By 2014, America started going through what is known as the “Great Awokening.” Many progressives who once regarded America as mostly good changed their mind, and came to believe that racism was “baked into” everything, that “white supremacy” was everywhere, and that everything tainted by racism (essentially, all American institutions, in their mind) needed to be “dismantled.”
No aspect of American life was left alone by the Great Awokening, its noisy tumult, and the atmosphere of ideological intimidation and bullying it created. Crime began to rise after the 2014 Ferguson protests, which were based on the false claim that a policeman had committed a wanton act of murder against an unarmed black man. Evidence and black witnesses supported the policeman’s claim that he acted in self-defense, as even progressive Justice Department civil-rights investigators later were forced to admit. But in the racially-charged atmosphere of the Great Awokening, evidence didn’t matter — CNN anchors peddled the false claim that the policeman had shot an innocent black man with his “hands up.” Long after the Justice Department concluded that the shooting was justified, progressive Senators, journalists, academics, and “criminal justice reformers” continued to claim that the black criminal shot by the cop had been murdered based on his race.
In this racially-charged, anti-police atmosphere, crime began to rise, in what is known as the “Ferguson effect.” As Wikipedia notes, “The Ferguson effect is an increase in violent crime rates in a community caused by reduced proactive policing due to the community’s distrust and hostility towards police.” Murders in Chicago rose from 411 in 2014 to 478 in 2015 and 765 in 2016.
The atmosphere also got profoundly worse in academia due to the Great Awokening. As the Heterodox Academy observes, “Within academia, there was a sharp increase” in “‘cancel culture’ and self-censorship. There were ballooning investments in (demonstrably ineffective) mandated diversity-related training and rapid expansions of campus ‘sex bureaucracies.’”
The Great Awokening affected progressives most, but it also had a deep effect on the libertarian intelligentsia, especially those who pride themselves as being in touch with contemporary intellectual currents, social justice, and “criminal justice reform.” The libertarian intelligentsia describe themselves as “socially liberal” and “fiscally conservative.” But for some of them, their fiscal conservatism disappeared during the Great Awokening. They stopped opposing welfare spending, because of the fact that blacks disproportionately rely on welfare compared to whites. Being socially liberal and thus “anti-racist” came to outweigh being fiscally conservative. For example, these “libertarian” intellectuals oppose Republican proposals to cut food stamps, viewing it as racist to cut food stamps alone, without also cutting farm subsidies. And they opposed conservative proposals to cut welfare, without cutting military spending.
That is as stupid as refusing to come up with a cure for cancer until there is a cure for the common cold.
Moreover, it is not politically feasible to cut both food stamps and farm spending by big amounts at the same time. Cutting either food stamps or farm subsidies would provoke a political backlash, but could be done by an administration and Congress that is willing to spend some political capital doing so. But cutting both at the same time is almost impossible, politically speaking: Trying to do so would ensure opposition from a majority of lawmakers, both Congressional Democrats, who oppose any cuts in food stamps, and those Republicans who come from districts with large numbers of farmers.
Food stamps cost much more than farm subsidies. In Fiscal Year 2021, food and nutrition assistance programs cost $182.5 billion, overwhelmingly going to food stamps. Food stamp “spending doubled from $63 billion in 2019 to $127 billion in 2023.” By contrast, farmers typically get about $20 billion in a given year.
If you are going to cut somewhere, it makes sense to cut food stamps — which is where the big savings can be found — and not farm spending — which is a tiny fraction of 1% of GDP.
But woke “libertarians” oppose cutting food stamps unless farm subsidies are eliminated. Professor Jacob Levy, a self-professed “non-lockean” libertarian, has criticized cutting food stamps alone.
Similarly, Aaron Ross Powell, the longtime editor of Libertarianism.org at the Cato Institute (which he left last year), suggests that it is wrong to advocate cuts in welfare spending, unless military spending is also cut. But it makes no sense to cut both welfare and defense spending by the same amount, because welfare is not needed for America to exist or be safe, unlike military spending, which is needed to protect America and its allies from foreign attacks. More importantly, military spending is no longer a big fraction of the federal budget. Military spending is just 2.7% of GDP, and the Pentagon receives less money every year than the Department of Health & Human Services, which is responsible for a subset of federal welfare programs. This blog has advocated cuts in wasteful military spending (see this blog post linked to by Senator Rand Paul), but defense spending cannot be cut as much as welfare spending should be, without endangering national security and the security of our NATO and east Asian allies.
The federal Department of Health & Human Services had a budget of $1.8 trillion Fiscal Year 2023, compared to only about $800 billion for the Defense Department.
Requiring that welfare not be cut more than military spending would leave most welfare spending intact (because military spending can’t be cut that much without endangering national security). That would leave federal spending unacceptably high, too high for a balanced budget without tax increases.
Progressive “libertarian” academics like Jacob Levy have endorsed large expansions of the welfare state to buy off voters and try to keep conservatives out of office. For example, Levy 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 conceded that Biden’s legislation is a “$200 bn a year kludgocratic mess.” But he says that passing this “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 certainly 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 also 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.” Reason also 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.
Both Powell and Levy are very much fans of the Black Lives Matter movement and “criminal justice reform.” Powell has described himself as “woke” on Twitter. They are both very into “criminal justice reform,” such as believing that the police are racist. Powell hates the police so much he once said that people in a Starbucks are rightly afraid for their safety if cops are also customers of the the Starbucks).
For the libertarian intelligentsia, support for left-wing “criminal justice reform” seems to be the gateway drug to wokeness and progressivism. Libertarians who hate the police today, will usually like welfare tomorrow (the same criminal class who get arrested by the police, and are viewed with sympathy by “criminal justice reformers”, tend to come from broken families dependent on welfare. Criminal justice “reformers” routinely make false claims, like claiming that the U.S. has the world’s highest incarceration rate (it’s higher in nations like El Salvador and Turkmenistan), or that the coronavirus pandemic caused the spike in violence in the U.S. in 2020, when in fact, violence fell in most of the world in 2020, including nations hit harder by the pandemic than the U.S.
An example of this is criminal defense lawyer Nicholas Sarwark, the head of the Libertarian Party from 2014-2020. Sarwark likes government handouts, approvingly retweeting a leftist who claims that Christians can’t be Republicans because Republicans support cutting government spending.
Left-wing activist Chris Potter had written, “I genuinely don’t understand how Christians are Republicans. The GOP is fighting to take Medicaid benefits and food benefits away from poor people. Can a Christian Republican please tell me how this even remotely aligns with the gospel”? Republicans aren’t trying to abolish Medicaid or food stamps, but some Republicans in Potter’s state are trying to require some able-bodied people to work if they are able to do so, if they want to receive Medicaid and food stamps. Sarwark approvingly retweeted that deceptive lefty tweet.
Under Sarwark’s tutelage, the national Libertarian Party depicted police Officer Wilson as a murderer. In 2020, it listed “Michael Brown” and his death as an example of “systemic” racism and “extrajudicial killings, and blatant violence toward black communities” by police. Many libertarian criminal justice “reformers” falsely peddled the claim that Michael Brown was shot as he surrendered with his hands up. This “hands up, don’t shoot” claim was later debunked by the Obama Justice Department, but only after it was widely peddled on CNN and other liberal media.
Countless small businesses were destroyed in 2020 in the riots that followed George Floyd’s death, which caused billions of dollars in damage. But Sarwark downplayed the harms of rioting and looting, telling people “upset” about “people looting stores” to “please work on yourself” and to focus instead on police racism. He said this at a time when some people were being murdered by looters, like David Dorn, the black retired police captain shot to death by looters in St. Louis on Tuesday. Looting increased the death rate in the black community by plundering pharmacies and other businesses that provide life-saving necessities. Riots in predominantly black areas can economically devastate those areas and increase unemployment for years, as happened in Detroit. Michael Barone describes how he “saw rioting in the name of justice destroy a city for decades.” A devastated economy contributes to despair, drug addiction, and early deaths.
Sarwark has defended Joe Biden’s student loan bailout, which will cost taxpayers at least $427 billion, and perhaps well over $1 trillion. All conservative and libertarian economists think the bailout is a bad idea. So do even many Democratic economists, such as Jason Furman, chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, who called Biden’s plan “reckless.” Furman says “Pouring roughly half trillion dollars of gasoline on the inflationary fire that is already burning is reckless.” Biden’s plan will increase inflation, inequality, tuition, and the national debt. Even the liberal Washington Post calls Biden’s student-loan bailout “a regressive, expensive mistake.”
The libertarian education scholar Neal McCluskey points out that Biden’s “massive debt cancellation will encourage even greater college price increases as schools and future borrowers will both expect more cancellation in the future,” and Biden’s action is “grossly unconstitutional.” Writing off student loans will encourage colleges to jack up tuition, by making it more attractive to take out big loans to cover college tuition. When students are willing to borrow more to go to college, colleges respond by raising tuition. The Daily Caller reports that “each additional dollar in government financial aid translated to a tuition hike of about 65 cents,” according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
But Sarwark is a big fan of canceling student loans at taxpayers’ expense. He amplifies and repeats attacks on opponents of the bailout, such as Megan McArdle, a libertarian-leaning Washington Post columnist, and Chris Sununu, the governor of New Hampshire, using his Twitter account.
Sarwark mocks opponents of welfare and government handouts as tools of the wealthy and powerful. He approvingly retweeted a progressive attacking a conservative for opposing spending trillions of taxpayer dollars to write off student loans, including for wealthy professionals. The conservative correctly said, “Forgiving student debt is a massive windfall to the rich, to the college educated, and most of all to the corrupt university administrators of America. No bailouts for a corrupt system. Republicans must fight this with every ounce of our energy and power.” The Sarwark-approved response claimed without any evidence that opponents of canceling student loans “represent the interests of wealth” trying “to blunt support for a popular thing.”
In reality, canceling student loan debt is “regressive and unfair,” notes Katherine Abraham, the former head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who was an economic adviser to President Obama. As Greg Price points out, “Only 37% of Americans have a 4-yr college degree, only 13% have graduate degrees, and a full 56% of student loan debt is held by people who went to grad school. Biden’s plan to cancel it would be like taking money from a plumber to pay the debt of a lawyer.”
Libertarians used to oppose government spending (except for national defense and police), because it has to be funded by taxes, and they viewed “taxation as theft,” generally speaking. But many self-proclaimed libertarian academics and think-tank employees have now totally abandoned a belief in small government. 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).
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. On Twitter, Sarwark sounds much more like the woke teacher’s union president Randi Weingarten than he does the libertarian leaders of the past, like Ron Paul. But he claims to still be a libertarian, claiming he is “focusing our efforts on … recruiting, training, and amplifying candidates who support libertarian solutions” with the Libertarian Policy Institute.
