Opposing big government and supporting government accountability doesn’t make you a fascist. Indeed, fascism was big government. Yet, progressives will call you a fascist for supporting privatization or deregulation.
Fascists nationalized many businesses. The fascist dictator Benito Mussolini boasted in a 1934 speech to Italy’s Chamber of Deputies that “three-quarters of the Italian economy, industrial and agricultural, is in the hands of the state.” The German fascist dictator Adolph Hitler imposed rent control on his birthday and closed many small corporations.
I support privatization of many government enterprises, such as the Post Office and air traffic control, and oppose rent control, yet I get emails and hostile comments on social media telling me I am a fascist, precisely for having these positions, which I have expressed in newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star. Detractors are angry that I agree with Donald Trump about privatizing the Post Office and eliminating rent control, but agreeing with Trump about those things doesn’t make me fascist, anymore than it would be fascist for me to agree with Trump’s decision to discontinue the penny because it costs 3.69 cents to make a penny. Hitler’s regime built the Autobahn, but supporting highways like the Autobahn doesn’t make you a fascist.
My detractors also don’t like my belief that to ensure government accountability, the president should be able to fire high-ranking civil servants and federal officials (other than the commissioners of multi-member agencies), a belief expressed in this law review article and adopted in relevant part by a 2020 Supreme Court decision. Especially officials like the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, who violated people’s free speech rights.
As The Washington Times reported in 2020, I am the person who came up with the legal theory that allows presidents to fire directors of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and other regulatory “czars,” whenever they wish. As The Times notes, I “developed the argument” adopted by the Supreme Court in Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (2020), which ruled that Congress can’t shield those officials from being fired through statutory removal protections.
President Trump has used this power to fire President Biden’s CFPB Director, and replace him with a conservative who has stopped requesting funding for the CFPB from the Federal Reserve, thus curtailing the CFPB’s activities. Progressives and left-libertarians claim this is fascism and an assault on democracy, but it is perfectly legal, as they could easily learn if they bothered to read the Supreme Court’s Seila Law decision and the provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act cited in the Supreme Court’s decisions.
The CFPB is very harmful to the economy and it has sought to restrict constitutionally protected speech by regulated entities, fining entities such as Townstone Financial for speech protected by the First Amendment, such as discussing the negative effect of crime on Chicago neighborhoods. The Washington Examiner has explained that, and other people have, too, such as in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. So have public-interest law firms, such as the Pacific Legal Foundation.
President Trump’s firing the CFPB director responsible for such outrages was amply justified. The Trump administration’s reduction of the CFPB’s funding should hopefully make such governmental abuses of power less common in the future.
But to people suffering from TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome), Trump’s actions to rein in the CFPB are an attack on democracy and a fascist abuse of power. The former head of the Tennessee Libertarian Party, a self-styled resistance warrior who depicted Kamala Harris as a freedom-loving capitalism-lover in the 2024 election campaign, denounced the effort to rein in the CFPB, “deleting” his “Coinbase account” in response to Coinbase raising constitutional objections to the CFPB. (See the first tweet below, by Joshua Reed Eakle).
The Project he heads falsely depicted Trump’s attempt to rein in the CFPB, which does not fight government corruption, as a way of protecting “government corruption.” His Project Liberal retweeted a tweet by Mr. Beat making that false claim. That claim is ridiculous, because the CFPB plays no role in fighting “government corruption”, and does not enforce laws against government corruption. The CFPB regulates only private businesses, which were already policed by multiple state and federal agencies. (See the second tweet below, by Project Liberal).
1.
2.
.
When the CFPB was created, free-market think tanks (including a scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute) objected to the CFPB’s creation, calling it economically harmful. They also objected on constitutional grounds to the way it was structured and financed.
