Most of my voting life I voted for the Libertarian Party when they advocated classical liberal/libertarian policies. Now those who care about and prioritize liberty and a free society—however they label themselves—should vote Democratic unless the candidate is a Democratic Socialist.

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Remembering the MAGA assaults on a free society

There’s been so much criminality and misdeeds in the Trump administration that it’s exhausting to cover it all, but keeping “the land of the free and the home of the brave” means remembering the essentials. I provide links when the points I make are not common knowledge and/or might be controversial.

Violating the norm of peaceful transfer of political power

January 6: Trump is the only presidential candidate in the US who refused to concede that he lost. He told a crowd to “fight like hell,” and the mob then stormed the Capitol to try to overturn the results. The House impeached him for “incitement of insurrection,” and 57 senators, including seven Republicans, voted to convict—short of the two-thirds required. After his campaign of lies and deception and pressuring election officials to falsify the results failed to overturn the election, he later pardoned all the perpetrators of the violence.

Violating the rule of law, shredding due process, torture

ICE: masked secret police who kidnap people and send them to hellholes in El Salvador, where they were subject to constant beatings, sexual abuse, and torture; to the Central African Republic, in the midst of a brutal civil war with severe human rights abuses; to Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz,” where large numbers of detainees were held in cages the size of phone booths; and to Fort Bliss, Texas, where guards grabbed detainees’ testicles while beating them. There’ve been zero consequences for this; indeed, Trump says they are “immune.”

Not only were the deportations done without any notification to families or lawyers, but ICE has disappeared from databases those they seized so lawyers and families can’t find them.

ICE and CBP have rammed people in their cars, dragged the occupants out, and rammed into houses without warrants. They have murdered, wounded, and assaulted protestors and ICE monitors—Alex Pretti and Renee Good, during the ICE occupation of Minneapolis, being the most publicized—but there have been many others.

There is now “expedited removal” for anyone undocumented, which means no hearing before a judge. (And this is even though immigration judges are—wrongly—a part of, and not independent of, the executive branch.) Indeed, Trump fired any immigration judge who disagreed with him or whom he perceived as not being deportation-friendly enough, and replaced the Board of Immigration Appeals, which has denied appeals for almost all deportation orders.

The administration removed TPS (temporary protected status) for immigrants fleeing violence and is deporting them to the very countries the State Department has declared unsafe—e.g., Haiti.

ICE apprehended immigrant parents after they dropped their kids off at school (see here, here, and here), as well as apprehending children and toddlers and using them as bait (the Liam Conejo Ramos incident).

Dehumanizing rhetoric, blatantly racist policies

Gross violations of due process and the rule of law described above almost always require dehumanization and racism, and that’s what occurred.

Trump calls immigrants “vermin” and “animals.” Kristi Noem, former head of Homeland Security, called Alex Pretti and Renee Good “domestic terrorists.” During his debate with Harris, Trump said that Haitians eat dogs and cats. Trump says Rep. Omar (D-MN) is “garbage” and that “her friends are garbage.”

Immigration policies target people with brown skin (sanctioned by the Supreme Court in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo), white nationalist rhetoric is used to recruit for ICE (see here and here), and virtually the only people admitted as refugees this year have been white South Africans.

Violating the ban on using the military for policing

Trump sent Marines to LA, and National Guard troops to Chicago and DC. This violates a basic norm since the Founding and violates Posse Comitatus, a statute banning the military from policing.

Assaults on free speech and free assembly

Trump and FCC chairman Carr threatened talk shows and networks for dissenting political opinions.

As mentioned, ICE murdered, assaulted, and wounded protestors and ICE monitors.

The administration targeted people for their political views and for writing op-eds. Rochester resident David Streever sent a critical email to the director of ICE, and five months later, federal officers tracked his movements and staked out his New York City hotel as he returned from an overseas trip. Tufts University doctoral candidate Rümeysa Öztürk co-authored a student newspaper op-ed criticizing university management regarding Gaza, and then plainclothes ICE agents arrested her without criminal charges and transferred her to multiple detention facilities across three states. Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) and other Democratic legislators made a video urging the military not to follow unlawful orders; the Trump administration attempted to indict them before a grand jury, though the grand jury declined.

The administration has delegitimized the opposition. Trump says Democrats are “Communists,” and Kristi Noem said the Marines were sent to LA to “liberate” CA from socialist leaders. Senator Alex Padilla (D-CA) was tackled to the ground and handcuffed for asking questions about ICE during a press conference with Kristi Noem. Representative Omar’s home was recently subject to a search warrant by Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the investigative arm of ICE. A week later Trump said she should be arrested and sent back to Somalia. Rep. Omar is a citizen and has lived here since she was a child. Members of Congress are rarely subject to a federal search other than for bribery, and it is unprecedented for this to occur right before an election.

And that is not all…

To spare the reader (and me!), I am not even going to cover in any detail the various other sordid crimes, abuses, and cruelties, such as the administration’s murder of suspected drug smugglers on the high seas, the unconstitutional tariffs, cuts and increases in various budgets not authorized by Congress, the astonishing level of graft, corruption, and cronyism, and the tin-pot dictator tactics of putting Trump’s name on currency, passports, a prescription drug website, and banners on various federal buildings, and his attempt to rename the Kennedy Center.

What Democrats can do

First, stop it. Second, remedy it.

Cessation

The only way to stop this is to vote and elect Democrats so they can take Congress this year and the presidency in 2028. The Republican Party has become MAGA-ized, with a few honorable exceptions on a few issues (e.g., Rand Paul on tariffs). In a democracy, elections are the basic and blunt feedback mechanism. The Republican Party right now is going to sink or swim with Trump—let them sink, face electoral disgrace, and get the message, loud and clear. This does not mean Democrats are sufficient to get us back towards the essentials of a free, democratic system—far from it—but they are necessary.

Justice and accountability

A basic maxim of jurisprudence, going back to Roman times, is ubi jus, ibi remedium, which means “no right without a remedy,” and this idea persisted through Anglo-American jurisprudence. But there have been no remedies, nothing for the massive rights violations, brutality, and injustice committed by ICE, CBP, and the Trump administration. And unfortunately, as things stand now, courts will not provide remedies for these injustices. The Supreme Court has vitiated, if not destroyed, remedies in criminal law by the presidential immunity decision in Trump v. United States, and before that, in Ziglar v. Abbasi (2017) and Egbert v. Boule (2022), it made judicially enacted civil remedies for constitutional rights violations at the federal level virtually impossible. However, the Supreme Court also said in Ziglar v. Abbasi that Congress can create civil statutory remedies. That will only come about if the Democrats control Congress and the presidency—without a Democratic president, a bill creating remedies will be vetoed. (I owe the point about remedies to Radley Balko.) A promising start for these remedies is the Accountability for Federal Law Enforcement Act, introduced by Senator Padilla, which gives individuals a right to sue regardless of citizenship status, and establishes that a federal agency is liable for an officer’s constitutional or statutory violations committed under color of law, regardless of agency policy or individual officer immunity.

Why a massive blue turnout is necessary

We know from Trump’s past actions after he lost in 2020, and from his recent attempts to stop mail-in voting (which, fortunately, were stopped by the Supreme Court), that he is willing to attempt to interfere with elections that he believes do not or will not support him or the Republican Party. He has already said that he does not rule out sending ICE to polling places and declaring a state of emergency before the election. He asked his supporters at the Republican midterm convention to “cheat like hell.” Most recently, he is attempting federal interference with California’s and Alaska’s voting. So it is reasonable to assume that some electoral interference or unconstitutional means will be attempted or used, which means some percentage of the voting may be tampered with. The larger the Blue Wave, as it is sometimes called, the more this interference will be mitigated. Of course, Trump may be bluffing. But given his past and present behavior, betting on bluffing is a bad bet, and so the larger the blue turnout, the better. (I owe this point to Tom Palmer.)

Objections

The Democrats are and have been bad too

Of course, but on the essentials for liberty and a free society, not anywhere near as bad.

• No Democrat has ever done or supported anything like January 6.

• No Democratic administration has used ICE and CBP in the brutally authoritarian way they have been used under Trump, substituting terror tactics for the rule of law. The Obama administration did deport more people than Trump did in his first term—though if we add “self-deportations,” to use that terrible phrase, Trump’s second term probably comes out worse—but it’s not the sheer numbers but the level of brutality and assault on human dignity that is at issue.

• No Democratic administration has brazenly violated the basics of due process, sending people to foreign and domestic hellholes the way this administration has, or used the military in policing.

• And while the Democrats certainly have been bad on free speech at several junctures—most recently the Biden administration pressuring Facebook to toe its line on Covid vaccines and the cause of the pandemic—nothing like Trump’s vendetta or threatened vendetta against the networks, political opponents, and the like has occurred.

No doubt there are risks to having a Democratic Congress and president: e.g., pressures to pack the Supreme Court and end the filibuster. But these are the lesser risks, because with a Republican Congress, or a Democratic Congress and Republican president, the horrific policies of the last two years are quite likely to continue largely unabated and without any chance of remedies, whereas, judging from opinion polls, bad Democratic ideas like court packing are not popular.

It might be argued that even if the Democrats have not been as bad as the Republicans on the constitutional essentials, they are worse on economic freedom. However, in light of Trump’s policy of obtaining partial federal ownership of many companies, that is no longer true, and even if it were true, a modest increase in economic freedom is hardly compensation for January 6, violations of due process and the rule of law, torture, and assaults on free speech.

Why not support the Libertarian Party instead?

The LP is irrelevant as a political force, not surprisingly in a country like the US that has strong incentives for only two parties in a first-past-the-post electoral system. In a normal election, and even in a semi-normal political time, it would be OK to vote for the LP, if doing so matched one’s convictions or principles. But this is not a normal election or time. Given the need for a strong blue turnout, and the presumption that some Democratic votes will be tossed out by Trumpian misdeeds, it is presumptively wrong to vote for the LP and dilute a potential blue wave.

My vote doesn’t count, so why should I vote?

Yes, of course, one person’s vote almost always doesn’t matter, but it’s not what you individually do, it’s what we, lovers of liberty, collectively do. If you love liberty, in a moment of crisis like this you are obligated to do something to promote liberty. While there are other, and in other contexts more effective, ways to promote liberty and a free society—e.g., going to demonstrations, attending meetings of those organizing against these horrors, persuading friends, writing or posting about it, recording ICE’s brutality and cruelty, donating to immigrant support groups—right now the best way is to be part of the blue wave. Because without that wave, the other methods will not get the MAGA Republicans out of power.

It may be true that my argument does not apply in solid-red states where even a large increase in blue voters will not change the outcome. But even there, there is a point to participating in an increase, to make it clear the blue increase is nationwide.

What to do about the Democratic Socialists of America?

My view is that the default this November and in 2028 is to vote Democratic. That default does not apply when the Democratic candidate is terrible, and that would be true for the DSA, who are truly awful. The claim that they support democracy is belied by their platform and their organization. The platform gives support to brutal dictatorships in Iran, Venezuela, and even North Korea (!!)—the worst totalitarian country in the world. They want to abolish the Constitution and much of the market economy. Hasan Piker (also known as Hasan Abi), an open admirer of Mao Zedong, the worst mass murderer in history, has collaborated and worked with the DSA. However, few Democrats running for office are DSA supporters or members. And even the most prominent DSA politician, Zohran Mamdani, has not governed as a socialist or communist (which is not to say some of his policies—e.g., rent control—are not quite bad).

You should not vote for any DSA candidate or any communist or communist sympathizer on the ballot. In that case, voting for the LP or abstaining is probably the better option. But almost all Democrats on the ballot are not DSA types.

Conclusion

So go ahead and vote blue, even if you must hold your nose to do so. Trump has several times compared himself to a king (see here and here) and has acted kingly when he could get away with it and/or Congress and the Supreme Court acquiesced. Electing a Democratic Congress raises more obstacles in his path, and passing civil remedies for his trampling of the Constitution and the basics of a free society puts him and his chief accomplices on notice that they may very well pay a price for their brutality and rights violations. And if the Republicans lose the presidency as well in 2028, that price should hopefully be in effect.

The clip as it circulated on X, posted October 26 by The PFBC Media (the caption is theirs). The full video of the talk is on the Property and Freedom Society’s YouTube channel.

Explaining why Europeans are wrong to compare Israel’s war in Gaza to the Holocaust, Hoppe told his audience:

To compare what happens to Gaza and then, the so-called Holocaust, as far as the Holocaust is concerned, if you deny the teeniest detail in the official narrative of the Holocaust in Germany, you will be jailed. Despite the fact that nobody I’ve ever met, even among those people who are called Holocaust deniers, has ever denied that cruel, evil, ugly things happened during that period. But if you study these things a little bit more closely—again I learned that all from Rothbard too—there are huge holes in the story. There are lots of lies mixed into certain things that are undoubtedly true. There were never forensic investigations done in these places.

In other words, Hoppe objects to comparing Gaza to the Holocaust not because he thinks it overstates what is happening in Gaza but because he thinks it overstates the Holocaust. The cruelty in Gaza is documented on video, he says, whereas the evidence for the Holocaust “had large holes.”

(The passage above is transcribed from the full video of the talk; other quotations from the talk are from the edited transcript his society published alongside the recording.)

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Much of the online commentary on the clip has gone off in unhelpful directions. So let me be clear about what’s actually objectionable about what Hoppe says here. It isn’t that he criticizes Israel’s conduct in Gaza. Many others, including serious scholars of genocide, have done the same, and criticizing the Israeli government is not antisemitism.

Nor is the problem (merely) his use of “so-called” to describe the Holocaust. Hoppe uses the phrase constantly, seemingly as a verbal tic. Elsewhere in the same talk he refers to “the so-called German guilt” and “the so-called Nuremberg trial.”

The real problem is the content of what he says. Hoppe grants, purely in the abstract, that “cruel, evil, ugly things happened,” while insisting that the specifics are riddled with “holes” and “lies” and claiming there were “never forensic investigations done in these places.” And the passage comes in the section of the talk he introduces as his “final and most controversial insight,” which opens with the claim that among those who “run the American government,” the group “of over proportional influence” is “the Jewish lobby,” and that “if you look at academia, all top positions are occupied by Jewish people.” All of this is the familiar rhetoric of Holocaust denial and distortion, very nearly line for line.

The forensic claim in particular is a familiar and demonstrably false trope. The forensic evidence exists, and is well-documented. In 1945 Polish investigators sent metal components from the Auschwitz gas chambers, along with samples of victims’ hair, to the Institute of Forensic Research in Kraków, where chemical tests detected cyanide compounds. The same institute tested the site again in the early 1990s in response to the claims of Holocaust deniers, again with positive results. But the historical record doesn’t rest on forensics alone. It rests also on the Nazis’ own documents, on the testimony of perpetrators like the commandant of Auschwitz, and on the testimony of the people who survived. The bottom line is that there is simply no credible historical reason to doubt that what happened was not merely a few “cruel, evil, ugly things” but rather a systematic genocide in which some six million Jews, along with millions of others, were murdered by the Nazi state.

If you are hearing about Hoppe for the first time, the natural question is whether this is a lapse, an old man saying ugly things at the tail end of an otherwise serious career. My aim in this essay is to show you that it is not. Hoppe’s peculiar brand of libertarianism has always come packaged with a variety of noxious commitments about culture, race, and hierarchy that have no essential connection to libertarianism as such. In what follows, I will explain who Hoppe is, what he’s become famous for, and why the argument that made him famous can’t support the politics he has built on it.

The short version

• Hoppe is one of the most visible figures on the reactionary fringe of libertarianism, and the source of the “physical removal” slogan beloved by a certain kind of very-online young libertarian.

• His reputation as a serious thinker rests on “argumentation ethics,” which claims to demonstrate the soundness of anarcho-capitalism on purely a priori grounds. The demonstration is simple and memorable, but roundly rejected by the vast majority of philosophers, even those quite sympathetic to libertarianism.

• Hoppe’s politics blend libertarianism with what he calls a conservatism “of the most uncompromising kind.” He believes that liberty requires cultural homogeneity and that the inequality of cultures is “ineradicable,” and he has appealed to race science to explain why.

• He has written that communists and advocates of democracy must be “physically removed,” “if need be by violence,” and he has spent two decades running a forum where libertarians could hear from white nationalists and race scientists.

• His September 2026 talk in Bodrum, which casts doubt on the Holocaust and attributes outsized power to “the Jewish lobby,” is largely continuous with decades of writing and public lectures endorsing hierarchy and exclusion, race science, and provocative doubts about established, conventional wisdom.

Who he is

Hoppe was born in West Germany in 1949 and earned his doctorate in Frankfurt under Jürgen Habermas, the great theorist of democratic deliberation. In 1986 he joined Murray Rothbard at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and over the following decades he became Rothbard’s leading intellectual heir and a fixture at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. His best-known book, Democracy: The God That Failed (2001), argues that monarchy is preferable to democracy (though also that both are inferior to anarchism) and that a genuinely libertarian order would be a patchwork of private covenant communities, each free to exclude whomever it likes.

Among some young libertarians, especially online and in radical anarcho-capitalist circles, Hoppe is venerated. He is “based.” His fans trade memes about “free helicopter rides,” a nod to the Pinochet regime’s practice of throwing political prisoners from aircraft, as a method of “physical removal.” The memes are pitched in the half-joking register that has come to dominate a certain corner of the internet, where irony makes it hard to say, and easy to deny, where the joke ends and the hatred begins.

Outside the Rothbardian and Austrian circles where he made his reputation, though, Hoppe’s name is largely unknown. Most mainstream political philosophers have never heard of him, and those who have rarely engage with his work. His admirers say that’s because the academy is a left-wing monoculture afraid of him. But there’s a better, simpler explanation. Hoppe’s central philosophical arguments just aren’t very good. In particular, “argumentation ethics” doesn’t come close to justifying libertarian rights. And even if it did, it wouldn’t do anything to justify the politics of exclusion he attaches to them.

Argumentation ethics

Hoppe’s reputation as a philosopher rests above all on a single argument, which he calls argumentation ethics. What he claims for it is extraordinary. Argumentation ethics is supposed to provide a proof of the libertarian theory of property rights with the certainty of a geometric theorem. There’s no appeal to intuitions, no debate about consequences, and no balancing of competing moral claims. Just pure apodictic certainty. The proof runs roughly like this. Argument, says Hoppe, is an attempt to settle disagreements by persuasion rather than force. In order to engage in argument, each party must recognize the other’s exclusive control over his own body. You can’t try to persuade someone while treating his body as yours to control by force. To argue against self-ownership is therefore to engage in a kind of “performative contradiction,” much as you would by saying aloud that you cannot speak. And since self-ownership is the foundation of the whole libertarian theory of property, anyone who denies libertarianism refutes himself the moment he opens his mouth.

This would be a remarkable argument, if it actually worked! Wouldn’t it be amazing if even the fiercest critics of libertarianism were tacitly presupposing libertarianism, every time they open their mouths? Wouldn’t it be great if you could prove libertarianism to be true through sheer logic, without having to bother to inquire about the messy business of what consequences anarchism or a mixed economy actually produce in the real world?

Unfortunately for Hoppe, few scholars have been persuaded by his “proof.” Even among libertarians, who are more predisposed than most to agree with his conclusions, most respondents have concluded that argumentation ethics falls flat. The most rigorous statement of the basic problem comes from Danny Frederick, writing in Reason Papers in 2013. Imagine, Frederick suggests, a feudal assembly in which (1) serfs are allowed to speak and everyone, serfs included, recognizes their right to be heard, while (2) everyone also believes that the serfs’ bodies belong to their lord. Nothing about this situation is incoherent. My arguing with you requires, at most, that I treat you as free to take part in the argument. It does not require me to grant that you hold an enforceable right against the entire world to control your body, which is precisely the thing that libertarian self-ownership actually demands. There’s nothing logically inconsistent in my holding that you have the right to speak, but not the right to sell your labor, or your kidney. In the vocabulary of the legal theorist Wesley Hohfeld, which Frederick borrows, arguing requires at most that we treat each other as having a liberty to speak, while self-ownership is a bundle of claim rights. Frederick concluded that the failure of Hoppe’s arguments “seems comprehensive.”

Frederick is far from alone. Robert Murphy and Gene Callahan likewise reject Hoppe’s argument, noting that using your body to argue no more proves you own your body than standing on a patch of ground while arguing proves you own the ground. Roderick Long and Marian Eabrasu have found other holes. And even Hoppe’s sympathizers concede that the basic argument doesn’t work. A 2023 defense of the argument begins by admitting that “no one has managed to cross the gap between use and ownership,” before going on to propose yet another patch to the leaky vessel.

But put those objections to the side for the moment, and suppose that the argument did work. What would it get us? At most, argumentation ethics gets us a strong right of self-ownership and the libertarian theory of property built on it. Those rights would allow owners to exclude people from their property for any reason, good or bad. But none of that says anything about who owners should exclude. And it certainly doesn’t make the exclusion of certain categories of people the point of property. Nothing in libertarianism tells you that democrats are dangerous neighbors, that homosexuality threatens civilization, or that some cultures are inferior to others. You can be a libertarian and believe in property rights and nevertheless (or because of those beliefs) hold that a free society is a pluralistic one, in which people very unlike each other can live side by side. If Hoppe ends up somewhere else, it isn’t argumentation ethics, or the libertarian theory of property it’s supposed to yield, that gets him there.

Hierarchy, exclusion, and race

In Democracy: The God That Failed, Hoppe writes that “there can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society.” The same goes, he continues, for “the advocates of alternative, non-family and kin-centered lifestyles such as, for instance, individual hedonism, parasitism, nature–environment worship, homosexuality, or communism,” who “will have to be physically removed from society, too, if one is to maintain a libertarian order.”

Hoppe’s defenders like to claim that these passages are taken out of context. After all, Hoppe is not calling for a state to round up gays and Democrats. He is describing a stateless world of private covenant communities, whose members agree to their rules in advance. Most libertarians accept that a voluntary community can set restrictive terms of membership and so, they argue, Hoppe is just explaining a basic libertarian commitment to free association. Nothing to see here.

The trouble is that Hoppe doesn’t stop at describing what such communities may do. He tells us what they should do, and his point isn’t confined to covenants. In the same chapter he urges libertarians to “reassert and exercise” their “right to exclusion in everyday life,” and to “distinguish themselves from others by practicing (as well as advocating) the most extreme form of intolerance and discrimination against egalitarians, democrats, socialists, communists, multiculturalists, environmentalists,” and others. That is a positive program of social exclusion, not a mere theory about what property permits in the abstract.

Hoppe’s program rests on premises that have nothing to do with argumentation ethics, and Hoppe laid several of them out in a 2017 speech to his society titled “Libertarianism and the Alt-Right.”

The first is that the principle of non-aggression isn’t sufficient to maintain a libertarian social order. A neighbor who aggresses against no one can still be a “bad” neighbor, Hoppe says, and since “you may not use violence against him,” the community must make him “a social outcast, so as to exert enough pressure on him to sell his property and leave.” But mere ostracism won’t always be enough. Neighbors “who openly advocate communism, socialism, syndicalism or democracy in any shape or form” must “not only be shunned, but they must, to use a by now somewhat famous Hoppe-meme, be ‘physically removed,’ if need be by violence.” Over the course of a few paragraphs, Hoppe has moved from the relatively innocent assumption that we can make, and act upon, moral judgments that go beyond the thin commitment to non-aggression, to the extraordinary and dangerous conflation of speech with aggression. Advocating democracy, he says, poses “an open threat to all private property and property owners.” But this is sophistry, of an especially dangerous variety. Arguing against private property is no more an attack on property owners than arguing for higher taxes is theft. Calling it a “threat” is a disturbingly Orwellian move, one that licenses violence against people who have done nothing more than express a dissenting political belief.

The second premise is that liberty requires homogeneity. “The peaceful cohabitation of neighbors,” he says, “requires also a commonality of culture: of language, religion, custom and convention,” and “multi-culturalism, cultural heterogeneity, cannot exist in one and the same place and territory” without ending in “the destruction of anything resembling a libertarian social order.”

And the third is hierarchy. Libertarians, he says, “must above all be realistic and recognize from the outset, as the Alt-Right does, the inequality not just of individuals but also of different cultures as an ineradicable datum of the human existence.” It’s clear enough what this means in practice. Immigrants should be screened for “cultural affinity,” “with the empirically predictable result of mostly, but by no means exclusively, western-white immigrant-candidates.” The “main addressees” of a populist libertarian message “must be indeed” the “dispossessed and disenfranchised native whites.” Police should crack down on street crime, and if most offenders “are young Black or Latino males,” then “so be it and such human specimen then should be the ones that most prominently get their noses bloodied.” In response to what he describes as violence and vandalism by antifascist protesters, he calls for “the police to be unleashed and this mob be beaten into submission.”

In fairness, Hoppe does warn against going all the way to white identity politics. It would be “a serious strategic error,” he says, “to make ‘whiteness’ the exclusive criterion on which to base one’s strategic decisions.” But this is merely a strategic objection. And the reasoning behind it is worse than the position it qualifies. Whiteness can’t be the dividing line, Hoppe explains, because it is “above all white men” who make up the ruling elite responsible for the present order. The groups he calls protected minorities (women, Blacks, Latinos, homosexuals, immigrants) benefit from that order, but “did not and do not possess the intellectual prowess that would have made this outcome possible.” In other words, his caveat about race rests on a hierarchy of its own, with white men at the top. The minorities can’t be the real enemy, because they aren’t capable enough to be.

None of these premises follows from libertarian principles. They are the familiar commitments of the nationalist right, attached to a libertarian theory of property and presented as though they were its natural fulfillment.

The Property and Freedom Society

Hoppe’s most recent comments about the Holocaust were delivered under the auspices of the Property and Freedom Society, an organization founded by Hoppe in 2006 as an alternative to the Mont Pèlerin Society. One of Hoppe’s complaints about Mont Pèlerin, according to the historian Quinn Slobodian in Hayek’s Bastards, was that it allowed “no discussion…of any sensitive race issue.” The PFS would be different.

Take the 2010 meeting of the Society. After Hoppe’s welcoming remarks, the first talk was by the neo-Nazi Richard Spencer on “The ‘Alternative Right’ in America,” a movement Spencer had helped name two years before. Later that day Richard Lynn, the self-described “scientific racist,” spoke about “The Global Bell Curve,” after which Hoppe, Spencer, Lynn, and the others took questions together. At that meeting, according to Slobodian, Hoppe offered up his own contribution to racial anthropology, according to which equatorial peoples, who could live on “insects,” faced few challenges, while northern peoples were forged by hunting “big game.” In his 2017 speech Hoppe listed, with evident pride, the alt-right figures who had “appeared here at our meetings in the course of the years”: Paul Gottfried, Peter Brimelow, Richard Lynn, Jared Taylor, John Derbyshire, Steve Sailer, and Richard Spencer.

Viewed against this backdrop, Hoppe’s recent talk in Bodrum is simply the natural continuation of his intellectual trajectory. A political ideology organized around the idea of keeping the wrong people out eventually needs an account of who the wrong people are and why they hold so much power. Hoppe’s appeal to “the Jewish lobby” and the political and intellectual dominance of Jews is an old, familiar story. There is an irony here that many of Hoppe’s supporters seem to have missed. To many of them, the racism, the antisemitism, and the doubts about the Holocaust are signs of intellectual courage, a willingness to challenge conventional thinking. To everyone else, they look like the most conventional elements of a very old package. The only new thing about them is in some ways the most implausible one: the claim that they follow from the logic of liberty.

Libertarianism: open and closed

I have argued before that the boundaries of the libertarian tradition are wider and blurrier than libertarians like to pretend, and that it’s largely a waste of energy to fight about who is and who isn’t a “real” libertarian. I still think this is right. Like it or not, Hoppe is a libertarian, in the only sense the word reliably carries. He stands in a recognizable line of descent from Rothbard and his predecessors, and reasons in a recognizably libertarian idiom, drawing on and offering his own interpretations of the core concepts of that tradition. But nothing much of interest follows from this fact. Precisely because the libertarian tradition is so open to interpretation, being a libertarian is compatible with both good philosophical reasoning and bad, with political commitments that are admirable and with ones that are vile. Libertarians, just like anybody else, need to be judged not on the basis of a shared ideological label but on the basis of what they actually say and do.

So, if you are a young libertarian who has found something thrilling in Hoppe, here is what I’d ask you to consider. What is it that initially attracted you to the libertarian ideal? Was it the idea of self-ownership? The principle of non-aggression? Was it a suspicion of concentrated power? Whatever it was, I want you to consider how that commitment fits with the Hoppean ideas of cultural homogeneity, the embrace of hierarchy, the police “unleashed,” and the neighbors removed “if need be by violence.” Are these complementary parts of the same coherent worldview? Or are they fundamentally different ideas, drawn from distinct and possibly incompatible traditions?

Every libertarian has to answer, implicitly or explicitly, the question of what liberty is for. Hoppe provides one answer. For Hoppe, the purpose and value of liberty is to make space for small, homogeneous communities bound together by kin and custom, governed by natural elites, and organized around keeping out anyone who doesn’t fit. The alternative vision, the one that I embrace, is that of the open society. It is a vision of a world of strangers who share no religion or ancestry, and who work together despite these differences on terms of voluntary, mutually beneficial exchange. This second vision, I would argue, is the one the great thinkers of the classical liberal tradition actually defended. Adam Smith marveled that the humblest coat was the joint work of thousands of people who would never meet. Ludwig von Mises, a Jew who left Vienna in 1934 and fled Europe for the United States in 1940, built his social philosophy around the division of labor as the engine of peaceful cooperation across every boundary of nation and creed. Karl Popper, though not a libertarian himself, shared the libertarian skepticism of closed, exclusive systems and gave the positive vision its name. Libertarianism at its best belongs on the side of openness, tolerance, and peace.

In response, Ilya Somin wrote a thoughtful critique for the Volokh Conspiracy, arguing that democracy’s value is merely instrumental and contingent, and that libertarians should focus on their comparative advantage in critiquing democracy.

Ilya was generous enough to publish my response on VC, and to allow me to republish it here. You can find it below. And, if that’s still not enough for you, you can read Ilya’s rejoinder to my response to his critique here!

My recent Liberalism.org essay, “Democracy Belongs on the List,” made the case that classical liberals should count democracy among their core commitments, alongside private property, free markets, and the rule of law. And it belongs there for the same reason. Like property rights and markets, democracy is a crucial way of keeping power in check.

Ilya Somin has written a generous and thoughtful reply to that piece. And I think he actually agrees with me more than the framing of his post might suggest. Ilya grants that democracies are generally freer and more prosperous than the alternatives, that democracy is “a valuable check on power,” that libertarians should arguably stress these points “more often,” and that “in much of the world today, right-wing nationalists pose a greater threat to libertarian values and priorities than the political left does.” What’s left mainly comes down to two questions: what counts as a libertarian critique of democracy, and whose job it is to defend democracy.

Before turning to those substantive issues, though, there’s one terminological matter that’s worth clearing up. Ilya says that nothing of significance hinges on whether we call our view “libertarian” or “classical liberal.” And on most questions I’d agree. On this one, though, I think the difference matters. In The Individualists, John Tomasi and I draw a distinction between strict libertarians and classical liberals. The former group tends to treat liberty as a moral absolute and to derive their politics from a single overarching principle like the non-aggression axiom. Think Murray Rothbard or Ayn Rand. The latter treat liberty as a strong but defeasible presumption and are more empiricist and pluralistic in their approach to politics. Think Friedrich Hayek or Richard Epstein.

My sense is that these two camps within the broader “liberty movement” have taken pretty different stances toward democracy, with strict libertarians being much more critical than their classical liberal brethren. Even back in the 19^thcentury, you could find Benjamin Tucker insisting that voting is always a form of aggression, and Lysander Spooner arguing that women “have just as good a right to make laws as men have, and no better: AND THAT IS JUST NO RIGHT AT ALL.” Herbert Spencer was even willing to walk back his support of women’s suffrage once he decided that women would probably use their vote to support bigger government. That’s a pretty different take than anything you’re likely to find in Ludwig von Mises or Friedrich Hayek (more on whom later), let alone in John Stuart Mill.

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That brings us to the first of the two substantive issues under dispute. Ilya argues that recent events have made libertarian critiques of democracy more important than ever, and that the libertarian solutions to democracy’s flaws are “primarily to limit and decentralize government power.” I’m with him on that, but I don’t think this settles, or even really addresses, the debate about democracy. Limiting and decentralizing government power is a claim about the scope of the state, about how much government should do. It’s a principle that would apply to any government, whether democratic or not. And, crucially, it isn’t an argument against democratic control of whatever the state does do.

That distinction was at the heart of my essay. Following Jacob Levy, I argued that classical liberals have let a perfectly sound critique of too much government slide into a skepticism about democracy itself, treating democracy, in Levy’s words, “as if the contrast to ‘democratic’ were ‘economic’ rather than ‘autocratic.’” One can be a radical about reducing the scope of the state and still insist that its agents must be answerable to the people they govern. Most of what Ilya calls the libertarian critique of democracy is really a critique of big government. That’s an argument I largely agree with, as far as it goes. The trouble comes when we file it under the wrong heading. When we ourselves blur the line between critiques of state power and critiques of democracy, we shouldn’t be surprised when people come away thinking libertarians are against democracy.

That brings me to comparative advantage, which is where I think Ilya’s argument is most interesting but also most mistaken. Libertarians are a small minority, he says, and “we have no comparative advantage when it comes to extolling the virtues of democracy relative to authoritarianism. Other types of liberals can do this work just as well as we can, perhaps better.” So we should stick to what we do best, which is analyzing democracy’s flaws.

This argument might make sense in some contexts. But as a general principle, I think it misfires, and it misfires most badly when the audience is classical liberals and libertarians themselves. That, after all, is where the turn against democracy has actually happened. Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Democracy: The God That Failed argued that monarchy was preferable to democracy, and complained that “habitual democrats” had been tolerated rather than “isolated, excluded and expelled from civilization.” Curtis Yarvin, who came to neoreaction by way of libertarianism, credits Hoppe with opening “a kind of door to the pre-revolutionary world” for him. And in 2009, Peter Thiel wrote in a Cato Institute publication that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” None of this follows from the libertarian critique of voter ignorance, and nothing Ilya has written points in this direction. But it grew in a movement where, as Janet Bufton recently put it in Liberal Currents, “even liberal libertarians were taught arguments about why democracy fails,” and hardly anyone was making the case for democracy on libertarian terms. Any old liberal can explain to the public why democracy beats dictatorship. But a libertarian drifting toward Hoppe or Yarvin isn’t going to listen to them. Only libertarians can tell libertarians that democracy is theirs.

So if democracy is a libertarian value, what kind of libertarian value is it? Ilya argues that democracy shouldn’t be “a first-order libertarian priority, on par with liberty, constraining coercion, property rights, and increasing human happiness,” because its value is instrumental rather than intrinsic. I agree that the value of democracy is instrumental. In that way, it’s in precisely the same position as a number of items on the classical liberal list. Free trade, federalism, judicial review, and the rule of law are instrumental too. What I want to resist is the claim that because democracy is only instrumentally valuable it’s therefore dispensable – something that can be traded away whenever we can imagine something better. What we can imagine, though, is a poor guide to what works. The better question, as David Schmidtz argues, is what has “an observable history of leading self-interested agents to act in ways that are useful and agreeable to the people around them,” and by that test democracy has very few rivals.

Which leaves us with Hayek. Ilya defends Hayek’s preference for “a liberal dictator to a democratic government lacking liberalism” as a claim about rare hypothetical cases, and suggests that transitional non-democratic rule “may be necessary” in places like Russia and China, citing the Allied occupations of Germany and Japan. But those occupations were run by democracies answerable to their own voters, and they ended. Russia and China, in contrast, have no outside power that could impose a transition and then hand power back. The only realistic candidate for transitional power in those countries is a domestic strongman, which is exactly the case Hayek had in front of him. Hayek wasn’t musing about hypotheticals; he was talking about Chile.

Ultimately, Ilya and I want the same thing. We both advocate a form of libertarianism that resists concentrated power wherever it appears, including when it arrives through the ballot box. Where we differ is on the need to say out loud that democracy is one of the ways we resist it. I think we should, and I think libertarians are better placed to say it than anyone, since the people who most need to hear it are our own.

I’ve got a new paper out at Economics & Philosophy, titled “The Just Price: A Market-Process Account” (open access). Here’s the main idea.

Consider the following case, originally presented by Robert Nozick:

Drowning: Q is drowning far from shore, and P comes by in his boat. Both know that no other hope of rescue is nearby. P offers to save Q, but only if Q first promises to pay $10,000.

Most people think that P acts wrongly in this case. It might be permissible to charge something for a rescue in circumstances like these. But $10,000 is not a just price.

Now consider a different case:

Ice Gouging: Four young men learn that a hurricane has knocked out power in a nearby town. They load a truck with ice they bought for $1.70 a bag, drive to the stricken area and sell it for $12 a bag, more than seven times what they paid for it.

A lot of people think that this price is also unjust. But the two cases are different in an important way. In Drowning, P stumbles fortuitously upon Q, no other rescuers are around to offer their services, and whatever interaction they have is (we can stipulate) strictly a one-shot affair. Whatever price P charges to Q isn’t really doing anything besides transferring wealth from Q to P. The price is serving no socially beneficial function.

Things are different in Ice Gouging. Here the high price serves at least two socially beneficial functions. It rations a scarce resource among competing buyers, and it signals and incentivizes future supply. The price isn’t merely transferring wealth from one person’s pocket to another’s. It’s doing something socially useful.

These functions are easy to miss in philosophical thought experiments about just prices, which are almost always static in nature. Those experiments usually ask us to envision a fixed supply of resources to be parceled out among a small number of people, where prices serve only to determine who gets the goods and who goes without. But that static image is deeply misleading about how prices work in actual markets. A price is a moment in an ongoing and essentially dynamic process, and the stock of goods, the number of sellers and the alternatives open to buyers are all variable and, in part, functions of the price itself.

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The idea that the just price is the market price isn’t new. The medieval Scholastics held a version of it. But the tradition never had a good account of why the market price should carry moral weight, and once economists showed that prices are set by impersonal supply and demand, the whole idea of a ‘just price’ came to look like a confusion.

My paper tries to take the dynamic character of markets seriously, and to make it the cornerstone of a new theory of the just price. In essence, my claim is that the competitive market process, when it is operating, confers a presumption of justice on the prices it produces. Whether a price is just thus isn’t a matter of how high or low that price is, nor is it a function of the cost of production or of buyers’ need. Prices are just when they are the product of a competitive, open market process, and they are just by virtue of the morally important functions that they play within that process. Even a just price, however, can be one that is morally wrong to charge. Just as a prisoner who is justly condemned may be pardoned, so too may a just price be overridden by the duty of charity. But the remedy is aid to the particular people who can’t afford to pay, not a cap on the price, which is still doing the work of getting more ice on the road.

That short statement probably leaves you with a lot of questions and objections! If so, I encourage you to read the paper for yourself. There I lay out the argument in much more detail, show how it applies to practical questions of monopoly and wage labor, and even try to resolve a longstanding tension in the interpretation of John Locke’s provocative essay on just pricing, Venditio.

More info below.

Cato University on Campus in San Diego

November 14, 2026, 8:30 AM – 5 PM
University of San Diego, Nexus Theater
5998 Alcalá Park Way, San Diego, CA

Applications close October 30. Details and application here.

About the event

Cato University on Campus is the Cato Institute’s regional event series for undergraduate and graduate students. This day-long seminar at the University of San Diego will explore “The Enemy Is Power: Markets, Institutions, and Liberalism,” examining the classical liberal case for dispersing power wherever it concentrates.

From the dangers of unaccountable state force to the new centers of power emerging through artificial intelligence and technology, the program will examine the institutions and ideas that shape individual freedom and a free society.

Who can apply?

US-based undergraduate and graduate students only. Applications are open until October 30, but space is limited, so apply soon!

Each attendee will receive

• A $100 travel stipend upon completion of the program

• A full day of academic programming and discussion

• Networking opportunities with scholars and peers

• Resources for further study

Sessions and speakers

Opening Keynote: The Enemy Is Power, Wherever You Find It
Matt Zwolinski, Director of the Center for Ethics, Economics, and Public Policy, University of San Diego

When Power Concentrates: Lessons from Latin America
Marcos Falcone, Policy Analyst, Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, Cato Institute
Martín Rodríguez y Rodríguez, Strategic Advisor, Commercial Diplomacy and Geopolitical Risk

Starting with the Individual: Equal Rights and the Limits of Government
Andrew Quinio, Civil Rights Attorney, Pacific Legal Foundation

When the State Gets It Wrong: Power and Accountability in Criminal Justice
C.J. Ciaramella, Criminal Justice Reporter, Reason

Can Competition Check the Power of AI?
Juan Londoño, Policy Analyst, Cato Institute
James Czerniawski, Head of Emerging Technology Policy, Consumer Choice Center

Closing Keynote: The Imperial Presidency, Then and Now
Luke A. Nichter, James H. Cavanaugh Endowed Chair in Presidential Studies, Chapman University

Questions? Email events@cato.org.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More soon.

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More soon.

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

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

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

What’s going on?

* * *

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

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

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

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

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* * *

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Left-Libertarianism Gets Right

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

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

What Left-Libertarianism Gets Wrong

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex was equally unimpressed.1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s an example from the paper:

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

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

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

Not according to Andressen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In other words, the pressures toward conformity are enormous.

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

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

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A Very Brief History of Antitrust1

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

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

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

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

Market Coercion

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

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

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

Neo-Brandeisianism

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

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

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

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

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

So Why Only Two Cheers?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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What Does LPE Believe?

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

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

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

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

Problems with LPE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Coercion, Rights, and Obligations

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

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

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

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

3. Baselines and Nihilism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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