavior that gives rise to it.

To be clear, this isn't just the well-known problem of externalities. There are some externalities that operate at the micro level, such as when a factory's emissions makes its neighbors sick. The problem here is that some kinds of actions are individually harmless but socially destructive. And it is precisely these kinds of problems that the moral parity thesis seems ill-equipped to deal with.

The moral parity thesis seeks to extrapolate political morality from the morality of individual behavior. But maybe that's the wrong way of thinking about politics. Perhaps politics is grounded in a kind of morality that is fundamentally social. That, at least, is the suggestion made by David Schmidtz is in his thought-provoking recent book, Living Together. Social morality, on Schmidtz's view, isn't based on some inherent set of "natural rights." And it is not derivable from intuitions about the morality of individual behavior. Rather, social morality is about what makes societies work well. It's about what enables us to live together peacefully and cooperatively. It is a fundamentally evolutionary phenomenon that emerges from our collective attempt to solve the problems inherent in social co-existence.

I have a lot to say about this view, and will return to it in future posts. But for now let me just point out how it connects to another pet peeve of mine with respect to libertarianism: its utter failure to address the phenomenon of children. If you try, as the moral parity thesis does, to build a political philosophy out of micro-level examples about adults interacting with each other, then you're going to wind up a little stumped regarding what to say about kids. They simply don't fit the model, and so your theory winds up treating them like a kind of strange fringe case.

But children are not a fringe case. All of us were children at one point, and the continued existence of our society depends on us making, and raising, a lot more children in the future. If morality is fundamentally a social phenomenon, then the existence of children and the nature of our obligations toward them damn well ought to be a central consideration, not an afterthought.

There’s obviously a tension here between this way of thinking about morality and the kind of individualism that Tomasi and I argue is central to libertarianism. On Schmidtz’s view, which strikes me as broadly Humean in nature, society isn’t just a collection of individuals, such that we can extrapolate social morality from the morality of individual behavior. Society is fundamental, at least when it comes to thinking about social morality. Or, to put it another way, if our question is how to enable people to live together in peace and prosperity, then the appropriate starting place for our thinking is society, not Robinson Crusoe.

Part of the problem is the wages. He told me that he makes the Californian minimum wage of $16 an hour. Even accounting for tips, that’s tough to live on in San Diego. But the real problem is that the minimum wage isn’t uniform. Under a recently signed bill, fast food workers in the Golden State must earn at least $20 an hour. So a bunch of this guy’s colleagues are quitting the business and moving across the strip mall to Jack in the Box where they can earn more money doing less skilled work.

And it gets worse. Those skills don’t come cheaply. I asked him what kind of training he needed to get in order to work for Great Clips, and he told me that California required him to complete six hundred hours in order to become a licensed hairstylist. That’s six hundred hours of unpaid effort before he ever earns his first dollar!

So there you have it. Six hundred hours of unpaid serfdom in order to earn four dollars less per hour than a burger flipper. You don’t need a PhD in economics to see what’s wrong with this picture.