It's funny because most of the die hard libertarians I knew IRL became massive Trumpers. Seems like a not small portion of libertarian tech people went that way too. I think it's either because a) constant progressive antagonism and sociopolitical wins broke their brains or b) they were always interpreting libertarianism as the freedom to be dicks to their enemies and Trump does offer that in spades. Anyways, kudos to the true believers still keeping the faith. I may think their world view is a bit zany, but I'd take it a million times over whatever the hell qualifies as being conservative now in the US.
I'm a libertarian (with some caveats; I describe myself as a "pragmatic libertarian"), and have always found myself most closely aligned with the Republican party until Trump. As long as Trump and Trumpism is on the ballot, I'm voting against it, protesting it, writing regular letters to my representatives against it, and doing anything else I can think of to help defeat Trump and Trumpism.
I imagine Rex here is talking about those Mises Caucus-style libertarians, the ones who spend their days talking exclusively about wokeness, white farmers in South Africa, and the heritability of IQ across racial demographics. While I would not go so far as to say they represent the majority of libertarians writ large, there is an in-built appetite for MAGA-style burn-it-all-down tactics. These types want to completely eliminate the New Deal (Social Security, alphabet soup agencies, the whole smorgasbord), bring back the gold standard, and are remarkably isolationist (even going so far as to break with the Bush administration during the War on Terror). The libertarian-to-fascist pipeline is real, and I've seen it happen in real-time.
This is American conservatism in the 2020s. This post, this pundit. This is actual, principled conservative thought, and it now resides in the Democratic Party. Smith / Maurer 2028!
This is completely rational. Trump is by far more libertarian than the liberal bureaucracy (not by ideology, by effect). Also, the right to be a dick is a very important right.
It may be an important right to you if you are a dick, but it is not an important part of baseline libertarian philosophy because it is limited by the harm principle, as enunciated by Mill and ignored by the vast majority of (so-called) Libertarian dicks. You have the inalienable right to "be" a dick, but not necessarily to act like one when the action "concerns others".
Trump is libertarian in the sense that he wants to fight the Left and demolish the administrative state, though even this is largely a matter of personal pride and less a question of genuine ideological commitment. Unfortunately, the libertarian-ish elements in the GOP (think the Tea Party bigwigs) thought they could contain Trump so he'd only go after the Left and RINO-types. They were wrong.
Isn’t what you’re defending about what’s best about libertarianism just classic liberalism? Seems to me that libertarians took all those good ideas and pushed them to weird inhumane extents.
I would reframe your conclusion to confine it mainly to the political spectrum from classic liberalism to social democracy liberalism.
Yes, it's something of a spectrum defined by how hard one cares about the principle of "let people manage their own life." And I think that's an important consideration among other important considerations, so I'm not a libertarian.
But in the past few decades large segments of the left have discovered a great enthusiasm for managing other people's lives. And I'm old enough to remember before that, when it was the (religious) right that wanted to police what everyone could say and do.
So I've grown to appreciate those few, strange personal-freedom extremists. They seem to be pushing the right way against what is apparently a deep-rooted and destructive part of human nature.
I think the left has always been like that, and the right still is. Americans don't value liberty out of nowhere: it's out of reaction to living with other Americans who have always been up in each others' business. The difference to when we grew up is that Bush squandered the right wing's power as consolidated by Nixon and Reagan, and left a blinking left wing suddenly more in charge than they'd been in generations.
David French wrote a column the other day where he touched on the two different kinds of freedom: freedom is the ability to do as you see fit, and you get it either from having power in its own right (wealth, strength, influence, popularity) or from liberty (where power refrains from exercising its ability to control you). When you don't have power, liberty is very valuable. But when you do have power, liberty feels like a nuisance or a burden. And then when you forget that liberty exists, or swept it away as a nuisance, losing power looks like a catastrophic loss of freedom.
Libertarians have zero appreciation for dealing with externalities and extreme intolerance for downward income distribution, no matter at how low deadweight loss.
I think that's true, but the term "liberal" has gotten weird in the US because it is often associated with Left. And our American Left has actually gotten less liberal over time.
You need to separate libertarian *thought* from libertarian *politics*. Libertarian thinkers like Milton Friedman (no relation) are often worth reading; libertarian *politicians*, on the other hand, are generally cranks.
Don’t you think it would be better to have cranky Ron, or even Rand Paul as president now rather than DJT? One thing I hate about people that complaining about libertarians and blaming them for our problems is that since they never actually get elected to anything (no matter how many times I vote for them).
Conversely, we very rarely have the opportunity to vote for real libertarians. How often do they run serious candidates distinguishable from Republicans at any level except President, governor, or the occasional Senator? (Even there, “serious” is generous) It seems to me that libertarians tend to get more of the benefit of the doubt than they should, because everyone assumes the smart ones just don’t run for anything.
I level this criticism more often at the greens and progressives, but it applies to libertarians too: they seem uninterested in doing the boring work of building up a party and proving they can handle the nuts and bolts stuff. Here in NH it’s exactly the opposite: the libertarians on our ballots tend to be a discredit to the whole group, indistinguishable from bog standard Republicans except angrier about education and more in favor of legalized gambling, and not skilled at or interested in really governing in the slightest.
There is one, but who was voted out by MAGA primaring, who ran as a Republican but converted to Libertarian, and that is Justin Amash of Michigan. He would regularly explain all his votes and his reasoning and tirelessly endorsed having congress act responsibly by having individual votes on bills instead of always rolling them all into big bills decided on by leadership. If we had more representatives like him, the President would not have all the executive power he has now.
As far as I can tell, the LPNH is not actually a libertarian party at all -- it's a MAGA party wearing the Libertarian Party as a skin suit, in the wake of a hostile takeover. Its Wikipedia page tells quite a story.
I want to answer yes, but honestly I don't know if going on the gold standard or appointing judges who view social security as unconstitutional would be less destructive than Liberation Day. Ron Paul seems quaint now but his views were really something.
In the past I’d have said that four years of one of the Pauls, constrained by Congress, would probably be all right. Maybe even a useful corrective in the long run. But I no longer trust Congress to safeguard even its own prerogatives, let alone our rights.
Ron Paul wanted to abolish the Federal Reserve and go back to the gold standard, which would devastate the global economy. I'd say that would be worse than anything Trump could ever do, but he's got 4 more years to prove me wrong...
There’s a distinction to be made between libertarianism as a method of analysis and as a political doctrine. The former is almost always useful; it requires someone to explain why a libertarian approach is insufficient. The latter is a refuge for smugness.
Libertarianism is a good antidote to cheap promises on both left and right. I'm sorry that fake promises are so popular in both parties now. I hope good sense returns and economic debates get to return to more interesting and subtler policy challenges. But as long as our parties insist on being this stupid, I'm going to be very glad for each and every libertarian.
Well, yes to all of this, but Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are self-identified libertarians and they apparently have great deal of influence over the administration. Isn't the thing here that this administration doesn't have an ideological compass? It is a mashup of project 2025, ranting from MTG and the like, the network state, Fox News hot air, Russian propaganda, neo-Confederates, apologists like Lindsey Graham trying to sane-wash policies, etc etc. it's whatever you want it to be, unless of course you want it to be faithful to the constitution or competent.
I don’t know how much influence Thiel has on Trump, but Elon Musk isn’t really libertarian other than supporting deregulation and freer trade. Musk is against immigration (except for the workers he wants), and he is for government subsidies for electric cars and wants to increase NASA budgets and require IDs for voting none of which is libertarian. He ultimately doesn’t have enough influence with Trump to even slightly reign in tariffs, and he didn’t really even try.
Elon Musk is all over the place. He's identified as a liberal, a socialist, and right now he's cosplaying as a Milei-style libertarian. The word fascism is quite overused, especially nowadays, but considering how fascists love to play games with words and ideological labels it's probably not far from his own personal inclinations.
Eh...but isn't the libertarian hatred of state capacity fundamentally the root cause of Trumpism, the unitary executive theory, and rule by executive orders? Because the public, when faced with libertarian state incapacity doesn't go "I'm so glad my government can never accomplish anything" instead they go "if breaking the rules is what it takes, then I'm okay with breaking the rules". That's not a theoretical flaw, that's libertarianism's actual practical result in the world and if other countries had America's genetic tendency toward libertarianism we'd see it play out over & over again. Humans fundamentally want government to do stuff; not to do nothing. It's just that few countries do and the ones that do rarely have the same level of vetocracy that exacerbates the problem that America has.
If you want governments to do stuff, then are you happy with all the stuff Congress handed over to let Trump do? The cost of government freely handing out goodies under Biden that you like, is now Trump doing what he likes, and it is a disaster.
What we had before Trump resembles nothing like libertarianism. The state has plenty of capacity. More than ever. It just uses that capacity to suck up resources to enrich the bureaucratic class and prevent the private sector from doing anything either. Libertarian lack of state capacity is due to the state barely existing. This set up at least allows non government actors the ability to get things done. e.g. a state with minimal capacity would be unable to block housing development in places like SF and NYC.
It's not the federal government's fault that insufficient housing is built in places like SF and NYC: it's more broken _local_ politics that's to blame.
It's the same problem with progressives acting at all levels of government. The feds had all the money in the world but couldn't even get a bunch of charging stations built because of their wasteful bureaucracy. They couldn't get broadband build for the same reason.
Isn't the existence of the bill of rights a counterexample? While it hasn't been enforced perfectly all the time, I think for the most part it has durably taken broad swaths of potential government powers off the table - eg the abilities to arbitrarily restrict speech or to search people's property whenever it wants. The libertarians say, "more of that please", and there's no reason to believe their success would inevitably produce an insurmountable backlash.
It's the usual kind of complaints (some part of these may be due to idiosyncratic implementation but most are generally applicable) :
- Financially burdensome to comply with, both as a one-off and ongoing (especially in terms of employee time).
- A lot of it is kind of pointless and imposes controls where there is minimal benefit to any end user
- The available evidence suggests it has benefited incumbents, even though it was nominally intended to target abuses by the likes of Google and Facebook
- Interpretations have changed since it was introduced, further complicating compliance and making it more difficult.
- Disregards the costs for users of compliance (everybody rightly loathes cookie banners) and consent is mostly a sham anyway (very few people are reading before clicking accept or reject all)
- Leads to lots of lawyer and court bloat as everything is endlessly litigated. Also requires ordinary employees to obtain a surprising amount of legal knowledge
I hate those cookie banners, I wonder why no browser maker has added a way to let the user make a default choice (all cookies, none, whatever) and have the browser send this result to sites instead of having them show the annoying pop up every time.
I suspect your solution wouldn't satisfy the requirements of the law, which as I understand it requires users to consent to each organization separately and explicitly.
Not sure tbh, most websites use a third party provider so it should be possible to build something that connects to nearly all of them.
Some ad blockers just remove the banners but that occasionally breaks the site depending on how it's set up.
And as Shawn Wilden says, I would also assume (but I'm not a lawyer) that a blanket "accept all" would not be allowed. Not that anyone who actually clicks "accept all" is reading every partner but nevertheless.
Great piece! TBH, I did not have an interest in politics till it had the potential to directly affect me (2006 CIR). I just naturally leaned towards Obama because he seemed like the grown up in the room when the Bush presidency ended in a total disaster. I used to argue a lot with libertarians. In recent years, I see myself getting more influenced by the ideas of Richard Hanania, Nate Silver, Conor Friedersdorf, Megan McArdle and Andrew Sullivan even though I love reading Noah and Matt Yglesias. I think there's widespread realization in the Democratic world that the promise of the Democratic coalition after the traditional Republican coalition collapsed has been left unfulfilled because of regulatory and bureaucratic nightmares even though the US economy and growth have chugged along. Instead of fixing the issues that were highlighted by Ezra Klein and Derek Thomson in Abundance, US voters have gravitated towards a conman with promises of easy fixes to hard problems. While we're waiting for the tariff induced disaster to unfold, I often ask myself what made US great? What allowed someone like me who grew up in a small town far away to move here and build a life and career here? The answer is always - individual, economic and academic freedom and openness to immigration. I don't think the tech industry would have succeeded to dominate the world with crippling regulations at home and I don't think American universities would have become the envy of the world without academic and individual freedom. I would still consider myself a liberal but just like Noah, I've started respecting libertarians more.
Yes the default needs to be towards freedom. freedom to do what you want with yourself and your property. Too often restrictions aren't really about safety or the environment or whatever, the are about rent seeking and controlling your fellow citizens. Using the police power of the state to control other people and their property.
Which doesn't mean there isn't a role for government. Or that the government we do have shouldn't be effective.
"If you would rather have a Trumpist right than a Reaganite right, I just don’t know what to tell you."
I'm a progressive so I hear you. I despise Trump and all his work and got nothing but contempt for the people who voted for him. May they get what they voted for.
OTOH, if you were a middle class blue collar guy (or gal) - what did Reaganism ever do for you? Populism is popular for a reason. Tariffs are, as Scott Alexander points out, an idiosyncratic belief of Trump, not a standard right-wing populist plank as neither Orban, nor Modi nor Erdogan seem interested in them? But protecting your markets to make sure your workers have jobs? That appeals to a lot of people who instinctively suspect they are going to be on the destroyed side of creative destruction...
You saw that, imho, with fascism in Spain. When Franco died and Spain opened up in 1974, the country had stagnated for decades and looked poor compared to the rest of Europe. I suspect it's because fascism essentially froze the economic system post 1936 (end of their civil war). No progress but also no disruption. No creation but also no destruction. The permanent stasis of the Lawful Evil. Yet the status quo can be a very attractive proposition to many.
As a progressive, I believe we can manage the destruction, reduce the downside and capture most of the upside. But it requires people to trust the elites and the experts. And, for the past 4-5 decades, the elites have done a pretty poor job of it all. And they never even bothered to apologize or learn anything.
Reagan was not a libertarian or a diehard free trader, regardless of his admiration for Milton Friedman, even if Noah says he is. Reagan was against Japanese imported cars (just like DJT in the 1980s). In 1981, his administration negotiated a “voluntary export restraint” (VER) agreement with Japan, limiting Japanese car imports to 1.68 million vehicles annually. This was designed to protect American automakers, particularly the Big Three (Ford, GM, Chrysler), from Japanese competition, which had gained significant market share.
Trump's tariffs will produce a shortage of goods equivalent to a hurricane. It is coming in six to eight weeks. The only question is whether it will be Cat 1, Cat 2 . . . or Catt 5? How much damage will this do to his popularity? Will he back down in time to salvage some of his support?
I don't think that Trump is especially popular and I expect even with a self imposed recession that the GOP and core MAGA supporters will continue to support him. Hoping that independents and people who sat out of the election might finally wake up though.
Great column. Sadly, I wish someone would explain why the Libertarian Party nominates so many cranks and kooks. I did vote for the former New Mexico Governor who owned a pot-growing business. William Weld, former Governor of Massachusetts, is a very sensible politician.
We haven't seen capitulation even though Trump's policies are underwater in just 100 Days. Impeachment isn’t right yet. We haven’t seen the effects of empty shelves. I got a note from the BMW dealership, saying they would hold current pricing till May 31st, so come in for service or buy your new or used vehicle. That tells me how much older inventory there is left on the lot.
We’ll soon see the effects of the China tariffs, 10% international pricing increases. That Milton Freidman video will be shared in my Morning Rant today at The Dispatch.
I've made this remark elsewhere, but: the LP's leadership and nominees are decided by a vote of "whoever wants to show up to the LP convention, in person", which means that these decisions tend to get made by the people who are... let's say "particularly dedicated".
Imagine if the Democratic Party chose their nominees this way. We'd probably have had a ticket headed by, like, Rashida Tlaib.
(This is also how the Mises Caucus took over a couple of years ago; they just made a coordinated effort to show up in force, despite the fact that libertarians in general tend to think they're scum.)
They are really doing a disservice to themselves. I suspect they would do better in some Congressional Districts and if they had a caucus in the House they might be able to break through. I have Libertarian tendencies, but like most Americans, our politics is a Chinese buffet.
As polling now shows, most Americans hated Joe Biden’s immigration policy, which was on the big reasons it sunk Kamala. Now, however do to incompetence, laziness, incoherence and general sloppiness, Trump’s immigration polices have gone to far for Americans.
They all do it, both Parties. The extremists in each party drive the primaries, nominate extremists, leaving those of us who see merit in each party's ideas are left out in the cold with no one to vote for.
You've got a few different factors all playing into this one. As you mentioned, you have the usual effects where the primary will promote the far edge of the party. Democrats compete to be more liberal, Republicans compete to be more conservative, Libertarians show off their dedication to the cause and their refusal to compromise.
Then, you have the very wide tent of the party. You've got free market economists like Friedman, anarcho-capitalists, philosophical idealists, the sort of absolutists who would argue that I should be able to sell my own body either into slavery or to a human chop shop, and yes, some people who want the freedom to be assholes (personally, I find Thomas Sowell's acknowledgement about tradeoffs to be refreshingly clear-eyed).
As has been mentioned, the convention has rules that favor the most strident voices. And getting the entire group to cooperate to practice politics can be like herding cats-drunk cats.
Jeff Maurer wrote a piece on the antics of the 2024 convention, and the observation was made that when a group isn't serious about winning an election, you get a lot of unserious people running for office. It's how you have John McAfee running for the nomination in 2020 while he couldn't enter the country, arguing his charges of tax evasion were proof that he walked the walk. It creates an environment that encourages tilting at windmills.
To be fair, this is a group of people who are famously hard to corral and get cohesion out of. The level of discipline and line-toeing needed to form an effective political party, is pretty much anathema to a group of people whose animating principle is “you can’t tell me what to do”.
I think as a political movement it’s better off as an eternal opposition, if it can be principled about it. Libertarians seem to get sucked into right-wing politics the same way religion does, and just as much to its detriment: it’s seen as just another junior partner in the conservative coalition, rather than an honest broker that speaks truth to all power.
I'm coming from the other side of this -- coming of age a libertarian/anarcho-capitalist, for much of my career I have been working on bottom-up and/or market-driven solutions to coordination and incentivization problems in the corporate world, and it's been clear to me that in order to avoid the failures of naive laissez-faire (essentially your criticisms #1-3) we need to incorporate ideas from systems thinking and cybernetics and more modern, simulation-driven model-based design. Only in the last few years I started seeing this hybrid show up in the economics thinking as well -- Dan Davies's "The Unaccountability Machine" is a good example. I am hopeful that what's happened to the US serves as a demonstration, worldwide, of the need for such a hybrid approach, and that some time in the not too distant future it helps us design new institutions and incentive systems at all levels that prove more resilient and empowering!
I love this post, and the larger point is that elites of a variety of ideological persuasions have been crying wolf and exaggerating against each other for a long time, as part of normal partisan competition in a democracy, while taking for granted that that democracy was robust.
But the impact has been to cause the populism prone classes to underrate all of us. They believed the right's excessive criticism of the left and the left's excessive criticism of the right, until they got to be down on "the establishment" all together. But the establishment IS the constitutional republic. Only it has the knowledge and the scruples to maintain America's heritage of freedom.
Now it's time for virtuous elites of varying ideological persuasions to come together, recognize what we have in common, and start letting the world know that whatever our differences, we know better than the Trumpian disaster, and we'll work together to rescue the country from this national suicide attempt that is underway.
Underrated comment right here. Yes, both sides demonized the others often over small differences, and now trust is destroyed. Moreover, when genuine threats emerge such as Trump,
well we already compared Bush, McCain and Romney to Hitler, why would we start believing you now.
I really hope that liberalism can make a comeback, though with lessons learned from recent economic and financial crises about how to address populist discontent. As you and others here have noted, there are different strains of libertarianism, and some are just downright insane. But combining a fierce defense of individual rights (including property rights) with respect for the dignity of human beings and government's reasonable role in defend it is at the core of liberalism. It's fallen out of favor since we veered a bit too far towards libertarianism ("let the markets decide everything"), but the American people are now seeing the consequences of the excesses of contemporary progressivism ("let the state decide guided by the enlightened few") and populism (pretty much the same except the "enlightened few" look different). The only way out of this mess though is for local governments to show that liberalism can succeed. Trying to win all-out at the national level won't work since I think there are too many seductive aspects of majoritarian ideologies championed by the left and right without some evidence that liberalism is working for citizens at the local level. Otherwise, liberals will be dismissed as just closet libertarians or progressives who can't get anything done other than post nice soundbites on social media.
Are there any bright champions of liberalism in the United States at the local or state level?
Please name one insane libertarian policy which is worse than Trump’s tariff policy. And how do you think letting markets decide everything is anything similar to anything Trump is doing now? He is an anti-libertarian, and as Noah said no democrats are speaking out as strongly against the tariffs as Rand Paul is.
I am not sure why you think I am stating that libertarian policies are worse than Trump? But in terms of insanity, Noah himself brought out some positions in his own post that are pretty dumb (like selling yourself into slavery). I think you're misreading my comment.
So there's a few Libertarians who have come to some insight on the silliness of their original believes, and now Libertarianism may be redeemed? Nonsense. Like like all ideologies that take some kind of (important) thought or (insightful) principle, and then essentialize it and take it to its extremes, without thinking about checks and balances against counterfailing forces, Libertarian ideology can only break down in the face of reality. As they have done now. The whole MAGA/FOX/Christian right are the 'local bullies' that Libertarianism has no response to, because lies and indoctrination are allowed according to the libertarian crowd.
Also, libertarians and goldbug/crypto-cranks are often the same people, which just goes to show how little of an apology they're owed.
Not even speaking of the ecological impact.
The overlap between the anarchist left and libertarian right remains interesting here though; a whole bunch of smart (and often well-willing) people thinking that 'if only everyone behaves nicely in the way we want them to behave, the world would be so much better and everyone will be free'. The real world is much more messy than that.
Libertarians are not supporters of MAGA or lies or indoctrination. They support free speech, so are not against FOX (or MSNBC) as long as they aren’t subsidized by the government, which explains why they are against NPR.
And while crypto has lots of fraudsters, like felon Democrat donor Sam Bankman-Fried, as well as Trump, that doesn’t make them libertarian. And preferring to hold gold as investment is just a financial worldview, why does that offend you to the point of being unforgivable?
And your claiming that anarchy is the worst possible thing have apparently not been watching the authoritarian Trump government giving us strong government good and hard.
That's the problem; not being against a powerful and influential institution that spreads nonsense and lies, and instead being against government supported media just because it's government supported is just silly. For someone born in a cult that cult is much worse, and a much larger impairment to freedom, than the government. Yet I've seen plenty of libertarians attempt wonky logic to defend the cult as 'freedom' and a government ensuring that people are able live their life free of, or to escape, the clutches of cult leaders as bad.
I wasn't referring to people who hold gold. Do with your money what you want to do, as long as it doesn't harm others. I was referring to the people who think 'gold or other metals are the only true money', and who then, for enigmatic reasons endorse crypto. The thing about gold being money is incorrect, and subsequently endorsing crypto is just inconsistent logic.
And I didn't call anarchy 'the worst possible thing', I said that anarchy just won't work out positively in the way that Kropotkin or Ayn Rand imagine, because different types of power (cult, economic, force, whatever) will find their way to grab a hold. That's why we should allow democratically elected governments to rein in liars and thief's and snake oil salesmen, and the likes. Except that in the US the snake oil salesman now got elected president. And for messy situations like that we need the checks and the balances, and media that say truth to power, but those checks and balances get defunded when people say things like 'tax is theft ' and nonsense like that.
"For example, some libertarians argue that people should be able to sell themselves into slavery; the proper response to this is “Eww.” "
The response to that is not Eww. It is that true libertarians probably don't exist. If you are for slavery then how are you for liberty? If you are against slavery, then some authority or system needs to enforce it, which cuts against the libertarian creed. In fact that is a good way (as J.S.Mill once did) to scratch beneath the surface of a self-awoved libertarian. You immediately discover that it is all about liberty for me, perhaps not for thee
Libertarians are not anarchists, and enforcing individual rights by police and courts are a key part of libertarian policy, so obviously slavery would not be allowed. Allowing people to freely enter in contracts and arrangements is part of individual rights, and someone who wanted to agree to work in exchange for some benefit, would be allowed, but if it’s freely entered into then it is not slavery. When a young person joins the military, where they have many rules on behavior and following orders, this isn’t slavery, so someone doing this for a private company (say on a deep sea oil drilling platform), it would’ve be slavery either.
Actually, libertarians have gone back and forth about the slavery question. Metaphysically, they're divided because on one hand there's the principle of self-ownership (and how can you own body/labor if you can't alienate it by selling it to someone else?) and the labor theory of property. More practically, they have a spotted history when it comes to the actual historical record of slavery in the United States; plenty of them are apologists for the Confederacy and still complain about the "War of Northern Aggression."
In this there is a broader critique of contract-based ethics though.
For instance many libertarians are against workplace safety laws, under the theory that anyone who willingly enters a labor contract can themselves be trusted to incorporate their own sense of safety and well-being. Similar things can be said for child labor laws, false advertising laws, product safety standards, bankruptcy laws, waiving away rights etc.
And it's true that just like in many instances the prevailing wage is above the state-mandated minimum wage, so might industries be expect to provide basic workplace safety guarantees to attract employees if its the revealed preference of employees to prioritize that.
However, if every employee needs to form an independent investigation of workplace safety to understand the terms of their employment there will be a lot of inefficiency generated from that.
So this is why some basic industry standards or at least ratings is essential. One might hope that private enterprise might setup their own standards and rating process to aid prospective employees, but why work so hard to locate a basic government function outside of government? Maybe industry or prospective employees can get together to support government regulation which helps them navigate this environment?
There is space for light sensible regulation within a libertarian framework, and the slavery example is just to say all libertarians should start by drawing their line somewhere.
It's funny because most of the die hard libertarians I knew IRL became massive Trumpers. Seems like a not small portion of libertarian tech people went that way too. I think it's either because a) constant progressive antagonism and sociopolitical wins broke their brains or b) they were always interpreting libertarianism as the freedom to be dicks to their enemies and Trump does offer that in spades. Anyways, kudos to the true believers still keeping the faith. I may think their world view is a bit zany, but I'd take it a million times over whatever the hell qualifies as being conservative now in the US.
I'm a libertarian (with some caveats; I describe myself as a "pragmatic libertarian"), and have always found myself most closely aligned with the Republican party until Trump. As long as Trump and Trumpism is on the ballot, I'm voting against it, protesting it, writing regular letters to my representatives against it, and doing anything else I can think of to help defeat Trump and Trumpism.
All the libertarians I know dislike Trump immensely, being that he is extremely anti-libertarian. So I'm skeptical of your claim.
I imagine Rex here is talking about those Mises Caucus-style libertarians, the ones who spend their days talking exclusively about wokeness, white farmers in South Africa, and the heritability of IQ across racial demographics. While I would not go so far as to say they represent the majority of libertarians writ large, there is an in-built appetite for MAGA-style burn-it-all-down tactics. These types want to completely eliminate the New Deal (Social Security, alphabet soup agencies, the whole smorgasbord), bring back the gold standard, and are remarkably isolationist (even going so far as to break with the Bush administration during the War on Terror). The libertarian-to-fascist pipeline is real, and I've seen it happen in real-time.
They probably thought Trump would be more pliable on trade than he is. I don't know why anyone would willing want to deal with Trump though.
I know some who think only Trump's destructiveness will properly show how dangerous government power is & why the govt must be scaled back.
(I agree this seems somewhat batshit, It's like "let me show you guns are dangerous by giving this gun to a madman.")
This is American conservatism in the 2020s. This post, this pundit. This is actual, principled conservative thought, and it now resides in the Democratic Party. Smith / Maurer 2028!
This is completely rational. Trump is by far more libertarian than the liberal bureaucracy (not by ideology, by effect). Also, the right to be a dick is a very important right.
It may be an important right to you if you are a dick, but it is not an important part of baseline libertarian philosophy because it is limited by the harm principle, as enunciated by Mill and ignored by the vast majority of (so-called) Libertarian dicks. You have the inalienable right to "be" a dick, but not necessarily to act like one when the action "concerns others".
On trade? On immigration?
Trump is libertarian in the sense that he wants to fight the Left and demolish the administrative state, though even this is largely a matter of personal pride and less a question of genuine ideological commitment. Unfortunately, the libertarian-ish elements in the GOP (think the Tea Party bigwigs) thought they could contain Trump so he'd only go after the Left and RINO-types. They were wrong.
Isn’t what you’re defending about what’s best about libertarianism just classic liberalism? Seems to me that libertarians took all those good ideas and pushed them to weird inhumane extents.
I would reframe your conclusion to confine it mainly to the political spectrum from classic liberalism to social democracy liberalism.
Yes, it's something of a spectrum defined by how hard one cares about the principle of "let people manage their own life." And I think that's an important consideration among other important considerations, so I'm not a libertarian.
But in the past few decades large segments of the left have discovered a great enthusiasm for managing other people's lives. And I'm old enough to remember before that, when it was the (religious) right that wanted to police what everyone could say and do.
So I've grown to appreciate those few, strange personal-freedom extremists. They seem to be pushing the right way against what is apparently a deep-rooted and destructive part of human nature.
I think the left has always been like that, and the right still is. Americans don't value liberty out of nowhere: it's out of reaction to living with other Americans who have always been up in each others' business. The difference to when we grew up is that Bush squandered the right wing's power as consolidated by Nixon and Reagan, and left a blinking left wing suddenly more in charge than they'd been in generations.
David French wrote a column the other day where he touched on the two different kinds of freedom: freedom is the ability to do as you see fit, and you get it either from having power in its own right (wealth, strength, influence, popularity) or from liberty (where power refrains from exercising its ability to control you). When you don't have power, liberty is very valuable. But when you do have power, liberty feels like a nuisance or a burden. And then when you forget that liberty exists, or swept it away as a nuisance, losing power looks like a catastrophic loss of freedom.
Check out your window for flying 🐖 because I wholly agree with something David French wrote.
If it makes you feel any better, some of that was me extrapolating :D
This is persuasive, thanks. I used to subscribe to French but stopped when he went to the NYT. Hope his ideas are reaching a bigger audience now.
Libertarians have zero appreciation for dealing with externalities and extreme intolerance for downward income distribution, no matter at how low deadweight loss.
That’s mostly because we think inequality is best addressed via growth not redistribution.
Libertarian vs classic liberalism is equivalent to socialism vs communism, they are basically the same with only a difference in rigidity.
I think that's true, but the term "liberal" has gotten weird in the US because it is often associated with Left. And our American Left has actually gotten less liberal over time.
You need to separate libertarian *thought* from libertarian *politics*. Libertarian thinkers like Milton Friedman (no relation) are often worth reading; libertarian *politicians*, on the other hand, are generally cranks.
Don’t you think it would be better to have cranky Ron, or even Rand Paul as president now rather than DJT? One thing I hate about people that complaining about libertarians and blaming them for our problems is that since they never actually get elected to anything (no matter how many times I vote for them).
Conversely, we very rarely have the opportunity to vote for real libertarians. How often do they run serious candidates distinguishable from Republicans at any level except President, governor, or the occasional Senator? (Even there, “serious” is generous) It seems to me that libertarians tend to get more of the benefit of the doubt than they should, because everyone assumes the smart ones just don’t run for anything.
I level this criticism more often at the greens and progressives, but it applies to libertarians too: they seem uninterested in doing the boring work of building up a party and proving they can handle the nuts and bolts stuff. Here in NH it’s exactly the opposite: the libertarians on our ballots tend to be a discredit to the whole group, indistinguishable from bog standard Republicans except angrier about education and more in favor of legalized gambling, and not skilled at or interested in really governing in the slightest.
There is one, but who was voted out by MAGA primaring, who ran as a Republican but converted to Libertarian, and that is Justin Amash of Michigan. He would regularly explain all his votes and his reasoning and tirelessly endorsed having congress act responsibly by having individual votes on bills instead of always rolling them all into big bills decided on by leadership. If we had more representatives like him, the President would not have all the executive power he has now.
You’re right! I had forgotten him.
As far as I can tell, the LPNH is not actually a libertarian party at all -- it's a MAGA party wearing the Libertarian Party as a skin suit, in the wake of a hostile takeover. Its Wikipedia page tells quite a story.
They’re “fun” neighbors.
I want to answer yes, but honestly I don't know if going on the gold standard or appointing judges who view social security as unconstitutional would be less destructive than Liberation Day. Ron Paul seems quaint now but his views were really something.
In the past I’d have said that four years of one of the Pauls, constrained by Congress, would probably be all right. Maybe even a useful corrective in the long run. But I no longer trust Congress to safeguard even its own prerogatives, let alone our rights.
Ron Paul wanted to abolish the Federal Reserve and go back to the gold standard, which would devastate the global economy. I'd say that would be worse than anything Trump could ever do, but he's got 4 more years to prove me wrong...
There’s a distinction to be made between libertarianism as a method of analysis and as a political doctrine. The former is almost always useful; it requires someone to explain why a libertarian approach is insufficient. The latter is a refuge for smugness.
good observation
We all would've been a lot better off if gary johnson had been elected president in 2016
Libertarianism is a good antidote to cheap promises on both left and right. I'm sorry that fake promises are so popular in both parties now. I hope good sense returns and economic debates get to return to more interesting and subtler policy challenges. But as long as our parties insist on being this stupid, I'm going to be very glad for each and every libertarian.
Well, yes to all of this, but Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are self-identified libertarians and they apparently have great deal of influence over the administration. Isn't the thing here that this administration doesn't have an ideological compass? It is a mashup of project 2025, ranting from MTG and the like, the network state, Fox News hot air, Russian propaganda, neo-Confederates, apologists like Lindsey Graham trying to sane-wash policies, etc etc. it's whatever you want it to be, unless of course you want it to be faithful to the constitution or competent.
I don’t know how much influence Thiel has on Trump, but Elon Musk isn’t really libertarian other than supporting deregulation and freer trade. Musk is against immigration (except for the workers he wants), and he is for government subsidies for electric cars and wants to increase NASA budgets and require IDs for voting none of which is libertarian. He ultimately doesn’t have enough influence with Trump to even slightly reign in tariffs, and he didn’t really even try.
Thiel's influence AIUI is more on JD Vance than on Trump.
Elon Musk is all over the place. He's identified as a liberal, a socialist, and right now he's cosplaying as a Milei-style libertarian. The word fascism is quite overused, especially nowadays, but considering how fascists love to play games with words and ideological labels it's probably not far from his own personal inclinations.
Meme-soup.
Eh...but isn't the libertarian hatred of state capacity fundamentally the root cause of Trumpism, the unitary executive theory, and rule by executive orders? Because the public, when faced with libertarian state incapacity doesn't go "I'm so glad my government can never accomplish anything" instead they go "if breaking the rules is what it takes, then I'm okay with breaking the rules". That's not a theoretical flaw, that's libertarianism's actual practical result in the world and if other countries had America's genetic tendency toward libertarianism we'd see it play out over & over again. Humans fundamentally want government to do stuff; not to do nothing. It's just that few countries do and the ones that do rarely have the same level of vetocracy that exacerbates the problem that America has.
Which libertarian has even supported rule by executive orders? These articles at Reason show no support for rule by executive orders.
https://reason.com/category/law/executive-branch/executive-overreach/
If you want governments to do stuff, then are you happy with all the stuff Congress handed over to let Trump do? The cost of government freely handing out goodies under Biden that you like, is now Trump doing what he likes, and it is a disaster.
I believe he's referring to the reaction most people have to reduced state capacity.
What we had before Trump resembles nothing like libertarianism. The state has plenty of capacity. More than ever. It just uses that capacity to suck up resources to enrich the bureaucratic class and prevent the private sector from doing anything either. Libertarian lack of state capacity is due to the state barely existing. This set up at least allows non government actors the ability to get things done. e.g. a state with minimal capacity would be unable to block housing development in places like SF and NYC.
It's not the federal government's fault that insufficient housing is built in places like SF and NYC: it's more broken _local_ politics that's to blame.
It's the same problem with progressives acting at all levels of government. The feds had all the money in the world but couldn't even get a bunch of charging stations built because of their wasteful bureaucracy. They couldn't get broadband build for the same reason.
"that's libertarianism's actual practical result"
Isn't the existence of the bill of rights a counterexample? While it hasn't been enforced perfectly all the time, I think for the most part it has durably taken broad swaths of potential government powers off the table - eg the abilities to arbitrarily restrict speech or to search people's property whenever it wants. The libertarians say, "more of that please", and there's no reason to believe their success would inevitably produce an insurmountable backlash.
My job requires me to deal with GDPR every day and I now understand the case for libertarianism in a way I did not before.
BTW, I'd be interested to hear more about this :)
It's the usual kind of complaints (some part of these may be due to idiosyncratic implementation but most are generally applicable) :
- Financially burdensome to comply with, both as a one-off and ongoing (especially in terms of employee time).
- A lot of it is kind of pointless and imposes controls where there is minimal benefit to any end user
- The available evidence suggests it has benefited incumbents, even though it was nominally intended to target abuses by the likes of Google and Facebook
- Interpretations have changed since it was introduced, further complicating compliance and making it more difficult.
- Disregards the costs for users of compliance (everybody rightly loathes cookie banners) and consent is mostly a sham anyway (very few people are reading before clicking accept or reject all)
- Leads to lots of lawyer and court bloat as everything is endlessly litigated. Also requires ordinary employees to obtain a surprising amount of legal knowledge
- A obsession with process over outcomes
I hate those cookie banners, I wonder why no browser maker has added a way to let the user make a default choice (all cookies, none, whatever) and have the browser send this result to sites instead of having them show the annoying pop up every time.
I suspect your solution wouldn't satisfy the requirements of the law, which as I understand it requires users to consent to each organization separately and explicitly.
Which is a bad law, and one which any libertarian would oppose.
Not sure tbh, most websites use a third party provider so it should be possible to build something that connects to nearly all of them.
Some ad blockers just remove the banners but that occasionally breaks the site depending on how it's set up.
And as Shawn Wilden says, I would also assume (but I'm not a lawyer) that a blanket "accept all" would not be allowed. Not that anyone who actually clicks "accept all" is reading every partner but nevertheless.
Great piece! TBH, I did not have an interest in politics till it had the potential to directly affect me (2006 CIR). I just naturally leaned towards Obama because he seemed like the grown up in the room when the Bush presidency ended in a total disaster. I used to argue a lot with libertarians. In recent years, I see myself getting more influenced by the ideas of Richard Hanania, Nate Silver, Conor Friedersdorf, Megan McArdle and Andrew Sullivan even though I love reading Noah and Matt Yglesias. I think there's widespread realization in the Democratic world that the promise of the Democratic coalition after the traditional Republican coalition collapsed has been left unfulfilled because of regulatory and bureaucratic nightmares even though the US economy and growth have chugged along. Instead of fixing the issues that were highlighted by Ezra Klein and Derek Thomson in Abundance, US voters have gravitated towards a conman with promises of easy fixes to hard problems. While we're waiting for the tariff induced disaster to unfold, I often ask myself what made US great? What allowed someone like me who grew up in a small town far away to move here and build a life and career here? The answer is always - individual, economic and academic freedom and openness to immigration. I don't think the tech industry would have succeeded to dominate the world with crippling regulations at home and I don't think American universities would have become the envy of the world without academic and individual freedom. I would still consider myself a liberal but just like Noah, I've started respecting libertarians more.
Yes the default needs to be towards freedom. freedom to do what you want with yourself and your property. Too often restrictions aren't really about safety or the environment or whatever, the are about rent seeking and controlling your fellow citizens. Using the police power of the state to control other people and their property.
Which doesn't mean there isn't a role for government. Or that the government we do have shouldn't be effective.
"If you would rather have a Trumpist right than a Reaganite right, I just don’t know what to tell you."
I'm a progressive so I hear you. I despise Trump and all his work and got nothing but contempt for the people who voted for him. May they get what they voted for.
OTOH, if you were a middle class blue collar guy (or gal) - what did Reaganism ever do for you? Populism is popular for a reason. Tariffs are, as Scott Alexander points out, an idiosyncratic belief of Trump, not a standard right-wing populist plank as neither Orban, nor Modi nor Erdogan seem interested in them? But protecting your markets to make sure your workers have jobs? That appeals to a lot of people who instinctively suspect they are going to be on the destroyed side of creative destruction...
You saw that, imho, with fascism in Spain. When Franco died and Spain opened up in 1974, the country had stagnated for decades and looked poor compared to the rest of Europe. I suspect it's because fascism essentially froze the economic system post 1936 (end of their civil war). No progress but also no disruption. No creation but also no destruction. The permanent stasis of the Lawful Evil. Yet the status quo can be a very attractive proposition to many.
As a progressive, I believe we can manage the destruction, reduce the downside and capture most of the upside. But it requires people to trust the elites and the experts. And, for the past 4-5 decades, the elites have done a pretty poor job of it all. And they never even bothered to apologize or learn anything.
It's a tough sell.
Reagan was not a libertarian or a diehard free trader, regardless of his admiration for Milton Friedman, even if Noah says he is. Reagan was against Japanese imported cars (just like DJT in the 1980s). In 1981, his administration negotiated a “voluntary export restraint” (VER) agreement with Japan, limiting Japanese car imports to 1.68 million vehicles annually. This was designed to protect American automakers, particularly the Big Three (Ford, GM, Chrysler), from Japanese competition, which had gained significant market share.
"OTOH, if you were a middle class blue collar guy (or gal) - what did Reaganism ever do for you"
you mean besides breaking stagflation, getting the economy going, and defeating the soviet union...
Trump's tariffs will produce a shortage of goods equivalent to a hurricane. It is coming in six to eight weeks. The only question is whether it will be Cat 1, Cat 2 . . . or Catt 5? How much damage will this do to his popularity? Will he back down in time to salvage some of his support?
https://kathleenweber.substack.com/p/hurricane-coming-six-to-eight-weeks
I don't think that Trump is especially popular and I expect even with a self imposed recession that the GOP and core MAGA supporters will continue to support him. Hoping that independents and people who sat out of the election might finally wake up though.
Great column. Sadly, I wish someone would explain why the Libertarian Party nominates so many cranks and kooks. I did vote for the former New Mexico Governor who owned a pot-growing business. William Weld, former Governor of Massachusetts, is a very sensible politician.
We haven't seen capitulation even though Trump's policies are underwater in just 100 Days. Impeachment isn’t right yet. We haven’t seen the effects of empty shelves. I got a note from the BMW dealership, saying they would hold current pricing till May 31st, so come in for service or buy your new or used vehicle. That tells me how much older inventory there is left on the lot.
We’ll soon see the effects of the China tariffs, 10% international pricing increases. That Milton Freidman video will be shared in my Morning Rant today at The Dispatch.
I've made this remark elsewhere, but: the LP's leadership and nominees are decided by a vote of "whoever wants to show up to the LP convention, in person", which means that these decisions tend to get made by the people who are... let's say "particularly dedicated".
Imagine if the Democratic Party chose their nominees this way. We'd probably have had a ticket headed by, like, Rashida Tlaib.
(This is also how the Mises Caucus took over a couple of years ago; they just made a coordinated effort to show up in force, despite the fact that libertarians in general tend to think they're scum.)
They are really doing a disservice to themselves. I suspect they would do better in some Congressional Districts and if they had a caucus in the House they might be able to break through. I have Libertarian tendencies, but like most Americans, our politics is a Chinese buffet.
As polling now shows, most Americans hated Joe Biden’s immigration policy, which was on the big reasons it sunk Kamala. Now, however do to incompetence, laziness, incoherence and general sloppiness, Trump’s immigration polices have gone to far for Americans.
They all do it, both Parties. The extremists in each party drive the primaries, nominate extremists, leaving those of us who see merit in each party's ideas are left out in the cold with no one to vote for.
You've got a few different factors all playing into this one. As you mentioned, you have the usual effects where the primary will promote the far edge of the party. Democrats compete to be more liberal, Republicans compete to be more conservative, Libertarians show off their dedication to the cause and their refusal to compromise.
Then, you have the very wide tent of the party. You've got free market economists like Friedman, anarcho-capitalists, philosophical idealists, the sort of absolutists who would argue that I should be able to sell my own body either into slavery or to a human chop shop, and yes, some people who want the freedom to be assholes (personally, I find Thomas Sowell's acknowledgement about tradeoffs to be refreshingly clear-eyed).
As has been mentioned, the convention has rules that favor the most strident voices. And getting the entire group to cooperate to practice politics can be like herding cats-drunk cats.
Jeff Maurer wrote a piece on the antics of the 2024 convention, and the observation was made that when a group isn't serious about winning an election, you get a lot of unserious people running for office. It's how you have John McAfee running for the nomination in 2020 while he couldn't enter the country, arguing his charges of tax evasion were proof that he walked the walk. It creates an environment that encourages tilting at windmills.
Funnily enough, the comments on Maurer's piece was actually the "elsewhere" I was referring to.
To be fair, this is a group of people who are famously hard to corral and get cohesion out of. The level of discipline and line-toeing needed to form an effective political party, is pretty much anathema to a group of people whose animating principle is “you can’t tell me what to do”.
I think as a political movement it’s better off as an eternal opposition, if it can be principled about it. Libertarians seem to get sucked into right-wing politics the same way religion does, and just as much to its detriment: it’s seen as just another junior partner in the conservative coalition, rather than an honest broker that speaks truth to all power.
I'm coming from the other side of this -- coming of age a libertarian/anarcho-capitalist, for much of my career I have been working on bottom-up and/or market-driven solutions to coordination and incentivization problems in the corporate world, and it's been clear to me that in order to avoid the failures of naive laissez-faire (essentially your criticisms #1-3) we need to incorporate ideas from systems thinking and cybernetics and more modern, simulation-driven model-based design. Only in the last few years I started seeing this hybrid show up in the economics thinking as well -- Dan Davies's "The Unaccountability Machine" is a good example. I am hopeful that what's happened to the US serves as a demonstration, worldwide, of the need for such a hybrid approach, and that some time in the not too distant future it helps us design new institutions and incentive systems at all levels that prove more resilient and empowering!
I love this post, and the larger point is that elites of a variety of ideological persuasions have been crying wolf and exaggerating against each other for a long time, as part of normal partisan competition in a democracy, while taking for granted that that democracy was robust.
But the impact has been to cause the populism prone classes to underrate all of us. They believed the right's excessive criticism of the left and the left's excessive criticism of the right, until they got to be down on "the establishment" all together. But the establishment IS the constitutional republic. Only it has the knowledge and the scruples to maintain America's heritage of freedom.
Now it's time for virtuous elites of varying ideological persuasions to come together, recognize what we have in common, and start letting the world know that whatever our differences, we know better than the Trumpian disaster, and we'll work together to rescue the country from this national suicide attempt that is underway.
Underrated comment right here. Yes, both sides demonized the others often over small differences, and now trust is destroyed. Moreover, when genuine threats emerge such as Trump,
well we already compared Bush, McCain and Romney to Hitler, why would we start believing you now.
I really hope that liberalism can make a comeback, though with lessons learned from recent economic and financial crises about how to address populist discontent. As you and others here have noted, there are different strains of libertarianism, and some are just downright insane. But combining a fierce defense of individual rights (including property rights) with respect for the dignity of human beings and government's reasonable role in defend it is at the core of liberalism. It's fallen out of favor since we veered a bit too far towards libertarianism ("let the markets decide everything"), but the American people are now seeing the consequences of the excesses of contemporary progressivism ("let the state decide guided by the enlightened few") and populism (pretty much the same except the "enlightened few" look different). The only way out of this mess though is for local governments to show that liberalism can succeed. Trying to win all-out at the national level won't work since I think there are too many seductive aspects of majoritarian ideologies championed by the left and right without some evidence that liberalism is working for citizens at the local level. Otherwise, liberals will be dismissed as just closet libertarians or progressives who can't get anything done other than post nice soundbites on social media.
Are there any bright champions of liberalism in the United States at the local or state level?
Please name one insane libertarian policy which is worse than Trump’s tariff policy. And how do you think letting markets decide everything is anything similar to anything Trump is doing now? He is an anti-libertarian, and as Noah said no democrats are speaking out as strongly against the tariffs as Rand Paul is.
I am not sure why you think I am stating that libertarian policies are worse than Trump? But in terms of insanity, Noah himself brought out some positions in his own post that are pretty dumb (like selling yourself into slavery). I think you're misreading my comment.
Well, abolishing the Fed and reverting to the gold standard would rival the scale and scope of the so-called “Trump Shock.”
Well Nixon did the reverse in 1971 and that was the last time the economy crashed because of political policies.
You're forgetting about the Volcker crash in 1981-82, where the Fed deliberately crashed the economy to stamp out inflation.
So there's a few Libertarians who have come to some insight on the silliness of their original believes, and now Libertarianism may be redeemed? Nonsense. Like like all ideologies that take some kind of (important) thought or (insightful) principle, and then essentialize it and take it to its extremes, without thinking about checks and balances against counterfailing forces, Libertarian ideology can only break down in the face of reality. As they have done now. The whole MAGA/FOX/Christian right are the 'local bullies' that Libertarianism has no response to, because lies and indoctrination are allowed according to the libertarian crowd.
Also, libertarians and goldbug/crypto-cranks are often the same people, which just goes to show how little of an apology they're owed.
Not even speaking of the ecological impact.
The overlap between the anarchist left and libertarian right remains interesting here though; a whole bunch of smart (and often well-willing) people thinking that 'if only everyone behaves nicely in the way we want them to behave, the world would be so much better and everyone will be free'. The real world is much more messy than that.
Libertarians are not supporters of MAGA or lies or indoctrination. They support free speech, so are not against FOX (or MSNBC) as long as they aren’t subsidized by the government, which explains why they are against NPR.
And while crypto has lots of fraudsters, like felon Democrat donor Sam Bankman-Fried, as well as Trump, that doesn’t make them libertarian. And preferring to hold gold as investment is just a financial worldview, why does that offend you to the point of being unforgivable?
And your claiming that anarchy is the worst possible thing have apparently not been watching the authoritarian Trump government giving us strong government good and hard.
That's the problem; not being against a powerful and influential institution that spreads nonsense and lies, and instead being against government supported media just because it's government supported is just silly. For someone born in a cult that cult is much worse, and a much larger impairment to freedom, than the government. Yet I've seen plenty of libertarians attempt wonky logic to defend the cult as 'freedom' and a government ensuring that people are able live their life free of, or to escape, the clutches of cult leaders as bad.
I wasn't referring to people who hold gold. Do with your money what you want to do, as long as it doesn't harm others. I was referring to the people who think 'gold or other metals are the only true money', and who then, for enigmatic reasons endorse crypto. The thing about gold being money is incorrect, and subsequently endorsing crypto is just inconsistent logic.
And I didn't call anarchy 'the worst possible thing', I said that anarchy just won't work out positively in the way that Kropotkin or Ayn Rand imagine, because different types of power (cult, economic, force, whatever) will find their way to grab a hold. That's why we should allow democratically elected governments to rein in liars and thief's and snake oil salesmen, and the likes. Except that in the US the snake oil salesman now got elected president. And for messy situations like that we need the checks and the balances, and media that say truth to power, but those checks and balances get defunded when people say things like 'tax is theft ' and nonsense like that.
I like the cut of your jib
That last paragraph reminds me of the old joke: "Who cares if libertarianism doesn't work in fact - it works in *theory*!"
"For example, some libertarians argue that people should be able to sell themselves into slavery; the proper response to this is “Eww.” "
The response to that is not Eww. It is that true libertarians probably don't exist. If you are for slavery then how are you for liberty? If you are against slavery, then some authority or system needs to enforce it, which cuts against the libertarian creed. In fact that is a good way (as J.S.Mill once did) to scratch beneath the surface of a self-awoved libertarian. You immediately discover that it is all about liberty for me, perhaps not for thee
Libertarians are not anarchists, and enforcing individual rights by police and courts are a key part of libertarian policy, so obviously slavery would not be allowed. Allowing people to freely enter in contracts and arrangements is part of individual rights, and someone who wanted to agree to work in exchange for some benefit, would be allowed, but if it’s freely entered into then it is not slavery. When a young person joins the military, where they have many rules on behavior and following orders, this isn’t slavery, so someone doing this for a private company (say on a deep sea oil drilling platform), it would’ve be slavery either.
Actually, libertarians have gone back and forth about the slavery question. Metaphysically, they're divided because on one hand there's the principle of self-ownership (and how can you own body/labor if you can't alienate it by selling it to someone else?) and the labor theory of property. More practically, they have a spotted history when it comes to the actual historical record of slavery in the United States; plenty of them are apologists for the Confederacy and still complain about the "War of Northern Aggression."
In this there is a broader critique of contract-based ethics though.
For instance many libertarians are against workplace safety laws, under the theory that anyone who willingly enters a labor contract can themselves be trusted to incorporate their own sense of safety and well-being. Similar things can be said for child labor laws, false advertising laws, product safety standards, bankruptcy laws, waiving away rights etc.
And it's true that just like in many instances the prevailing wage is above the state-mandated minimum wage, so might industries be expect to provide basic workplace safety guarantees to attract employees if its the revealed preference of employees to prioritize that.
However, if every employee needs to form an independent investigation of workplace safety to understand the terms of their employment there will be a lot of inefficiency generated from that.
So this is why some basic industry standards or at least ratings is essential. One might hope that private enterprise might setup their own standards and rating process to aid prospective employees, but why work so hard to locate a basic government function outside of government? Maybe industry or prospective employees can get together to support government regulation which helps them navigate this environment?
There is space for light sensible regulation within a libertarian framework, and the slavery example is just to say all libertarians should start by drawing their line somewhere.