The first mention I remember of left anarchists was when some anarchists' union fought in the Spanish Civil War, and the oxymoron made no sense. I later read a description which said some went so far in their denial of private property that they it was fair game to move into a random house while the "owners" were away shopping or working, but the most inexplicable were the ones that shared toothbrushes and underwear. Now granted, I'm sure most meant washed underwear, but still ... and toothbrushes? That was probably about the same time I realized that collectivists are just plain crazy.
Seattle at one time proposed a law that required homeowners to rent out "unused" bedrooms, such as when children moved out. The concept itself is bizarre and unworkable, since it's a no brainer to fill them with boxes or turn them into offices, libraries, hobby rooms, any number of ways. But I cannot help but conclude that yes, they are crazy, insane, non compos mentos, if they think such an invasion of privacy and disrespect for property rights makes any sense.
Got any examples of crazier than such a hatred of private property as sharing toothbrushes and underwear?
Without private property, there is no society. I do not think any society is even possible without the concept of private property. The notoriously anti-private property Comanche Indians of North America marked their arrows so they would know who had killed an animal.
“If you take a walk through the countryside, from Indonesia to Peru, and you walk by field after field — in each field a different dog is going to bark at you. Even dogs know what private property is all about. The only one who does not know it is the government.” — Hernando de Soto
Equally, private property is not possible without society. But right anarchists presume to build society on basis of private property which is madness.
Why is that madness? Just because you don’t like it?
You own yourself. That is a fundamental axiom of liberty.
If you own yourself, you own the fruits of your labor, otherwise that makes you a slave of whoever steals from you or forces you to work for them.
Exchanging the fruits of your labor follows inexorably.
You may as well claim building society on the basis of oral or written communications, or on the basis of humans having hearts and lungs, is madness. Property is a natural inevitable derivation of liberty, of owning yourself.
Nozick has given an example of pouring a bottle of ketchup in the ocean. So you mixed your labor of pouring a bottle with ocean. Do you own ocean?
"You own the fruit of your labor" is fine as far as it goes but laws of a tribe or a state are required to define how much labor must be mixed with precisely what things to define ownership.
Interesting, of course. My sense is that a coalition between classical liberals and contemporary liberals in the US at the moment is a chimera. Yes, of course there are streams, or better, streamlets, in the Democratic Party that are not insane. But classical liberalism is a streamlet, too. Even together, a quantité negligiable.
My sense is that the US of A, as well as western Europe, has moved left over my lifetime, caused by the Brahminization of the left. My political preferences were more or less formed ca. 1969, at the age of 19, after I read Capitalism and Freedom. [I still have the paperback copy, yellow pages, bent corners, and all, I studied then.] Of course, details changed as my understanding grew. Still, I would say I was slightly left of center at the time.
Back in the US for many years after some years in Europe, I have found that while my views have not changed, I am now considered a right-wing extremist!
I was trying to use the word "liberal" the way Yglesias used it, though it's probably best to not use it. The Left noticed that the word they had stolen earlier was no longer highly esteemed [by, say, the 1980's or '90's], so they reverted to the word they had stolen earlier from Christian reform movements -- progressives.
But all this illustrates well what the Left does best -- rewrite dictionaries.
My point is no more and no less that prior to 10 years ago, “liberal” was not a perfectly accurate description of the overall left, but at least it was not the opposite of the truth.
Today, by contrast - and note that since “progressive” fell out of favor, the ones who are not hard leftists have largely gone back to the term “liberal” - its use is Orwellian, since there is simply no way they can be characterized on net as liberal, given in general how many of their policy goals are explicitly illiberal, and how on speech in particular they have become so hostile to the First and most important liberal value.
I think the faction Yglesias is a part of is as liberal as the "liberals" of ten years ago, probably more. How much of the left they represent I don't know. But they are more liberal than Trump et. al.
We surely do agree on “the faction Yglesias is a part of is as liberal as the ‘liberals’ of ten years ago.”
We surely disagree on the “probably more”, and if you have any evidence there, I’d love to hear it.
We even more surely very strongly disagree on the “more liberal than Trump et al.” point.
But since you refuse to provide the relevant specifics of “Trump et al” or “MAGA Republicans” illiberalism, and compare policy by policy, and seem to be engaged in a lot of wishful thinking on where the Yglesiaises actually stand today, it is quite difficult to have the discussion.
Frank! Compadre! My political views were completely encompassed by “Capitalism and Freedom” in 1969 as well. I affectionately referred to it as “Capitalism and Friedman”. I continued to swim in the CaF ocean until David tossed me the life-preserver titled “The Machinery of Freedom”…thank you David!
“It is even more true now. Left liberals, even the abundance faction, may not be classical liberals but they are closer to us and we are closer to them than either of us is to the Maga Republicans on the right or the progressive Democrats on the left.”
IMO this was *such* a fantastic essay until this final sentence.
And to be clear, it’s not that the sentence is entirely incorrect. And with a narrow, uncharitable reading, it can be construed to be correct.
But by casually inserting the mostly ill-defined phrase “MAGA Republicans”, it strongly implies that classical liberals are closer to today’s “left liberals” like Yglesias than to the center of today’s GOP.
And that’s not true. To me, almost self-evidently so.
Now of course it would be true if “MAGA Republicans” refers *only* to the worst elements of the populist right agenda, I’m more than happy to concede.
But there is precious little evidence - either in Trump’s total record or anywhere else, like polls of what GOP voters or even self-described MAGA voters support - that this caricature is remotely accurate.
Even as I’m happy to concede that “MAGA” is slightly more illiberal than the highly imperfect Trump, who is himself clearly somewhat more illiberal than the “center-right” in the GOP that existed before Trump came down the escalator in 2015.
My assertion is that the midpoint of MAGA is in fact at least as close to “classical liberal” as left-liberals like Yglesias.
The left has moved SO far left, and what this essay misses is that the “center-left” and “left liberals” have moved at least as far, and in almost all cases further, towards the illiberal left in the last 11 years than the average person on the right has become more illiberal in that same timespan.
But of course I’m surely influenced by my wishful thinking belief that “the correct answer” is for anyone actually old-school center-left, actually for abundance, let alone already classical liberal or libertarian on economic issues, to understand that the center of the GOP despite MAGA is *so* much* closer to their positions and policy objectives than today’s almost completely illiberal left.
And as importantly by the non-wishful observation that said illiberal left has already swallowed the Dem party.
Did you read the Yglesias post? On the basis of that and a few other people connected with that faction I think you are mistaken, that those people are closer to us than the Democrats who called themselves liberals ten or fifteen years ago were, in part because they are reacting against the Progressives in their party.
No, David, I did not read that post, because it is paywalled.
I have read many Yglesias posts.
He is not a center-leftist. I don’t believe he ever was.
I have no per se problem with referring to him as a left-liberal.
I would actually claim he is broadly speaking an old-school progressive in the mold of Bill Maher and Alan Dershowitz in terms of his preferred policies.
Do you have ANY material evidence for this “those people are closer to us than the Democrats who called themselves liberals ten or fifteen years ago were, in part because they are reacting against the Progressives in their party” claim?
Do you have all that much specific evidence for your claim that his policy preferences are closer to classical liberal besides the two obvious ones of wanting more immigration and lower spending on the military?
More importantly, any evidence that they have moved closer to classical liberalism in the last 10-15 years?
I am unaware of even a single example where the center-left or left-liberals have moved further towards classical liberalism in the last 10 years, let alone the far stronger claim that in aggregate they have.
Mitigating strongly against your claim is the reality that they have not in fact denounced their left flank but are working hard to elect leftists across the board.
Yglesias himself in many blog posts is quite open about this. I.e. his arguments are entirely about what he thinks is most helpful for Democrats to be elected in order to have ruling majorities, and towards that end he does often argue *tactically* with hard leftists that they should move towards the center or at least be more tolerant of center-left candidates in purple locales.
Now if we were talking Ezra Klein (the prototypical “Abundance” guy) or Josh Barro (the prototypical center-left guy), I’d still disagree with you. IMO Klein is merely trying to reintroduce the left arguments of 2005 in 2024. so I’d still disagree with you, but I’d concede your argument would at least be somewhat stronger.
But if you have evidence for your extraordinary claim of these folks literally having moved towards more liberal policy positions in reaction to the activist left, I’m all ears.
Wow. Most progressives I know will barely agree that Yglesias is left of center at all. And then the reference to 'old school progressives' like the comedian famous for hating Muslims and one of Trump's personal lawyers? This is very clearly written from a place pretty far to the right of center.
The main reason that progressives are like classical liberals is that they care about freedom for people. And you will laugh at that, but the key is that oppressed people are not free. And oppression comes from family and social origins far more often than it comes from government. So government needs to act, to increase freedom, by limiting oppression.
I'm with this in general. Trump is a less bad choice than any current Democrat I am aware of, and so are MAGA Republicans, whom I think of more as being unconcerned with Trump's actual policies and mostly follow along because he is not a typical politician, whom he scares the piss out of.
Compare that with the woke anti-science anti-reality Democrats. I do not recall a single Democrat in the last 10 or 15 years who exhibited even the slightest resistance to the wokists who run their party now. Trumpists are pathetic in their obeisance to Trump, but that pales in comparison to Democrats' blind obedience to wokism, DEI, Magical Money Theory, applauding political murders (Kirk, the health care CEO, even the attempts on Trump and the Supreme Court justice), economic barbarism (minimum wage laws, occupational licensing, regulation out the wazoo), climate catastrophism, and too many other irrational beliefs (beliefs, mind you, not just policies).
I cannot imagine voting for any Democrat under the current circumstances. They come as close to being institutionally (as in the party, not clinically) insane as I can imagine, and I can't imagine what it would take to change them. Trump at least will be out of legal power in 2½ years, and out of influence soon after (he's 80 years old!), and his successors will fail miserably at keeping his legacy intact, as all second generation heirs do. The Democrats? No end in sight.
I hope Trump will be out of if influence after his term ends, but I am not sure he will be. The city political machines of the past used their control of primaries to stay in power and he has been doing the same thing, so I am not sure he won't remain party boss for another decade or more.
I meant partly that Trump is old and mortal, and whether his body or brain expires first, he has a limited lifespan left.
The other part is that his various crown princes will have to compete to be the new MAGA king, whether Trump designates a favorite or not. Competition requires differentiating themselves from each other, which requires deviations from what Trump did or would do were he still in charge. As with all dynasties, the successors won't be as capable, and will spend too much effort trying to emulate Trump instead of being their own man. Trump supporters will have to choose from the various crown princes, not including Trump, and Trump's influence will wane.
Yes, he’s made quite an interesting recovery from his illness. The Babylon Bee (or is it Not The Bee?) has been making lots of jokes about recovering from being a Democrat. But whatever he’s going through, he seems like the most independent thinker in the Senate after Rand Paul. The Democrats will probably try to primary him, but he’s still got, I think, 4 years.
The best, even ahead of Rand Paul, was Massie, but AIPAC has now bought his seat for cash and of course the legacy media have made this outrage a non-story.
The current Democratic "mainstream" actually wants to turn the country into what the right has correctly labeled "anarcho-tyranny," meaning that Antifa and similar terrorist groups will not only run wild, raping, pillaging, and murdering, but the police will protect them against any of their victims defending himself. Under those conditions (which already exist in places like Portland and Minneapolis), the best hope for a return to freedom will be either the populist-right rising in civil war, or that another Pinochet carries out a successful coup and then purges the communists.
Wow. You know, maybe don't believe everything you are told about progressives by people who are paid to be hostile to them. Or better yet, ask someone, "Hey, are you in favor of rape, pillage, and murder?"
Gee, the number of leftists who are pro-Hamas (not merely anti-Israel, not merely pro-Palestinian, but explicitly pro-Hamas) in the wake of Oct. 7th would beg to differ with your implicit and explicit assertions.
Go check the Harvard-Harris polls from fall 2023 and later and you can see for yourself. It is something close to half of young people, far more than half of young leftists.
Just because you yourself choose to remain ignorant of the numbers doesn’t mean that they are not in fact very, very large.
Colin Wright is in favor of every kind of caste system and hierarchy imaginable and his entire set of arguments related to redefining sex into a teleological appeal-to-nature construct are hyper-conservative or reactionary.
The problem with this is that "abundance democrats" aren't really a thing. They have no power in the Democrat party and even the individual characters who claim this label cave when asked to give a full throated endorsement of the implied policies. An abundance democrat is basically a Republican, minus whatever baggage you (in your head) may attach to that because of Trump.
My own sense is that Trump has been successful in elections because of culture issues (immigration, DEI, gender stuff, somewhat climate). I don't think any of his non-Republican (and non-libertarian) economic policies will have legs when he is gone.
Abundance Democrats absolutely are a thing. They are Democrats in favor of abundance, in the abstract, totally in denial of the obvious fact that all their policies, without exception, raise prices--that is, diminish abundance.
When an abundance Democrat actually embraces pro-market policies, he either leaves or is expelled from the Democratic Party. Are there exceptions? Maybe. Many people are not significant to the Party, so not worth the trouble of expelling; and I should be surprised to see a donor expelled.
(Well, maybe donors are expelled, as time goes on. Democratic candidates advertise not taking money from AIPAC, and other Jewish organizations and people are surely coming up, and other obstacles to the left after them.)
Anyway, if you know of an exception, a truly pro-market Democrat, please let me know.
It doesn’t make clear that the Abundance Liberals actual views have changed.
Or even that that actual “liberals“ of ten years ago were for the affirmative action as practiced (obviously the progressives were).
They may have felt that way all along.
It doesn’t even make clear that they assert that it’s better policy (though I’ve little doubt Piper herself believes that) now, merely that it’s effective communication strategy for winning elections.
Separately, I find it telling that this was about all you could come up with to support the claim.
Of course, perhaps this is somewhat moot, since Piper we’ve both acknowledged is far more libertarian, and likely on net center-left, than almost all the Abundance Liberals (left-liberals), and I have no quarrel with your claim that those actually still on the center-left very plausibly are closer to libertarian that is Trump / the center of MAGA.
“Left liberals, even the abundance faction, may not be classical liberals but they are closer to us and we are closer to them than either of us is to the Maga Republicans on the right or the progressive Democrats on the left.”
But they keep running progressives!
I like to know where the evil is coming from. At least Trump is predictable. I will always vote for a candidate who lowers some taxes over a lunatic that threatens more taxes. But in the final analysis either extreme is bad—pick your poison.
And then that faction turns around and endorses Mamdani. Remember Mamdani's main opponent during the election in question was Cuomo, so they can't even claim "stopping Republicans" as a justification.
Ezra Klein, one of the leaders of the faction you describe, not only doesn’t want the Democrats party to stop running progressives, he himself voted for Mamdani, who is much further anti-libertarian leftist than even the average “progressive”.
But Yglesias does NOT want the Dem party to stop running progressives across the board.
He only wants them to stop running progressives in purple and red states.
His stance on progressive (though not, to be clear, on hard left socialist) is the mirror image of William F Buckley’s: he wants the most progressive candidate who can win.
And far more “Abundance Liberals” favor Yglesias’ view here than those of Sunstein or Piper.
On way to think about the term "liberal" is in contrast to the term "conservative." In the 19th century and before, liberals favored liberty, but did so out of values developed during the Enlightenment: reason, freedom, individualism, democracy, rule of law, separation of power and checks and balances, etc. In contrast, conservatives believed (to varying degrees) in strong authoritarian governments and monarchies (and often the divine right of kings -- note that this was the subject of Locke's lesser read FIRST treatise on government).
These 19th century ideas do not fit neatly into modern political ideologies, but they do to some degree.
20th Century Socialism is in some sense liberal, in that it claims to be derived from reason and rational principles. (A more careful theoretical economic analysis and historical evidence shows that it fails on all of these, but that is at least what its proponents argue.) And in some senses it is conservative in that it envisions great restrictions on freedom and individualism.
Modern libertarianism is certainly liberal in the 19th century sense.
The modern center-left has some aspects of 19th century liberalism: It believes in freedom of speech, religion, much economic freedom, rule of law, democracy. However, as David correctly notes, it advocates for a large amount of government power in economic areas and thus less freedom there.
The modern center-right is similar. It believes in freedom of speech, religion, much economic freedom, rule of law, democracy. It advocates for more economic freedom (sometimes) and less personal or social freedom than the center left.
But contrast these two with the far-left and far-right.
The far-left or progressive left favors much greater restrictions on economic freedom and personal freedom. There is a lot of focus on group rights (and thus the focus is less on individualism). There is endless focus on wrongs committed based on race, gender, sexual orientation, etc -- that is collective wrongs, even though the individual victims might be individuals. This looks more like 19th century conservatism than the center left, although the orientation -- group rights of victims and economic redistribution -- is very different than the divine right of kings.
The far-right is authoritarian, and cares very little about the rule of law and democracy. (Trump and his supporters, for example). Tariffs, January 6, bullying foreign states, etc.
Until (say) 2010, both the far left and far right were marginal fringe movements in both parties. So people could have a reasonable discussion about in what sense Democrats or Republicans or Libertarians were liberal or conservative. But with the rise of progressive Democrats and MAGA Republicans, both the center-left and center-right from 2010 are looking pretty liberal compared to the recent authoritarian anti-liberal (in the 19th century sense) newcomers.
Or, to put it another way, the right cares most about increasing freedom for those who already have the most, the left cares about increasing freedom for those who have the least.
Yeah I mean the fundamental political philosophy synthesis of liberal and left ideas runs through the vein of Rawls, Dworkin and further on the left to GA Cohen.
The bizarre idea that freedom can be divorced from the resources necessary to make that freedom real or meaningful has always seemed blinkered at best and willfully dishonest at worst.
"The bizarre idea that freedom can be divorced from the resources necessary to make that freedom real or meaningful..."
Where do said "resources necessary" come from? Most do not simply exist independent of human effort.
Those of us of a classical liberal or libertarian persuasion find it a bizarre idea that "freedom" fundamentally comes from forcibly taking the property of others.
Why do you have a claim to resources created by someone who is now dead? It's the inheritance that screws you up when you try to claim human effort creates the rights to resources.
Plus, if people didn't claim land, hunting and gathering could be done with no one else putting any effort in. But property rights block that.
Your 2nd claim about hunting and gathering is just absurd in the modern world, and you actually know that.
Relatively high inheritance taxes, OTOH,are one of the few left views that I agree with. They can’t be 90%+, because incentives, but I do favor relatively high inheritance taxes.
American conservatives sought--and seek--to preserve the founding (usually as modified by Lincoln's refounding), which is to say, to preserve what used to be called a liberal project.
American conservatives have never favored monarchy. British Tories were not for any absolute monarchy either. Both of them were more pro-liberty than anything now.
I cannot fathom how anyone who's watching can make the claim "Republicans at the moment support more government—more even than Democrats as of the last time they were in power"
I nearly lost my job, many people were forced out of the military, large number of people were deplatrformed for wrong-speak all under the recent Democrat over-reach around forced vaccination. Long term big-investing Democrat backers Mark Zuckerburg and Marc Andreeson saw how Democrats were controlling their platforms and dropped their Democrat allegiances as they were both informed by the Biden administration that AI was going to be dictated from on-high.
From forcing chicken ranch slaughters to forcing Texas to not enforce border their border policies, to deciding, sans-votes, who could and couldn't run for election and who would be barred to prosecuting people for suggesting and uncovering fraud, the Democrat party, went full Animal Farm "rules for thee, not for me," while Maga has been cutting regulations more than 2 to 1 with each new reg linked to multiple (sometimes scores) of obscolesced regulations.
Who pushed the car companies into climate mandates? Not Maga.
I can understand disagreeing with MAGA. To each his own. But make those disagreements honest ones, not claims that MAGA is more authoritarian that Democrats. The only possible way to make that have any validity is to discount those that Democrats were autoractic against as not mattering because they disagree with you. Democrats were not only big government, but big government disguised via big NGO and AID shell games.
Except . . . MAGA didn't exist 2007 (discounting the 1980s Reagen MAGA which I'm sure you're not referring to) so I don't follow you. How can that quote be from 2007?
DF said in the original post that in 2007 he wrote "Since Republicans at the moment support more government—more even than Democrats as of the last time they were in power—it is worth looking for other allies."
Then he went on to add (2026):
"It is even more true now. Left liberals, even the abundance faction, may not be classical liberals but they are closer to us and we are closer to them than either of us is to the Maga Republicans on the right or the progressive Democrats on the left."
I interpret the latter paragraph as saying "it's now even more worth looking for other allies". And that DF thinks left liberals are closer to classical liberals than MAGA Republicans. {I agree broadly re respect for law and tradition - MAGA has little. I agree less so re economic policies and regulation.}
Ambiguity in your meaning when you wrote, "I agree broadly" makes it hard for me to know what you're agreeing with.
From my perspective, the part of his post I agree with is that people are libertarian for different reasons. I want small government so that I can be entreprenuerally successful. I see now hope of accomplishing that with the left's liberals who seem (from my vantage point) to want to control
* Communication (no unapproved discussion)
* Health (my body is the government's choice)
* Families (children belong to the school system's teacher's transgender police)
From my perspective the main thing MAGA is doing that has the left disturbed is treating laws as if they should be applied as written and apply to all.
I get the distinct opinion that there is a massive gaslighting going on that is giving people different news and censoring any take that doesn't put the left in a good light.
What I meant is that I agree, broadly (not on every specific), that the abundance faction of left liberals (*not* progressives) are closer to libertarians in outlook than are MAGA Republicans. Not on specifics - MAGA is more anti-regulation, pro-free-markets. But I perceive MAGA as very much disdainful of law and precedent and tradition re *process*. Quite authoritarian in many ways - it's my way or the highway. The progressives are just as bad (if not worse) in the other direction. But JFK type liberals are better. I see both extremes (MAGA vs progressives) being very pro-censorship, just they want to censor different things. Between the drug wars, the FDA prohibiting sale of anything new, and abortion, both extremes want to control our bodies (again, in different ways). Each extreme wants families to behave in their own approved ways. On specifics I generally agree with MAGA more than with liberals, but liberals (again, *not* progressives) seem more likely to respect people who want to do things differently. Neither side is any good IMHO, but I think in the 21st centry libertarians can likely cooperate more with liberals than with MAGA. (FWIW, "MAGA" in my opinion is way worse than Trump himself.)
“I agree broadly re respect for law and tradition - MAGA has little”
Those are conservative values and even institutional centrist values, sure.
I don’t follow how they are libertarian values. Could you explain?
Separately, while I agree with you 100% that MAGA and Trump have little respect for tradition, I strongly disagree with the assertion - or at least the strong implication - that MAGA and Trump believe less in respect for the law than does today’s left.
I was referring to "classical liberals" not "libertarians". I can't speak for libertarians (well nobody can) but I agree that things like decorum and tone are more classical liberal values than libertarian values. Re who has more respect for law per se (MAGA vs progressives) I'm not sure there's much to choose between. Nor do libertarians have much respect for law per se.
> I cannot fathom how anyone who's watching can make the claim "Republicans at the moment support more government—more even than Democrats as of the last time they were in power"
It makes sense if you take "government" to mean merely the elected government. And think of the permanent bureaucrats, not to mention the NGOs and AID organizations, as an aristocratic class whose "rights" to federal funding and independence the Trump administration is violating.
If I understand you correctly, the "problem" is that Trump is over-reaching by taking taxpayer dollars out of government. OK, that's an ... interesting take. I'm not sure if you're ironically agreeing with my issue or not. Friedman's comment that this was from 2007 I take as a clear rebuttal.
Right you are. Same with Universities who use the fungible government money to foster their agendies. USAID was an incredible scam all around, but just one of many.
Hundreds of thousands of people have lost their jobs, many have been forced out of the military, and the rule of law is in life support. That was all Trump.
Source? 100s of thousands of people doing taxpayer funded NGO work losing their jobs is not a libertarian failure, but a success. Hundreds of thousands of people lowing their racists-quota makeshift in order for the organizations to continue to receive government funding is not a failure, but a success. Hundreds of thousands of Commercial Drivers Licensese operators unable to read road signs, not even speaking the language, losing that license is not a failure, but a success.
I don't know which hundreds of thousands of people you're referring to.
I was in the military back when preparadness was job 1 and I watched in horror the DEI "my 2 mommies would b so proud" commericials having nothing to do with military preparadeness, and learned in horrow of people joining the military for the express purpose of getting taxpayers to pay for their $50,000 sex-reassignment surgeries.
I'm going to have to see and read specifics on your assertions before I'm going to be influenced by sob stories of the poor gender studies majoris and near-suicidal commercial drivers, much less the sensitiivity training in third-world-nation taxpayer funded iniiatives to be upset about it.
As to the rule-of-law on life support, I saw the weaponization against conservatives of the Biden era. Again, you're going to have to give me sources rather than just broad assertions. Who lost their job? What were the circumstances?
I get the fact that foreign-born people want to inherity the lives my grandparents and other ancestors created for their posterity, and want their children's schools covered by taxpayers as well. Who wouldn't? That doesn't make me sympathetic to their cause.
If a libertarian success is hundreds of thousands of people dying as a consequence, as with USAID, I really don't want to see what a libertarian failure looks like. Nuclear war, maybe?
You're moving the goalposts here, and still providing no sources for your claim. You originally said, 100,000 people losing their job (still uncourced) and now are claiming 100,000 people dying from USAID (which, BTW, AID is not aid, it is US Agency for International Development which spent far more on propaganda than on keeping people alive.
Again I'm going to need your source on the 100s of thousands of people dying, as I'll need your souce on 100,000 jobs lost and your souce on rule-of-law on life-support. .
100,000 people die every day from the aging process alone and yet taxpayer funding of overcoming the aging process is nearly nil. I contend that if you want to save lives, that's an easier start.
100,000 unborn children's lives were lost every few years due to taxpayer funderd assisted abortions.I don't know why YOUR perogatives that you aren't funding yourself need to be my perogatives when I already know a better use of funds. Solve aging and you've saved 100,000 lives every day, not just in one year, but in all years going forward.
that Harvard headline you cite is almost pure bullshit.
It is based on modeling a 1 year halt to the specific "life-saving" programs.
At most there was an 8 to 15 day pause in the funding of those programs.
Even if the model is perfectly accurate and one assumes that a temporary pause in funding caused irreversible harm, the number of deaths would be a small fraction of what was claimed.
Thanks for the links. I appreciate the follow up. The story appears anecdotal and referenctial. I don't see anything to back it up. And I don't see it countering the 35 million people dying every single year because aging hasn't been solved. Yes it's sad that people in undeveloped countries are dying and we're not keeping them alive. But it's a case of learned helplessness. We've taught people to not solve their own problems and to wait around for us to solve them for us.
The Civil Service layoffs and NGO losses are exactly what I expected, government taxpayer funded jobs.
In both cases these are not counters to the LIBERTARIAN argument that MAGA is less libertarian. Both of your example sets involved forced money (taxes) taken from one group to benefit another.
I understand the short-term human cost, but the core libertarian argument is about the second-order effects of moving money from productivie to unproductive sectors. In your own references, the woman had 9 children. How many children do I have? I have 1. Why? Because I waited to have children until I could afford to have children, as did my wife, so we only got the one.
It's not that I don't care for poor Jane Naboi or any of Rovina Noboi's other children. It's that I'm never misled by the hidden costs of forced redistribution from productive to unproductive sectors.
And naturally, Atul Gwande, who served in the Biden administration for 5 years can be totally trusted to be an honest statistician, as can all the children at the Minnesota "Learing" Center that was recently uncovered. Certainly there's no bias in that reporting.
But nothing I said or didn't say referred to the morality of MAGA, just to the libertarian ethos and nothing in the links you just showed indicate an anti-libertarian ethos.
The problem with liberal arguments is that it's always couched as if there are no hidden costs, and the hidden costs of Rovino Naboi's 9 children is the 9 children I didn't get to have because all the money I could have spent toward my family went to hers.
There was never such a thing as a “libertarian”, just republicans who smoked weed and didn’t go to church.
At this point, anyone who says that freedom is their main ideological center and hasn’t been voting straight ticket dem since at least Obama is full of shit.
Huntsman and Gary Johnson got drummed out many years ago, Ron and Rand and Massie are all ultra conservative socially and are credibly bigoted, and ostensible libertarians like Vance turned into sub-Jared Taylor white supremacists the moment they could remove the mask.
I’m just describing what I see on the news. Nothing Biden has done has ever gotten close to actual rapist trump and his rape of children and adults. You have voted for a rapist too many times for me not to think your kind loves rape
"Trans rights" consists of the "right" to force everybody else to pretend that black is white, two plus two is five, and that a man can become a woman.
The problem isn't their existence. The problem is their insistence that the rest of the world recognize their delusions to the extent of men in women's locker rooms, beating up women in women's sports, in violation of both common decency and Title IX.
The problem is that trans women are more likely to be victims of men than cis women are. If you aren't comfortable throwing cis girls into boys locker rooms, then why would you be comfortable doing it with girls who are even more likely to get assaulted?
How about the right to do what you want with your own body? You know, that foundational right that libertarians always claim is the foundation of all else?
Yes absolutely. Did any of them send gunmen into cities to batter them into submission? Did they ever force programs on fox or whatever right wing shock jock off the air like Trump did with Colbert?
“Bang bang. You’re dead liberal”: actual ice agents sent by the GOP
What, like when he threatened broadcast licenses? Oh wait, Trump. How about those multi billion dollar lawsuits over BS libel claims? Oh yeah, also Trump.
What did Biden do again? Something about emails suggesting the government thought certain stories were fake or harmful to public health? Such coercion. Wow.
So suing BBC for $10 billion for an edit that implied something Trump didn't like ISN'T supressing the press, but an email suggesting that a story has the hallmarks of Russian propaganda is?
You are twisted like a pretzel trying to work backwards from your conclusions.
My impression is that the abundance folks don’t really have their heart in it. They know that the outcomes are bad, and they know that things need to change. It seems that they also recognize that a far more libertarian legal and regulatory regime is a necessary, and probably sufficient, condition to bring about the abundance that they claim that they want. That is to say, I think that they know that abundance requires a political party that has a fundamentally laissez fairer approach to anything to do with economics, and they also know that the Democratic Party does not view the world that way. Yet they still call themselves Democrats. Given that libertarians only matter to the extent that they can influence the views and preferences of liberals and conservatives, I am not even sure what it means for libertarians to ally with liberals or Democrats. Libertarians have only an immaterial number of votes to offer. Maybe there are some wealthy libertarians who could fund think tanks or magazines or podcasts or influencers working to try to create a fusionist ideal that some members of the Democratic Party could endorse?
There could be an intellectual alliance with each group learning from the other, and it could produce ideas that would spread. Pro-market ideas might spread to different places if packaged by Democrats.
It's interesting that Yglesias brings up the role of the state in public transportation. Whether or not he's correct to take for the granted the utility of governmental intervention there, it's notable that in my experience, a large majority of arguments against libertarianism focus on functions that account for a very small percentage of total government expenditures.
'But who will build the roads?' If all a government did was build roads, that would entail reducing the scope of the government by something like 99.9%.
“the moderate left of the current U.S. political spectrum — abandoned that negative liberty in favor of what is sometime called positive liberty, the right to an adequate level of food, education, medicine paid for and provided, if necessary, by someone else.”
It’s the “paid for….by someone else” that makes it anti-liberty!
Government is such an abstraction. Let’s stop for a moment and acknowledge that individuals make up what you and I call the government. I’m prepared to pay for my defense of person and property but I know that a private defense company will do a better job than a “government”. The reason why that is so is simple; if they don’t some other firm will get my business—same as Walmart or Amazon.
98 percent of whatever you claim as personal wealth was earned and created by past generations, and is by any right the shared inheritance of all since no human could possibly earn the luck of their birth (i e as regards inheritance) nor the accomplishments of the past, nor could even Nozick cleanse the chain of property from its innumerable sins. You are but using and leveraging the common inheritance of knowledge and infrastructure and law and resources.
So whatever amount you are allowed to leverage from the common inheritance of all, and whatever society collectively allows you to keep beyond the tiny leveraging contribution you make individually, is well within the propriety of law and freedom.
More importantly, freedom is meaningless without the resources necessary to effectuate one’s desires. So freedom and inequality are as close to diametrically opposed as any two concepts could be.
Does the Present Generation owe anything to Past Generations including their Good Fortunes of Parentage as well as the Tangled Chain of Property Ownership?
Was President Obama correct?
By Melgar du Poseidon
The short answer is no, but in something of an outline of bullet points is my fullest rebuttal to both your claim and his argument.
The Source of Value is Present Labor
Past infrastructure is useless without current maintenance and innovation.
A computer requires past discoveries, but its current value is created now.
Wealth is not a fixed pool of historical resources to be divided.
Wealth is constantly generated through active, daily human effort.
Voluntary Exchange Honors Past Generations
Past generations chose how to pass down their accomplishments.
They did this through market sales, gifts, and voluntary inheritance.
Forcing a "shared inheritance" violates the wishes of those past creators.
Respecting private property honors the choices of ancestors.
Luck Does Not Justify State Coercion
No one chooses the luck of their birth.
However, life's unfairness does not grant the state the right to steal.
Taking from one to give to another requires institutional violence.
Equalizing luck through force destroys individual liberty and motivation.
The Flaw of Cosmic Rectification
Historical property chains do contain injustices and theft.
However, the solution cannot be total state ownership of everything.
Governments are historically the largest committers of property theft.
Giving the state control over "common inheritance" invites mass corruption.
Moving forward with clear, protected property rights minimizes future injustice.
Leveraged Assets Are Already Paid For
Innovators do leverage existing law, infrastructure, and knowledge.
However, they pay for this usage through taxes, fees, and market prices.
Using public knowledge does not make an inventor indebted to the state.
Knowledge is non-rivalrous; one person using it does not diminish it for others.
Concluding Remarks
President Obama was mistaken when he admonished: “You didn’t build that!”
Entrepreneurs already pay for roads and infrastructure through heavy taxes.
Using a public utility does not give the government ownership of your profit.
Every competitor in a market has access to the exact same roads and schools.
Infrastructure exists for everyone, yet most business startups fail.
The defining variable of success is individual risk, tradeoffs , and execution.
Businesses are built using the help of workers, suppliers, and teachers.
These relationships are voluntary market exchanges, not government programs.
All parties are already compensated through wages and contractual payments.
The state did not create the underlying wealth used to build the infrastructure.
Government only builds things by first taking resources from private producers.
Crediting the state for business success reverses cause and effect.
In short, you need to check your premises because your conclusion is in error—What is mine is private property I earned over a lifetime of work and whatever was given to me was done through voluntary exchanges or mutual trades.
Why would I care about “honoring” past generations versus maximizing effective actual agentic freedom for the largest portion of the living population?
Why would the unearned genetic or familial inheritance of any person be worthy of any deference, regardless of the wishes of the dead?
Why would I conclude that the tiny contribution of current generations would be prioritized, when, in the absence of the accumulated millennia of knowledge and infrastructure, that labor would be worth as much as a subsistence colony in the poorest and most isolated regions of Africa?
Why would the compensation of the past generations justly transfer to the present?
On what basis do competitors possibly have equal access to resources in the absence of the actual money and leverage necessary to take advantage of theoretical opportunities?
On what basis would one possibly conclude the state did not create the underlying wealth to build the infrastructure?
The Veil of Ignorance, Moral Arbitrariness, the Difference Principle, and Fair Equality of Opportunity—Why John Rawls is Wrong
By Melgar du Poseidon
1. On deference to unearned inheritance and the wishes of the dead
The Right of the Living: I do not argue that an heir "deserves" their inheritance based on personal merit. Instead, I look at the right of the property owner while they are alive.
Freedom of Disposal: If a person legitimately owns property, they have the absolute right to gift it, trade it, or destroy it. A will is simply a deferred gift.
Preventing State Encroachment: Violating the wishes of the deceased requires the state to violently seize property from a family. This creates an unacceptably powerful state with the leverage to decide who "deserves" resources.
2. On prioritizing current labor over accumulated historical infrastructure
The Subjective Theory of Value: Value is not determined by the historical cost or effort it took to build something. It is determined by what people currently value and are willing to pay for in the present moment.
Capital Maintenance: Historical infrastructure and knowledge are useless without ongoing, active human labor to maintain, apply, and adapt them. A factory left abandoned for 50 years becomes worthless rubble; current generation labor keeps that capital alive and productive.
The Danger of Collective Debt: Claiming current labor is subordinate to past generations implies that citizens are born with a permanent debt to a collective society.
As a libertarian I reject this because individuals are born free, not as debtors to a state or a historical collective.
3. On why the compensation of past generations justly transfers to the present
The Nature of Title and Contract: Property rights do not expire when a person dies. If a past generation earned compensation, that compensation takes the form of private property. The owner has the contractual right to choose their successor.
Family as an Economic Unit: Parents work and save precisely to provide a better life and a safety net for their children. Stripping away the ability to pass wealth to the next generation destroys the primary incentive for long-term capital accumulation, investment, and multi-generational planning.
4. On equal access to resources without money or leverage
Negative vs. Positive Rights: Libertarians distinguish between negative rights (the freedom from interference) and positive rights (the right to be provided with a good or service).
Equal Protection, Not Equal Outcomes: The market promises equal rules, not equal starting points. "Equal access" means nobody is legally barred by the state from competing, buying property, or starting a business.
Leverage via Voluntary Cooperation: A person without capital can still compete by selling their labor, developing specialized skills, or pooling resources with others through voluntary partnerships and credit markets. Forcing "equal outcomes" requires continuous, authoritarian redistribution of wealth.
5. On the basis that the state did not create the underlying wealth for infrastructure
The State is a Consumer, Not a Producer: The state does not naturally possess wealth of its own. Every dollar the state spends on roads, schools, or infrastructure must first be extracted from the private economy via taxation, inflation, or debt.
Opportunity Cost (The Broken Window Fallacy): While state-built infrastructure is highly visible, the wealth that would have been created if that money had stayed in the private sector remains invisible.
Private Innovation Drives the State: The knowledge, machinery, and materials used to build public infrastructure are almost always developed by private individuals and private enterprises. The state merely directs stolen or borrowed capital toward projects, often with massive inefficiencies compared to market-driven solutions.
Conclusion
The fundamental flaw of the Rawlsian vision is that it separates wealth from the human choices that create it. By reducing families to 'moral arbitrariness' and wealth to a 'collective pool,' Rawls constructs a system that requires permanent state coercion. A free society must reject this. We must celebrate the voluntary transfers, private innovations, and individual rights that actually build a prosperous world.
Nobody is born free from history, nor do you ever once grapple with how totally meaningless your life of freedom is for those who aren’t born into families or backgrounds that allow for greater wealth and access to opportunity, on a personal or regional or national scale, and just asserting it is nonsense.
“It may not have occurred to him that if the best form of government is very bad that is a reason not to give government the power to do things even if the alternatives are imperfect, hence that libertarian opposition to government power over the economy”.
It may not have occurred to him that the United States had the best form of government until rent seeking broke it along with presidents like Lincoln, Wilson and FDR—turning representatives government that placed the individual in charge of his own life into a democracy.
I know that David has tried to move on from his claim that Abundance Liberals are closer to libertarians/classical liberals than Trump/MAGA, rather than addressing that claim head on.
I just don’t see how anyone reading this “interview” / discussion that includes the two authors of the book could possibly continue to believe that:
It seems to me that DF, just like Arnold Kling in his post yesterday, is ignoring both the magnitude and the first derivative of the movement away from libertarianism on the left, and ignoring the magnitude of closeness to libertarianism on the right, and instead is choosing entirely to focus on the first derivative of movement away from libertarianism on the right (which no doubt is true) and the second derivative of a small move back towards libertarianism by a small group on the left.
In other words, DF and AK are both exhibiting wishful thinking buying in to MSM vibes about the Abundance movement and about “icky” MAGA, while ignoring the actual policy and actual support reality of the groups in question.
Coming from two minds I greatly respect, I find this bigly Sad.
> One that we stole from the left anarchists, but since they don’t believe in property rights …
I literally LOL when I read this.
The first mention I remember of left anarchists was when some anarchists' union fought in the Spanish Civil War, and the oxymoron made no sense. I later read a description which said some went so far in their denial of private property that they it was fair game to move into a random house while the "owners" were away shopping or working, but the most inexplicable were the ones that shared toothbrushes and underwear. Now granted, I'm sure most meant washed underwear, but still ... and toothbrushes? That was probably about the same time I realized that collectivists are just plain crazy.
Seattle at one time proposed a law that required homeowners to rent out "unused" bedrooms, such as when children moved out. The concept itself is bizarre and unworkable, since it's a no brainer to fill them with boxes or turn them into offices, libraries, hobby rooms, any number of ways. But I cannot help but conclude that yes, they are crazy, insane, non compos mentos, if they think such an invasion of privacy and disrespect for property rights makes any sense.
The left anarchists are no more crazy than the right anarchists.
Got any examples of crazier than such a hatred of private property as sharing toothbrushes and underwear?
Without private property, there is no society. I do not think any society is even possible without the concept of private property. The notoriously anti-private property Comanche Indians of North America marked their arrows so they would know who had killed an animal.
“If you take a walk through the countryside, from Indonesia to Peru, and you walk by field after field — in each field a different dog is going to bark at you. Even dogs know what private property is all about. The only one who does not know it is the government.” — Hernando de Soto
Taxation is theft is just as crazy.
Equally, private property is not possible without society. But right anarchists presume to build society on basis of private property which is madness.
Why is that madness? Just because you don’t like it?
You own yourself. That is a fundamental axiom of liberty.
If you own yourself, you own the fruits of your labor, otherwise that makes you a slave of whoever steals from you or forces you to work for them.
Exchanging the fruits of your labor follows inexorably.
You may as well claim building society on the basis of oral or written communications, or on the basis of humans having hearts and lungs, is madness. Property is a natural inevitable derivation of liberty, of owning yourself.
Nozick has given an example of pouring a bottle of ketchup in the ocean. So you mixed your labor of pouring a bottle with ocean. Do you own ocean?
"You own the fruit of your labor" is fine as far as it goes but laws of a tribe or a state are required to define how much labor must be mixed with precisely what things to define ownership.
Interesting, of course. My sense is that a coalition between classical liberals and contemporary liberals in the US at the moment is a chimera. Yes, of course there are streams, or better, streamlets, in the Democratic Party that are not insane. But classical liberalism is a streamlet, too. Even together, a quantité negligiable.
My sense is that the US of A, as well as western Europe, has moved left over my lifetime, caused by the Brahminization of the left. My political preferences were more or less formed ca. 1969, at the age of 19, after I read Capitalism and Freedom. [I still have the paperback copy, yellow pages, bent corners, and all, I studied then.] Of course, details changed as my understanding grew. Still, I would say I was slightly left of center at the time.
Back in the US for many years after some years in Europe, I have found that while my views have not changed, I am now considered a right-wing extremist!
“…contemporary liberals in the US…”
You of course mean leftists, as they are no longer reasonably described as liberal.
I was trying to use the word "liberal" the way Yglesias used it, though it's probably best to not use it. The Left noticed that the word they had stolen earlier was no longer highly esteemed [by, say, the 1980's or '90's], so they reverted to the word they had stolen earlier from Christian reform movements -- progressives.
But all this illustrates well what the Left does best -- rewrite dictionaries.
We indeed agree.
My point is no more and no less that prior to 10 years ago, “liberal” was not a perfectly accurate description of the overall left, but at least it was not the opposite of the truth.
Today, by contrast - and note that since “progressive” fell out of favor, the ones who are not hard leftists have largely gone back to the term “liberal” - its use is Orwellian, since there is simply no way they can be characterized on net as liberal, given in general how many of their policy goals are explicitly illiberal, and how on speech in particular they have become so hostile to the First and most important liberal value.
I think the faction Yglesias is a part of is as liberal as the "liberals" of ten years ago, probably more. How much of the left they represent I don't know. But they are more liberal than Trump et. al.
We surely do agree on “the faction Yglesias is a part of is as liberal as the ‘liberals’ of ten years ago.”
We surely disagree on the “probably more”, and if you have any evidence there, I’d love to hear it.
We even more surely very strongly disagree on the “more liberal than Trump et al.” point.
But since you refuse to provide the relevant specifics of “Trump et al” or “MAGA Republicans” illiberalism, and compare policy by policy, and seem to be engaged in a lot of wishful thinking on where the Yglesiaises actually stand today, it is quite difficult to have the discussion.
See Kelsey Piper on affirmative action:https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/can-a-liberal-society-do-affirmative
Frank! Compadre! My political views were completely encompassed by “Capitalism and Freedom” in 1969 as well. I affectionately referred to it as “Capitalism and Friedman”. I continued to swim in the CaF ocean until David tossed me the life-preserver titled “The Machinery of Freedom”…thank you David!
“It is even more true now. Left liberals, even the abundance faction, may not be classical liberals but they are closer to us and we are closer to them than either of us is to the Maga Republicans on the right or the progressive Democrats on the left.”
IMO this was *such* a fantastic essay until this final sentence.
And to be clear, it’s not that the sentence is entirely incorrect. And with a narrow, uncharitable reading, it can be construed to be correct.
But by casually inserting the mostly ill-defined phrase “MAGA Republicans”, it strongly implies that classical liberals are closer to today’s “left liberals” like Yglesias than to the center of today’s GOP.
And that’s not true. To me, almost self-evidently so.
Now of course it would be true if “MAGA Republicans” refers *only* to the worst elements of the populist right agenda, I’m more than happy to concede.
But there is precious little evidence - either in Trump’s total record or anywhere else, like polls of what GOP voters or even self-described MAGA voters support - that this caricature is remotely accurate.
Even as I’m happy to concede that “MAGA” is slightly more illiberal than the highly imperfect Trump, who is himself clearly somewhat more illiberal than the “center-right” in the GOP that existed before Trump came down the escalator in 2015.
My assertion is that the midpoint of MAGA is in fact at least as close to “classical liberal” as left-liberals like Yglesias.
The left has moved SO far left, and what this essay misses is that the “center-left” and “left liberals” have moved at least as far, and in almost all cases further, towards the illiberal left in the last 11 years than the average person on the right has become more illiberal in that same timespan.
But of course I’m surely influenced by my wishful thinking belief that “the correct answer” is for anyone actually old-school center-left, actually for abundance, let alone already classical liberal or libertarian on economic issues, to understand that the center of the GOP despite MAGA is *so* much* closer to their positions and policy objectives than today’s almost completely illiberal left.
And as importantly by the non-wishful observation that said illiberal left has already swallowed the Dem party.
Did you read the Yglesias post? On the basis of that and a few other people connected with that faction I think you are mistaken, that those people are closer to us than the Democrats who called themselves liberals ten or fifteen years ago were, in part because they are reacting against the Progressives in their party.
No, David, I did not read that post, because it is paywalled.
I have read many Yglesias posts.
He is not a center-leftist. I don’t believe he ever was.
I have no per se problem with referring to him as a left-liberal.
I would actually claim he is broadly speaking an old-school progressive in the mold of Bill Maher and Alan Dershowitz in terms of his preferred policies.
Do you have ANY material evidence for this “those people are closer to us than the Democrats who called themselves liberals ten or fifteen years ago were, in part because they are reacting against the Progressives in their party” claim?
Do you have all that much specific evidence for your claim that his policy preferences are closer to classical liberal besides the two obvious ones of wanting more immigration and lower spending on the military?
More importantly, any evidence that they have moved closer to classical liberalism in the last 10-15 years?
I am unaware of even a single example where the center-left or left-liberals have moved further towards classical liberalism in the last 10 years, let alone the far stronger claim that in aggregate they have.
Mitigating strongly against your claim is the reality that they have not in fact denounced their left flank but are working hard to elect leftists across the board.
Yglesias himself in many blog posts is quite open about this. I.e. his arguments are entirely about what he thinks is most helpful for Democrats to be elected in order to have ruling majorities, and towards that end he does often argue *tactically* with hard leftists that they should move towards the center or at least be more tolerant of center-left candidates in purple locales.
Now if we were talking Ezra Klein (the prototypical “Abundance” guy) or Josh Barro (the prototypical center-left guy), I’d still disagree with you. IMO Klein is merely trying to reintroduce the left arguments of 2005 in 2024. so I’d still disagree with you, but I’d concede your argument would at least be somewhat stronger.
But if you have evidence for your extraordinary claim of these folks literally having moved towards more liberal policy positions in reaction to the activist left, I’m all ears.
Wow. Most progressives I know will barely agree that Yglesias is left of center at all. And then the reference to 'old school progressives' like the comedian famous for hating Muslims and one of Trump's personal lawyers? This is very clearly written from a place pretty far to the right of center.
The main reason that progressives are like classical liberals is that they care about freedom for people. And you will laugh at that, but the key is that oppressed people are not free. And oppression comes from family and social origins far more often than it comes from government. So government needs to act, to increase freedom, by limiting oppression.
Please elaborate on this “oppression” and how the government can somehow eliminate it without threatening liberty.
One step they've already taken is saying that yes, you can be raped even if you are married.
Stuff like that.
In other news… https://stateoftheday.substack.com/p/why-are-women-dating-their-rapists?r=b5zww&utm_medium=ios
I'm with this in general. Trump is a less bad choice than any current Democrat I am aware of, and so are MAGA Republicans, whom I think of more as being unconcerned with Trump's actual policies and mostly follow along because he is not a typical politician, whom he scares the piss out of.
Compare that with the woke anti-science anti-reality Democrats. I do not recall a single Democrat in the last 10 or 15 years who exhibited even the slightest resistance to the wokists who run their party now. Trumpists are pathetic in their obeisance to Trump, but that pales in comparison to Democrats' blind obedience to wokism, DEI, Magical Money Theory, applauding political murders (Kirk, the health care CEO, even the attempts on Trump and the Supreme Court justice), economic barbarism (minimum wage laws, occupational licensing, regulation out the wazoo), climate catastrophism, and too many other irrational beliefs (beliefs, mind you, not just policies).
I cannot imagine voting for any Democrat under the current circumstances. They come as close to being institutionally (as in the party, not clinically) insane as I can imagine, and I can't imagine what it would take to change them. Trump at least will be out of legal power in 2½ years, and out of influence soon after (he's 80 years old!), and his successors will fail miserably at keeping his legacy intact, as all second generation heirs do. The Democrats? No end in sight.
I hope Trump will be out of if influence after his term ends, but I am not sure he will be. The city political machines of the past used their control of primaries to stay in power and he has been doing the same thing, so I am not sure he won't remain party boss for another decade or more.
I meant partly that Trump is old and mortal, and whether his body or brain expires first, he has a limited lifespan left.
The other part is that his various crown princes will have to compete to be the new MAGA king, whether Trump designates a favorite or not. Competition requires differentiating themselves from each other, which requires deviations from what Trump did or would do were he still in charge. As with all dynasties, the successors won't be as capable, and will spend too much effort trying to emulate Trump instead of being their own man. Trump supporters will have to choose from the various crown princes, not including Trump, and Trump's influence will wane.
Fetterman might be the best Democrat going, and he is currently being exiled from the party, so I expect you are quite correct.
Yes, he’s made quite an interesting recovery from his illness. The Babylon Bee (or is it Not The Bee?) has been making lots of jokes about recovering from being a Democrat. But whatever he’s going through, he seems like the most independent thinker in the Senate after Rand Paul. The Democrats will probably try to primary him, but he’s still got, I think, 4 years.
The best, even ahead of Rand Paul, was Massie, but AIPAC has now bought his seat for cash and of course the legacy media have made this outrage a non-story.
Oh yes, the legacy media is rabidly pro-Israel these days…
🙄
Enjoy your tariffs and $8 gas...
The current Democratic "mainstream" actually wants to turn the country into what the right has correctly labeled "anarcho-tyranny," meaning that Antifa and similar terrorist groups will not only run wild, raping, pillaging, and murdering, but the police will protect them against any of their victims defending himself. Under those conditions (which already exist in places like Portland and Minneapolis), the best hope for a return to freedom will be either the populist-right rising in civil war, or that another Pinochet carries out a successful coup and then purges the communists.
Wow. You know, maybe don't believe everything you are told about progressives by people who are paid to be hostile to them. Or better yet, ask someone, "Hey, are you in favor of rape, pillage, and murder?"
Because slander is shitty.
Queers for Palestine, celebrating Oct 7.
Gee, the number of leftists who are pro-Hamas (not merely anti-Israel, not merely pro-Palestinian, but explicitly pro-Hamas) in the wake of Oct. 7th would beg to differ with your implicit and explicit assertions.
You have a count? Or just an impression of how many there are from a few getting constantly highlighted in your media feeds?
The second, I'm sure.
Go check the Harvard-Harris polls from fall 2023 and later and you can see for yourself. It is something close to half of young people, far more than half of young leftists.
Just because you yourself choose to remain ignorant of the numbers doesn’t mean that they are not in fact very, very large.
For those who prefer brevity, and to give credit where it is due, the TL/DR version is:
Colin Wright was correct then, and even more correct now.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/elon-musk-tweeted-my-cartoon-woke-progressive-left-wing-media-right-viral-twitter-politics-culture-liberal-center-11651504379
https://x.com/SwipeWright/status/1462114108535312388
Colin Wright is in favor of every kind of caste system and hierarchy imaginable and his entire set of arguments related to redefining sex into a teleological appeal-to-nature construct are hyper-conservative or reactionary.
Thank you for making my point better than I ever could have on my own.
No idea how that self congratulatory aside has substance…
Exactly.
The problem with this is that "abundance democrats" aren't really a thing. They have no power in the Democrat party and even the individual characters who claim this label cave when asked to give a full throated endorsement of the implied policies. An abundance democrat is basically a Republican, minus whatever baggage you (in your head) may attach to that because of Trump.
My own sense is that Trump has been successful in elections because of culture issues (immigration, DEI, gender stuff, somewhat climate). I don't think any of his non-Republican (and non-libertarian) economic policies will have legs when he is gone.
Abundance Democrats absolutely are a thing. They are Democrats in favor of abundance, in the abstract, totally in denial of the obvious fact that all their policies, without exception, raise prices--that is, diminish abundance.
When an abundance Democrat actually embraces pro-market policies, he either leaves or is expelled from the Democratic Party. Are there exceptions? Maybe. Many people are not significant to the Party, so not worth the trouble of expelling; and I should be surprised to see a donor expelled.
(Well, maybe donors are expelled, as time goes on. Democratic candidates advertise not taking money from AIPAC, and other Jewish organizations and people are surely coming up, and other obstacles to the left after them.)
Anyway, if you know of an exception, a truly pro-market Democrat, please let me know.
A quibble... didn't Alfred Kahn get transportation deregulation done under President Carter, not Clinton?
Yes. I fixed it on Substack but can't edit the X or FB or email versions.
So far my son is the only one who has pointed out my other mistake, Linus for Charley Brown.
Yes!
As some evidence that Abundance Democrats are more liberal than the "liberal" Democrats of ten years ago, Kelsey Piper contra affirmative action: https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/can-a-liberal-society-do-affirmative
This is fairly thin evidence.
It doesn’t make clear that the Abundance Liberals actual views have changed.
Or even that that actual “liberals“ of ten years ago were for the affirmative action as practiced (obviously the progressives were).
They may have felt that way all along.
It doesn’t even make clear that they assert that it’s better policy (though I’ve little doubt Piper herself believes that) now, merely that it’s effective communication strategy for winning elections.
Separately, I find it telling that this was about all you could come up with to support the claim.
Of course, perhaps this is somewhat moot, since Piper we’ve both acknowledged is far more libertarian, and likely on net center-left, than almost all the Abundance Liberals (left-liberals), and I have no quarrel with your claim that those actually still on the center-left very plausibly are closer to libertarian that is Trump / the center of MAGA.
“Left liberals, even the abundance faction, may not be classical liberals but they are closer to us and we are closer to them than either of us is to the Maga Republicans on the right or the progressive Democrats on the left.”
But they keep running progressives!
I like to know where the evil is coming from. At least Trump is predictable. I will always vote for a candidate who lowers some taxes over a lunatic that threatens more taxes. But in the final analysis either extreme is bad—pick your poison.
Your "they" is the Democratic party. I am responding to a faction in that party that wants it to stop running progressives.
David,
I will be ready and willing to vote for a real moderate, but I don’t believe it will happen in my lifetime.
And then that faction turns around and endorses Mamdani. Remember Mamdani's main opponent during the election in question was Cuomo, so they can't even claim "stopping Republicans" as a justification.
https://x.com/DropSiteNews/status/1989482560951292302?lang=en
Ezra Klein, one of the leaders of the faction you describe, not only doesn’t want the Democrats party to stop running progressives, he himself voted for Mamdani, who is much further anti-libertarian leftist than even the average “progressive”.
But Yglesias does NOT want the Dem party to stop running progressives across the board.
He only wants them to stop running progressives in purple and red states.
His stance on progressive (though not, to be clear, on hard left socialist) is the mirror image of William F Buckley’s: he wants the most progressive candidate who can win.
And far more “Abundance Liberals” favor Yglesias’ view here than those of Sunstein or Piper.
https://modernpower.substack.com/p/taking-stock-of-abundance-may-2026
“Movement Progressives and Abundance Progressives want similar things, but take divergent approaches.”
On way to think about the term "liberal" is in contrast to the term "conservative." In the 19th century and before, liberals favored liberty, but did so out of values developed during the Enlightenment: reason, freedom, individualism, democracy, rule of law, separation of power and checks and balances, etc. In contrast, conservatives believed (to varying degrees) in strong authoritarian governments and monarchies (and often the divine right of kings -- note that this was the subject of Locke's lesser read FIRST treatise on government).
These 19th century ideas do not fit neatly into modern political ideologies, but they do to some degree.
20th Century Socialism is in some sense liberal, in that it claims to be derived from reason and rational principles. (A more careful theoretical economic analysis and historical evidence shows that it fails on all of these, but that is at least what its proponents argue.) And in some senses it is conservative in that it envisions great restrictions on freedom and individualism.
Modern libertarianism is certainly liberal in the 19th century sense.
The modern center-left has some aspects of 19th century liberalism: It believes in freedom of speech, religion, much economic freedom, rule of law, democracy. However, as David correctly notes, it advocates for a large amount of government power in economic areas and thus less freedom there.
The modern center-right is similar. It believes in freedom of speech, religion, much economic freedom, rule of law, democracy. It advocates for more economic freedom (sometimes) and less personal or social freedom than the center left.
But contrast these two with the far-left and far-right.
The far-left or progressive left favors much greater restrictions on economic freedom and personal freedom. There is a lot of focus on group rights (and thus the focus is less on individualism). There is endless focus on wrongs committed based on race, gender, sexual orientation, etc -- that is collective wrongs, even though the individual victims might be individuals. This looks more like 19th century conservatism than the center left, although the orientation -- group rights of victims and economic redistribution -- is very different than the divine right of kings.
The far-right is authoritarian, and cares very little about the rule of law and democracy. (Trump and his supporters, for example). Tariffs, January 6, bullying foreign states, etc.
Until (say) 2010, both the far left and far right were marginal fringe movements in both parties. So people could have a reasonable discussion about in what sense Democrats or Republicans or Libertarians were liberal or conservative. But with the rise of progressive Democrats and MAGA Republicans, both the center-left and center-right from 2010 are looking pretty liberal compared to the recent authoritarian anti-liberal (in the 19th century sense) newcomers.
Or, to put it another way, the right cares most about increasing freedom for those who already have the most, the left cares about increasing freedom for those who have the least.
Yeah I mean the fundamental political philosophy synthesis of liberal and left ideas runs through the vein of Rawls, Dworkin and further on the left to GA Cohen.
The bizarre idea that freedom can be divorced from the resources necessary to make that freedom real or meaningful has always seemed blinkered at best and willfully dishonest at worst.
"The bizarre idea that freedom can be divorced from the resources necessary to make that freedom real or meaningful..."
Where do said "resources necessary" come from? Most do not simply exist independent of human effort.
Those of us of a classical liberal or libertarian persuasion find it a bizarre idea that "freedom" fundamentally comes from forcibly taking the property of others.
Which is the core of your claim, is it not?
Why do you have a claim to resources created by someone who is now dead? It's the inheritance that screws you up when you try to claim human effort creates the rights to resources.
Plus, if people didn't claim land, hunting and gathering could be done with no one else putting any effort in. But property rights block that.
Your 2nd claim about hunting and gathering is just absurd in the modern world, and you actually know that.
Relatively high inheritance taxes, OTOH,are one of the few left views that I agree with. They can’t be 90%+, because incentives, but I do favor relatively high inheritance taxes.
It's absurd in the modern world because everywhere is owned already. Property rights prevent people from feeding themselves.
American conservatives sought--and seek--to preserve the founding (usually as modified by Lincoln's refounding), which is to say, to preserve what used to be called a liberal project.
American conservatives have never favored monarchy. British Tories were not for any absolute monarchy either. Both of them were more pro-liberty than anything now.
I cannot fathom how anyone who's watching can make the claim "Republicans at the moment support more government—more even than Democrats as of the last time they were in power"
I nearly lost my job, many people were forced out of the military, large number of people were deplatrformed for wrong-speak all under the recent Democrat over-reach around forced vaccination. Long term big-investing Democrat backers Mark Zuckerburg and Marc Andreeson saw how Democrats were controlling their platforms and dropped their Democrat allegiances as they were both informed by the Biden administration that AI was going to be dictated from on-high.
From forcing chicken ranch slaughters to forcing Texas to not enforce border their border policies, to deciding, sans-votes, who could and couldn't run for election and who would be barred to prosecuting people for suggesting and uncovering fraud, the Democrat party, went full Animal Farm "rules for thee, not for me," while Maga has been cutting regulations more than 2 to 1 with each new reg linked to multiple (sometimes scores) of obscolesced regulations.
Who pushed the car companies into climate mandates? Not Maga.
I can understand disagreeing with MAGA. To each his own. But make those disagreements honest ones, not claims that MAGA is more authoritarian that Democrats. The only possible way to make that have any validity is to discount those that Democrats were autoractic against as not mattering because they disagree with you. Democrats were not only big government, but big government disguised via big NGO and AID shell games.
That was quoted from a post made in 2007.
Oh, OK. This original was only sent to me yesterday and I wasn't familiar with the context. Thanks for clarifying. Consider my comments null and void.
Except . . . MAGA didn't exist 2007 (discounting the 1980s Reagen MAGA which I'm sure you're not referring to) so I don't follow you. How can that quote be from 2007?
DF said in the original post that in 2007 he wrote "Since Republicans at the moment support more government—more even than Democrats as of the last time they were in power—it is worth looking for other allies."
Then he went on to add (2026):
"It is even more true now. Left liberals, even the abundance faction, may not be classical liberals but they are closer to us and we are closer to them than either of us is to the Maga Republicans on the right or the progressive Democrats on the left."
I interpret the latter paragraph as saying "it's now even more worth looking for other allies". And that DF thinks left liberals are closer to classical liberals than MAGA Republicans. {I agree broadly re respect for law and tradition - MAGA has little. I agree less so re economic policies and regulation.}
Ambiguity in your meaning when you wrote, "I agree broadly" makes it hard for me to know what you're agreeing with.
From my perspective, the part of his post I agree with is that people are libertarian for different reasons. I want small government so that I can be entreprenuerally successful. I see now hope of accomplishing that with the left's liberals who seem (from my vantage point) to want to control
* Communication (no unapproved discussion)
* Health (my body is the government's choice)
* Families (children belong to the school system's teacher's transgender police)
From my perspective the main thing MAGA is doing that has the left disturbed is treating laws as if they should be applied as written and apply to all.
I get the distinct opinion that there is a massive gaslighting going on that is giving people different news and censoring any take that doesn't put the left in a good light.
What I meant is that I agree, broadly (not on every specific), that the abundance faction of left liberals (*not* progressives) are closer to libertarians in outlook than are MAGA Republicans. Not on specifics - MAGA is more anti-regulation, pro-free-markets. But I perceive MAGA as very much disdainful of law and precedent and tradition re *process*. Quite authoritarian in many ways - it's my way or the highway. The progressives are just as bad (if not worse) in the other direction. But JFK type liberals are better. I see both extremes (MAGA vs progressives) being very pro-censorship, just they want to censor different things. Between the drug wars, the FDA prohibiting sale of anything new, and abortion, both extremes want to control our bodies (again, in different ways). Each extreme wants families to behave in their own approved ways. On specifics I generally agree with MAGA more than with liberals, but liberals (again, *not* progressives) seem more likely to respect people who want to do things differently. Neither side is any good IMHO, but I think in the 21st centry libertarians can likely cooperate more with liberals than with MAGA. (FWIW, "MAGA" in my opinion is way worse than Trump himself.)
“I agree broadly re respect for law and tradition - MAGA has little”
Those are conservative values and even institutional centrist values, sure.
I don’t follow how they are libertarian values. Could you explain?
Separately, while I agree with you 100% that MAGA and Trump have little respect for tradition, I strongly disagree with the assertion - or at least the strong implication - that MAGA and Trump believe less in respect for the law than does today’s left.
I was referring to "classical liberals" not "libertarians". I can't speak for libertarians (well nobody can) but I agree that things like decorum and tone are more classical liberal values than libertarian values. Re who has more respect for law per se (MAGA vs progressives) I'm not sure there's much to choose between. Nor do libertarians have much respect for law per se.
> I cannot fathom how anyone who's watching can make the claim "Republicans at the moment support more government—more even than Democrats as of the last time they were in power"
It makes sense if you take "government" to mean merely the elected government. And think of the permanent bureaucrats, not to mention the NGOs and AID organizations, as an aristocratic class whose "rights" to federal funding and independence the Trump administration is violating.
If I understand you correctly, the "problem" is that Trump is over-reaching by taking taxpayer dollars out of government. OK, that's an ... interesting take. I'm not sure if you're ironically agreeing with my issue or not. Friedman's comment that this was from 2007 I take as a clear rebuttal.
> I'm not sure if you're ironically agreeing with my issue or not.
I am. I'm pointing out the quiet part of their argument that they can't say out loud.
Right you are. Same with Universities who use the fungible government money to foster their agendies. USAID was an incredible scam all around, but just one of many.
Hundreds of thousands of people have lost their jobs, many have been forced out of the military, and the rule of law is in life support. That was all Trump.
Source? 100s of thousands of people doing taxpayer funded NGO work losing their jobs is not a libertarian failure, but a success. Hundreds of thousands of people lowing their racists-quota makeshift in order for the organizations to continue to receive government funding is not a failure, but a success. Hundreds of thousands of Commercial Drivers Licensese operators unable to read road signs, not even speaking the language, losing that license is not a failure, but a success.
I don't know which hundreds of thousands of people you're referring to.
I was in the military back when preparadness was job 1 and I watched in horror the DEI "my 2 mommies would b so proud" commericials having nothing to do with military preparadeness, and learned in horrow of people joining the military for the express purpose of getting taxpayers to pay for their $50,000 sex-reassignment surgeries.
I'm going to have to see and read specifics on your assertions before I'm going to be influenced by sob stories of the poor gender studies majoris and near-suicidal commercial drivers, much less the sensitiivity training in third-world-nation taxpayer funded iniiatives to be upset about it.
As to the rule-of-law on life support, I saw the weaponization against conservatives of the Biden era. Again, you're going to have to give me sources rather than just broad assertions. Who lost their job? What were the circumstances?
I get the fact that foreign-born people want to inherity the lives my grandparents and other ancestors created for their posterity, and want their children's schools covered by taxpayers as well. Who wouldn't? That doesn't make me sympathetic to their cause.
If a libertarian success is hundreds of thousands of people dying as a consequence, as with USAID, I really don't want to see what a libertarian failure looks like. Nuclear war, maybe?
You're moving the goalposts here, and still providing no sources for your claim. You originally said, 100,000 people losing their job (still uncourced) and now are claiming 100,000 people dying from USAID (which, BTW, AID is not aid, it is US Agency for International Development which spent far more on propaganda than on keeping people alive.
Again I'm going to need your source on the 100s of thousands of people dying, as I'll need your souce on 100,000 jobs lost and your souce on rule-of-law on life-support. .
100,000 people die every day from the aging process alone and yet taxpayer funding of overcoming the aging process is nearly nil. I contend that if you want to save lives, that's an easier start.
100,000 unborn children's lives were lost every few years due to taxpayer funderd assisted abortions.I don't know why YOUR perogatives that you aren't funding yourself need to be my perogatives when I already know a better use of funds. Solve aging and you've saved 100,000 lives every day, not just in one year, but in all years going forward.
Source on 100s of thousands of deaths:
https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hundreds-of-thousands-of-deaths/
Source on 300,000+ jobs lost:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_United_States_federal_mass_layoffs?wprov=sfla1
I stand by what I said.
that Harvard headline you cite is almost pure bullshit.
It is based on modeling a 1 year halt to the specific "life-saving" programs.
At most there was an 8 to 15 day pause in the funding of those programs.
Even if the model is perfectly accurate and one assumes that a temporary pause in funding caused irreversible harm, the number of deaths would be a small fraction of what was claimed.
So the first claim is bogus.
https://chatgpt.com/share/6a25d42d-ca70-83eb-9926-4cccfd2acd72
Thanks for the links. I appreciate the follow up. The story appears anecdotal and referenctial. I don't see anything to back it up. And I don't see it countering the 35 million people dying every single year because aging hasn't been solved. Yes it's sad that people in undeveloped countries are dying and we're not keeping them alive. But it's a case of learned helplessness. We've taught people to not solve their own problems and to wait around for us to solve them for us.
The Civil Service layoffs and NGO losses are exactly what I expected, government taxpayer funded jobs.
In both cases these are not counters to the LIBERTARIAN argument that MAGA is less libertarian. Both of your example sets involved forced money (taxes) taken from one group to benefit another.
I understand the short-term human cost, but the core libertarian argument is about the second-order effects of moving money from productivie to unproductive sectors. In your own references, the woman had 9 children. How many children do I have? I have 1. Why? Because I waited to have children until I could afford to have children, as did my wife, so we only got the one.
It's not that I don't care for poor Jane Naboi or any of Rovina Noboi's other children. It's that I'm never misled by the hidden costs of forced redistribution from productive to unproductive sectors.
And naturally, Atul Gwande, who served in the Biden administration for 5 years can be totally trusted to be an honest statistician, as can all the children at the Minnesota "Learing" Center that was recently uncovered. Certainly there's no bias in that reporting.
But nothing I said or didn't say referred to the morality of MAGA, just to the libertarian ethos and nothing in the links you just showed indicate an anti-libertarian ethos.
The problem with liberal arguments is that it's always couched as if there are no hidden costs, and the hidden costs of Rovino Naboi's 9 children is the 9 children I didn't get to have because all the money I could have spent toward my family went to hers.
There was never such a thing as a “libertarian”, just republicans who smoked weed and didn’t go to church.
At this point, anyone who says that freedom is their main ideological center and hasn’t been voting straight ticket dem since at least Obama is full of shit.
Say what? Obama, Hillary, Biden, Harris, and every single Democrat candidate were freedom-loving, more than every single Republican?
You've got TDS, example No. 18476367.
Gay marriage? Free expression? Trans rights? Marijuana? Abortion? Or is it just muh guns for you?
Nope, still got TDS if you think every single Republican is the worst of the bunch.
Huntsman and Gary Johnson got drummed out many years ago, Ron and Rand and Massie are all ultra conservative socially and are credibly bigoted, and ostensible libertarians like Vance turned into sub-Jared Taylor white supremacists the moment they could remove the mask.
So yeah. Absolutely.
AOC. Bernie. Lizzie. Mamdani. You guys own them. You are claiming the Pauls and Massie are worse than avowed Marxists.
So no. Absolutely.
Politically_Illinois appears to be the result of being successfully brainwashed by The Daily Show.
https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/896d899e-328c-4965-8345-563555365cd1_1836x806.webp
Posting 10 year old 4chan posts isn’t an argument.
You’ve fallen for chud derangement syndrome
The argument is in the 4chan post.
I'd ask you to read it, but decades of being brainwashed by your TV appears to have destroyed your capacity for rational thought.
You’re the deranged one, you can’t even acknowledge reality. Yea, anyone still rolling with the label Republican is part of the scum bunch.
Don’t you have a pedophile to vote for?
Like Biden, always pawing children, showering with his daughter?
I can’t imagine what a shrunken brain it must take to see the world as so black and white.
I’m just describing what I see on the news. Nothing Biden has done has ever gotten close to actual rapist trump and his rape of children and adults. You have voted for a rapist too many times for me not to think your kind loves rape
"Trans rights" consists of the "right" to force everybody else to pretend that black is white, two plus two is five, and that a man can become a woman.
Trans people exist sorry that makes you mad. They’ve always existed the whole history of humanity
The problem isn't their existence. The problem is their insistence that the rest of the world recognize their delusions to the extent of men in women's locker rooms, beating up women in women's sports, in violation of both common decency and Title IX.
The problem is that trans women are more likely to be victims of men than cis women are. If you aren't comfortable throwing cis girls into boys locker rooms, then why would you be comfortable doing it with girls who are even more likely to get assaulted?
Deluded people exit. That doesn't mean we should indulge their delusions.
How about the right to do what you want with your own body? You know, that foundational right that libertarians always claim is the foundation of all else?
You can do whatever self-destructive thing you want with your own body. You do not have the right to make others play along with you charade.
Uh huh. And you will, of course, stand up on our side to defend that right when the proposed bills outlawing it come into force?
No, I didn't think so.
Yes absolutely. Did any of them send gunmen into cities to batter them into submission? Did they ever force programs on fox or whatever right wing shock jock off the air like Trump did with Colbert?
“Bang bang. You’re dead liberal”: actual ice agents sent by the GOP
> Did they ever force programs on fox or whatever right wing shock jock off the air like Trump did with Colbert?
You mean like the Biden's regime social media censorship comple?
What, like when he threatened broadcast licenses? Oh wait, Trump. How about those multi billion dollar lawsuits over BS libel claims? Oh yeah, also Trump.
What did Biden do again? Something about emails suggesting the government thought certain stories were fake or harmful to public health? Such coercion. Wow.
> How about those multi billion dollar lawsuits over BS libel claims?
We have libel laws, just because you want the libel to spread doesn't make them go away.
> Something about emails suggesting the government thought certain stories were fake or harmful to public health?
It's still censorship, even if you want the news suppressed.
So suing BBC for $10 billion for an edit that implied something Trump didn't like ISN'T supressing the press, but an email suggesting that a story has the hallmarks of Russian propaganda is?
You are twisted like a pretzel trying to work backwards from your conclusions.
Laughable, you compare being banned for saying the n word to state censorship
My impression is that the abundance folks don’t really have their heart in it. They know that the outcomes are bad, and they know that things need to change. It seems that they also recognize that a far more libertarian legal and regulatory regime is a necessary, and probably sufficient, condition to bring about the abundance that they claim that they want. That is to say, I think that they know that abundance requires a political party that has a fundamentally laissez fairer approach to anything to do with economics, and they also know that the Democratic Party does not view the world that way. Yet they still call themselves Democrats. Given that libertarians only matter to the extent that they can influence the views and preferences of liberals and conservatives, I am not even sure what it means for libertarians to ally with liberals or Democrats. Libertarians have only an immaterial number of votes to offer. Maybe there are some wealthy libertarians who could fund think tanks or magazines or podcasts or influencers working to try to create a fusionist ideal that some members of the Democratic Party could endorse?
There could be an intellectual alliance with each group learning from the other, and it could produce ideas that would spread. Pro-market ideas might spread to different places if packaged by Democrats.
It's interesting that Yglesias brings up the role of the state in public transportation. Whether or not he's correct to take for the granted the utility of governmental intervention there, it's notable that in my experience, a large majority of arguments against libertarianism focus on functions that account for a very small percentage of total government expenditures.
'But who will build the roads?' If all a government did was build roads, that would entail reducing the scope of the government by something like 99.9%.
Defenders of government seem least enthusiastic to defend the enterprises that account for the overwhelming majority of governance. Even when it comes to public transit, we can ask, "if not for government, who would spend $231 billion on not building high speed rail?" (https://reason.org/commentary/as-estimated-cost-for-high-speed-rail-soars-california-lawmakers-move-to-hide-information-from-taxpayers/).
“the moderate left of the current U.S. political spectrum — abandoned that negative liberty in favor of what is sometime called positive liberty, the right to an adequate level of food, education, medicine paid for and provided, if necessary, by someone else.”
It’s the “paid for….by someone else” that makes it anti-liberty!
Who pays for the defense of your property rights?
Same people as pay for food for the starving.
One of these things can only be effectively provided by the government, the other can be least effectively provided by the government.
Ah, so the claim is about efficiency, but you acknowledge that both are things other people are required to do for you?
Government is such an abstraction. Let’s stop for a moment and acknowledge that individuals make up what you and I call the government. I’m prepared to pay for my defense of person and property but I know that a private defense company will do a better job than a “government”. The reason why that is so is simple; if they don’t some other firm will get my business—same as Walmart or Amazon.
> I’m prepared to pay for my defense of person and property but I know that a private defense company will do a better job than a “government”
In your anarchist condition your defense company will evolve into a protection racket, and then a government.
Possibly but I think otherwise.
Hint: think about where governments came from in the first place.
98 percent of whatever you claim as personal wealth was earned and created by past generations, and is by any right the shared inheritance of all since no human could possibly earn the luck of their birth (i e as regards inheritance) nor the accomplishments of the past, nor could even Nozick cleanse the chain of property from its innumerable sins. You are but using and leveraging the common inheritance of knowledge and infrastructure and law and resources.
So whatever amount you are allowed to leverage from the common inheritance of all, and whatever society collectively allows you to keep beyond the tiny leveraging contribution you make individually, is well within the propriety of law and freedom.
More importantly, freedom is meaningless without the resources necessary to effectuate one’s desires. So freedom and inequality are as close to diametrically opposed as any two concepts could be.
Does the Present Generation owe anything to Past Generations including their Good Fortunes of Parentage as well as the Tangled Chain of Property Ownership?
Was President Obama correct?
By Melgar du Poseidon
The short answer is no, but in something of an outline of bullet points is my fullest rebuttal to both your claim and his argument.
The Source of Value is Present Labor
Past infrastructure is useless without current maintenance and innovation.
A computer requires past discoveries, but its current value is created now.
Wealth is not a fixed pool of historical resources to be divided.
Wealth is constantly generated through active, daily human effort.
Voluntary Exchange Honors Past Generations
Past generations chose how to pass down their accomplishments.
They did this through market sales, gifts, and voluntary inheritance.
Forcing a "shared inheritance" violates the wishes of those past creators.
Respecting private property honors the choices of ancestors.
Luck Does Not Justify State Coercion
No one chooses the luck of their birth.
However, life's unfairness does not grant the state the right to steal.
Taking from one to give to another requires institutional violence.
Equalizing luck through force destroys individual liberty and motivation.
The Flaw of Cosmic Rectification
Historical property chains do contain injustices and theft.
However, the solution cannot be total state ownership of everything.
Governments are historically the largest committers of property theft.
Giving the state control over "common inheritance" invites mass corruption.
Moving forward with clear, protected property rights minimizes future injustice.
Leveraged Assets Are Already Paid For
Innovators do leverage existing law, infrastructure, and knowledge.
However, they pay for this usage through taxes, fees, and market prices.
Using public knowledge does not make an inventor indebted to the state.
Knowledge is non-rivalrous; one person using it does not diminish it for others.
Concluding Remarks
President Obama was mistaken when he admonished: “You didn’t build that!”
Entrepreneurs already pay for roads and infrastructure through heavy taxes.
Using a public utility does not give the government ownership of your profit.
Every competitor in a market has access to the exact same roads and schools.
Infrastructure exists for everyone, yet most business startups fail.
The defining variable of success is individual risk, tradeoffs , and execution.
Businesses are built using the help of workers, suppliers, and teachers.
These relationships are voluntary market exchanges, not government programs.
All parties are already compensated through wages and contractual payments.
The state did not create the underlying wealth used to build the infrastructure.
Government only builds things by first taking resources from private producers.
Crediting the state for business success reverses cause and effect.
In short, you need to check your premises because your conclusion is in error—What is mine is private property I earned over a lifetime of work and whatever was given to me was done through voluntary exchanges or mutual trades.
Why would I care about “honoring” past generations versus maximizing effective actual agentic freedom for the largest portion of the living population?
Why would the unearned genetic or familial inheritance of any person be worthy of any deference, regardless of the wishes of the dead?
Why would I conclude that the tiny contribution of current generations would be prioritized, when, in the absence of the accumulated millennia of knowledge and infrastructure, that labor would be worth as much as a subsistence colony in the poorest and most isolated regions of Africa?
Why would the compensation of the past generations justly transfer to the present?
On what basis do competitors possibly have equal access to resources in the absence of the actual money and leverage necessary to take advantage of theoretical opportunities?
On what basis would one possibly conclude the state did not create the underlying wealth to build the infrastructure?
The Veil of Ignorance, Moral Arbitrariness, the Difference Principle, and Fair Equality of Opportunity—Why John Rawls is Wrong
By Melgar du Poseidon
1. On deference to unearned inheritance and the wishes of the dead
The Right of the Living: I do not argue that an heir "deserves" their inheritance based on personal merit. Instead, I look at the right of the property owner while they are alive.
Freedom of Disposal: If a person legitimately owns property, they have the absolute right to gift it, trade it, or destroy it. A will is simply a deferred gift.
Preventing State Encroachment: Violating the wishes of the deceased requires the state to violently seize property from a family. This creates an unacceptably powerful state with the leverage to decide who "deserves" resources.
2. On prioritizing current labor over accumulated historical infrastructure
The Subjective Theory of Value: Value is not determined by the historical cost or effort it took to build something. It is determined by what people currently value and are willing to pay for in the present moment.
Capital Maintenance: Historical infrastructure and knowledge are useless without ongoing, active human labor to maintain, apply, and adapt them. A factory left abandoned for 50 years becomes worthless rubble; current generation labor keeps that capital alive and productive.
The Danger of Collective Debt: Claiming current labor is subordinate to past generations implies that citizens are born with a permanent debt to a collective society.
As a libertarian I reject this because individuals are born free, not as debtors to a state or a historical collective.
3. On why the compensation of past generations justly transfers to the present
The Nature of Title and Contract: Property rights do not expire when a person dies. If a past generation earned compensation, that compensation takes the form of private property. The owner has the contractual right to choose their successor.
Family as an Economic Unit: Parents work and save precisely to provide a better life and a safety net for their children. Stripping away the ability to pass wealth to the next generation destroys the primary incentive for long-term capital accumulation, investment, and multi-generational planning.
4. On equal access to resources without money or leverage
Negative vs. Positive Rights: Libertarians distinguish between negative rights (the freedom from interference) and positive rights (the right to be provided with a good or service).
Equal Protection, Not Equal Outcomes: The market promises equal rules, not equal starting points. "Equal access" means nobody is legally barred by the state from competing, buying property, or starting a business.
Leverage via Voluntary Cooperation: A person without capital can still compete by selling their labor, developing specialized skills, or pooling resources with others through voluntary partnerships and credit markets. Forcing "equal outcomes" requires continuous, authoritarian redistribution of wealth.
5. On the basis that the state did not create the underlying wealth for infrastructure
The State is a Consumer, Not a Producer: The state does not naturally possess wealth of its own. Every dollar the state spends on roads, schools, or infrastructure must first be extracted from the private economy via taxation, inflation, or debt.
Opportunity Cost (The Broken Window Fallacy): While state-built infrastructure is highly visible, the wealth that would have been created if that money had stayed in the private sector remains invisible.
Private Innovation Drives the State: The knowledge, machinery, and materials used to build public infrastructure are almost always developed by private individuals and private enterprises. The state merely directs stolen or borrowed capital toward projects, often with massive inefficiencies compared to market-driven solutions.
Conclusion
The fundamental flaw of the Rawlsian vision is that it separates wealth from the human choices that create it. By reducing families to 'moral arbitrariness' and wealth to a 'collective pool,' Rawls constructs a system that requires permanent state coercion. A free society must reject this. We must celebrate the voluntary transfers, private innovations, and individual rights that actually build a prosperous world.
Nobody is born free from history, nor do you ever once grapple with how totally meaningless your life of freedom is for those who aren’t born into families or backgrounds that allow for greater wealth and access to opportunity, on a personal or regional or national scale, and just asserting it is nonsense.
I’m truly sorry you believe that is so. I, on the other hand, do not agree with your view of human history.
“It may not have occurred to him that if the best form of government is very bad that is a reason not to give government the power to do things even if the alternatives are imperfect, hence that libertarian opposition to government power over the economy”.
It may not have occurred to him that the United States had the best form of government until rent seeking broke it along with presidents like Lincoln, Wilson and FDR—turning representatives government that placed the individual in charge of his own life into a democracy.
Didn’t trucking get deregulated in 1980, at the end of the Carter administration? Was Clinton even governor of Arkansas yet at that time?
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I know that David has tried to move on from his claim that Abundance Liberals are closer to libertarians/classical liberals than Trump/MAGA, rather than addressing that claim head on.
I just don’t see how anyone reading this “interview” / discussion that includes the two authors of the book could possibly continue to believe that:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/28/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-thompson-dunkelman.html
It seems to me that DF, just like Arnold Kling in his post yesterday, is ignoring both the magnitude and the first derivative of the movement away from libertarianism on the left, and ignoring the magnitude of closeness to libertarianism on the right, and instead is choosing entirely to focus on the first derivative of movement away from libertarianism on the right (which no doubt is true) and the second derivative of a small move back towards libertarianism by a small group on the left.
In other words, DF and AK are both exhibiting wishful thinking buying in to MSM vibes about the Abundance movement and about “icky” MAGA, while ignoring the actual policy and actual support reality of the groups in question.
Coming from two minds I greatly respect, I find this bigly Sad.