On Twitter, woke millennials complain constantly about Donald Trump. That includes people who claim to be libertarian, yet seldom criticize left-wing politicians who restrict free speech and attack free markets. They hate the police, prisons, and borders, and don’t care much about small businesses, out-of-control government spending, or high tax rates.
The irony is that some of these woke “libertarians” played an indispensable role in Trump’s rise, by ensuring that conservatives who disliked Donald Trump would vote for Donald Trump rather than the Libertarian Party in 2016. These wokesters explicitly told libertarian-leaning, free-market conservatives to stay out of the Libertarian Party, which those conservatives then did. Many of those conservatives then held their nose and voted for Donald Trump to keep Hillary Clinton from winning the election. The woke libertarians’ efforts to keep free-market conservatives out echoed the Saturday Night Live skit “Gay Communist Gun Club,” in which a tiny club of gay communist gun-nuts refuses to let anyone join, even if they share some of the group’s aims (like being gay and a gun-nut) if they don’t share each and every one of the group’s unusual characteristics (such as being a communist).
These woke “libertarians” told normal people to stay out of the Libertarian Party, and they did.
The Washington Examiner’s Timothy Carney had worked for a libertarian think-tank, and had been described as a “libertarian from 9 to 5” by Gene Healy, a vice president of the libertarian Cato Institute. Carney is a free-market conservative, and has a lot of political positions that were historically viewed as libertarian. But when free-market conservatives like him pondered voting libertarian out of antipathy to Donald Trump, libertarians like the Cato Institute’s Aaron Ross Powell told them to stay out.
Powell, the long-time editor of Libertarianism.org, told free-market conservatives not to join the Libertarian Party. In The Washington Post, Powell wrote:
Now that Donald Trump has all but wrapped up the Republican nomination… a small cohort of notable Republicans have signaled that they are shifting their affiliation to the Libertarian Party. The Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney, already leaning that way, tweeted that he’s making the switch and longtime Republican strategist Mary Matalin recently explained that she would “never vote for Hillary and never Trump means always liberty. Hence, Libertarian.”
Wrong….
The danger…of trying to accommodate never-Trumpers would be the watering down of libertarian values.
Powell later described himself on Twitter as “woke.” He regularly expressed hatred for Republicans, conservatives, conservatism and Trump on Twitter, before moving to Mastodon, where he continues to express hatred for conservatives, claiming the GOP and the mainstream right are fascist. Powell suggests that it is racist to make ending “affirmative action” a “priority” or to focus on cutting “welfare programs” rather than “military spending.” He also accused former Cato Institute employee Ilya Shapiro of being a “racist” for opposing affirmative action in judicial selection.
Powell’s attacks on conservatives, as a high-profile “libertarian,” ensured that some conservatives would not vote Libertarian in 2016, delivering the presidency to Donald Trump.
Other self-described libertarians — woke millennials — helped ensure that conservatives would not vote for Gary Johnson, the 2016 libertarian nominee, by getting Johnson to praise Hillary Clinton and reject traditional conservative and libertarian positions. Under their influence Johnson called Hillary Clinton a “wonderful public servant.” That disgusted Republicans. It also disgusted many independents and swing voters, who disliked both Clinton and Trump.
Usually, libertarian presidential candidates draw the vast majority of their support from dissatisfied Republicans, while dissatisfied Democrats vote for the Green Party.
But in 2016, the libertarian candidate took positions so offensive to conservatives that the number of Republicans voting Libertarian wasn’t that much higher than the number of Democrats voting Libertarian. Many Republicans who disliked Donald Trump voted for him anyway. As a result, Donald Trump was able to eke out a narrow victory over Hillary Clinton.
When the 2016 presidential campaign started, the 2016 Libertarian Presidential candidate, Gary Johnson, seemed almost ideally situated to win Republican votes. He was the former two-term Republican governor of New Mexico, the last Republican to win in that center-left state. He was a moderate Republican who had easily carried the independent vote in his state election campaigns. If you read his social media posts, he seems like a basically reasonable fellow, much better than Joe Biden. Polls in the summer of 2016 showed him getting as much as 13% of the vote, with most of his support coming from Republicans.
But Johnson’s woke young “libertarian” aides encouraged him to take toxic unpopular positions, such as attacking the police and religious freedom. His stance against religious freedom angered libertarians such as the Williamson County Libertarian Party, whose web site noted that Johnson supported forcing a “a wedding photographer to photograph a lesbian commitment ceremony, which violated the photographer’s free-speech rights, since photography is speech, and the First Amendment forbids compelled speech.”
By election day, Johnson got only 3.3% of the vote.
As a candidate for New Mexico governor, Johnson had backed the police, and supported increasing penalties for teen killers. This was good politics: The police have always been popular with American voters in general, and independent and swing voters in particular, which is why Republicans regularly run attack ads accusing Democrats of wanting to defund the police.
But as a 2016 presidential candidate, Johnson antagonized independents and anti-Trump Republicans by villifying the police. He claimed that black people were four times more likely to be arrested than whites, for committing the very “same” crime. Even progressive “fact-checkers” took issue with this extreme claim, which happens to be false.
Johnson may have been talking about drug possession cases, where people have raised concerns about racist application of the drug laws. But most incarceration is not due to drugs, but rather due to violence. Only 4% of people in state prisons in 2015 were there for drug possession. Most are there for violent felonies, and about one in five is there for property crimes.
For most violent crimes, the higher black arrest rate simply reflects the higher black crime rate, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. “White and black people were arrested proportionate to their involvement in serious nonfatal violent crime overall and proportionate to their involvement in serious nonfatal violent crime reported to police.” (See Allen J. Beck, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Race and Ethnicity of Violent Crime Offenders and Arrestees, 2018, at pg. 2).
It is often claimed that blacks use drugs at the same rate as whites, yet are arrested at higher rates. But as even libertarian critics of the war on drugs have observed, “The drug numbers are based off of unreliable survey data. Additionally: ‘African Americans are nearly twice as likely to buy outdoors, three times more likely to buy from a strangers, and significantly more likely to buy away from their homes.’”” “Also, African Americans are more likely to smoke outdoors.”
That’s from a peer-reviewed study which noted:
African Americans are statistically more likely to engage in risky purchasing behaviors that increase their likelihood of arrest. Using trivariate probit regression with demographic, drug use, and drug market covariates, analyses reveal that African Americans are nearly twice as likely to buy outdoors (0.31 versus 0.14), three times more likely to buy from a stranger (0.30 versus 0.09), and significantly more likely to buy away from their homes (0.61 versus 0.48). These results provide an additional explanation for the differential in arrest rates between African Americans and Whites.
This debunks a common argument that police are racist, by showing that rates of open drug use are not the same for different races. Police seldom arrest people for drug use or purchases behind closed doors, because they don’t even know about it. But they are much more likely to arrest people who buy or use drugs in public. As a lawyer points out, “Police can’t arrest people for crimes they don’t see or detect. So police aren’t racist just because arrest rates differ by race, even when crime rates are the same, if one race commits crimes more in the open, making them easier to detect.” A New York Times article similarly notes that “African Americans may also be more apt to face arrest, according to researchers, because they might be more likely to smoke marijuana outdoors, attracting the attention of the police.”
Woke “libertarians” like Aaron Ross Powell are wrong to attack the motives of those who focus on cutting “welfare programs” more than on cutting military spending. 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. Moreover, social programs cost far more than the military, so the federal budget deficit cannot be eliminated just by cutting defense spending. 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.
Increasing numbers of woke “libertarians” now wrongly oppose cutting welfare spending unless other forms of government spending are cut more. For example, they oppose cutting food stamps unless farm subsidies are first eliminated. But this makes cutting overall government spending impossible, because 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” have opposed cutting food stamps unless farm subsidies are eliminated. Professor Jacob Levy, a self-professed “non-lockean” libertarian, has criticized cutting food stamps alone. Levy also 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
Passing Build Back Better would be a bad idea. 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.
A former head of the Libertarian Party, who became woke, defended Joe Biden’s student loan bailout, which could cost taxpayers $1 trillion. But 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.
Moreover, 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 some self-proclaimed libertarian academics and think-tank employees have become woke, and 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. 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.
