Rand Paul is opposing wasteful spending, while fake pseudo-libertarian intellectuals attack his family. As Hannah Cox, a libertarian critic of wasteful spending, notes, “There are a few things you can expect without fail each December, such as “Congress passing a spending bill no one has read.”
Senator Rand Paul went on Fox Business this week to oppose the bloated omnibus spending bill. “The Omnibus will be 3000 pages. We’ll get it two hours before they want to pass it. No one will read it.”
“If 41 of us said no and held our ground until there was a compromise we could force Democrats to reduce spending,” he said. “We have completely and totally abdicated the power of the purse. Republicans are emasculated. They have no power, and they are unwilling to gain that power back.”
As Cox observes,
He’s right to be frustrated. Washington’s spending is out into the stratosphere…As a result, the Federal Reserve continues to print dollars like it’s on its way to a strip club, and inflation continues to run hot.
This is unsustainable. We’re already paying the price for this economic illiteracy, and the sad reality is it’s only going to get worse for future generations. You think you can’t afford a house now? You think wages are stagnant now? Just you wait.
But, as Paul points out, there are few people left in DC who care at all about the mess they are creating, selling us out for short-term gains and political favors instead.
“This brings upon us the lie that Republicans really are fiscally conservative,” Paul lamented. “The Democrats aren’t. They will not pretend to be fiscally conservative. Not one of them up here gives a darn about the debt.”
“Republicans all profess to, but when you make them vote on the PAGO resolution (pay as you go), that we can’t have new spending without offsetting it, they always vote to exempt it,” Paul pointed out.
While Paul is criticizing wasteful spending, many academics and think-tank employees who claim to be libertarian aren’t. Many of them have evolved leftward over the last decade into “bleeding heart libertarians” or “liberaltarians,” and thus no longer oppose government spending increases, massive deficit spending, or new entitlement programs. In the words of a former investment banker who used to fund libertarian groups, they have gone from supporting “free speech and free markets” to supporting “Free Mumia” (left-wing criminal justice reform) and “Free Stuff” that progressives want (race-based reparations that could cost $10-12 trillion, trillions of dollars worth of student loan forgiveness, and Biden welfare expansions such as Build Back Better).
Instead of helping amplify Paul’s critique of wasteful spending, they are currently complaining about the content of the newsletters that Rand Paul’s father, former Libertarian Presidential Candidate (and former Republican Congressman) Ron Paul, sent to donors a generation ago. Seriously. That’s their priority. Thirty-year-old newsletters!
By contrast, they seem to have no interest in the multitude of bigoted or inaccurate things Joe Biden has said in more recent years. Which might be explained by the fact that most of them voted for Biden, rather than the 2020 libertarian presidential candidate, Jo Jorgensen.
On Twitter, lefty intellectuals who claim to be libertarian now say bad things about capitalism, and say that instead of focusing on free speech and free markets, libertarians should focus on “defunding the police, abolishing the prisons,” and “granting reparations.” (To quote a tweet that was liked or retweeted by many self-proclaimed libertarians with large Twitter followings).
One of those self-proclaimed “libertarians,” Cory Massimino, wrote a chapter in the “Routledge Handbook of Libertarianism,” which he said attacks “capitalism.” As he explains, “in my Routledge chapter ‘Two Cheers For Rothbardianism’ … I argue libertarians ought to care deeply about relational egalitarianism and oppose cisheteropatriarchy, white supremacy, ageism, ableism, and capitalism.”
The self-proclaimed “libertarian” David D’Amato wrote on Twitter, “I’m a full-blown socialist and would like to see every last dollar of [student loan] debt vanish.” D’Amato is on the “Board of Policy Advisors” for a libertarian think-tank.
The longtime editor of Libertarianism.org, Aaron Ross Powell, did an approving podcast with the “libertarian,” Cory Massimino, who said that “libertarians ought to…oppose … capitalism.”
Powell says true libertarians are to the left of both socialists and conservatives, the former being what Powell calls “the unstable middle.”
Powell recently did a postcast called “An Introduction to Marxism for Non-Marxists” with Ian Bennett.” It gave a sympathetic soapbox to a Marxist to make the case for Marxism, which Powell believes is often misunderstood.
Remarkably, a number of other left-libertarians seem to agree with Powell — his podcast sympathetic to Marxism was retweeted by Nicholas Sarwark, the chairman of the Libertarian National Committee from 2014-2020, who now seems to be more of a Democrat in his political leanings. Sarwark supports writing off trillions of dollars in student loan debt at taxpayer expense. Sarwark recently unsuccessfully ran as the Democratic and Libertarian candidate for Hillsborough County Attorney.
Progressive libertarian academics have supported big expansions of the welfare state. For example, McGill University’s Jacob Levy, a self-described “Non-Lockean Libertarian,” admitted that Joe Biden’s Build Back Better was bad “on the merits”– “a kludgocratic mess of a way to do budgeting and social policy.” He admits that Biden’s legislation is a “$200 bn a year kludgocratic mess.” But he says that passing that “mess” is worth it, to avoid handing Biden an embarrassing political defeat:
Manchin is right on the merits. BBB is a kludgocratic mess of a way to do budgeting and social policy.
But $200 bn a year in kludgocratic mess isn’t as bad as the potential consequences of crippling Biden’s presidency. https://t.co/0KhSL7zQWV
— Jacob T. Levy (@jtlevy) December 19, 2021
There is nothing “libertarian” or pro-market about the Build Back Better Act that the progressive ersatz “libertarian” Levy wants Congress to enact. The leading libertarian magazine, Reason, reported that Biden’s Build Back Better plan would radically worsen the nation’s finances, increasing inflation and the national debt. Reason reported that “President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better Act is likely to end up costing taxpayers about double what the official price tag suggests, and much of that hidden cost will end up being added to the national debt….If all the Build Back Better plan’s proposals were made permanent…the final price tag would be $4.8 trillion, and the bill would add about $2.8 trillion to the deficit.” Reason reported that it was likely that Build Back Better’s “trillions of dollars of new federal spending is likely to send inflation rocketing even higher.” And it reported that Build Back Better contains expensive giveaways for special interests, and that it will lead to more bloat and waste in pre-K education and daycare.
