Libertarians Are More Politically Homeless Than Ever

For libertarians, modern American politics makes for a lonely place. Lonelier than usual, that is. Democrats are doubling down on their longtime taste for government control of the economy while replacing vestigial civil liberties concerns with a mania for policing political discourse. Republicans want to close the doors of the land of opportunity so they can dole out jobs to supporters in the not-very free economy they plan to manipulate for their own purposes. The major parties strongly agree on one point: State power should be enhanced and wielded for their own ends.

That leaves little room for free minds and free markets.

Free Market, No More

That the GOP has drifted from support for free enterprise under Donald Trump is no revelation. As far back as 2016, 57 percent of Republicans surveyed by The Economist/YouGov agreed with then-Vice President-elect Mike Pence's take that "the free market has been sorting it out, and America's been losing." (Among Democrats, the figure was 33 percent, with 38 percent among independents.)

"On the right, support for free markets and free trade are more and more often derided as relics of a bygone century, while quasi-theocratic ideas are gathering support," Reason's Stephanie Slade wrote two years ago in a piece discussing the convergence of the illiberal right and left.

Sure enough, the 2024 Republican platform promises "a robust plan to protect American Workers, Farmers, and Industries from unfair Foreign Competition." That means Trump's proposed tariffs. It likely also means "consequences" he has favored for companies that move jobs and manufacturing off-shore.

That activist impulse isn't confined to trade. While much ink has been spilled over vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance's 2021 musings about firing "every civil servant in the administrative state" to "replace them with our people," less has been said about his rationale for that scheme.

New Fans of the Regulatory State

"We should just seize the administrative state for our own purposes," he urged. Seize the administrative state to reduce its role in our lives, perhaps? Well, no. It's about political payback.

"Why don't we seize the assets of the Ford Foundation, tax their assets, and give it to the people who've had their lives destroyed by the radical open borders agenda?" Vance asked of Tucker Carlson.

The party platform does call to "cut costly and burdensome regulations," and that's encouraging. But with talk of "seizing" and "consequences," those cuts will likely benefit only those on the party's good side, not those making choices it doesn't like.

Among those making choices the GOP doesn't like are those advocating what Vance and friends call "open borders"—or maybe just easier immigration. For those who entered the country illegally, the party platform promises the "largest deportation program in American history." A large government program will undoubtedly require lots of bureaucrats, funding, and power. That program will also, the platform promises, "deport pro-Hamas radicals and make our college campuses safe and patriotic again."

The Speech Police

Such an ambitious and intrusive government plan is worthy of President Joe Biden's Democrats who, just a few years ago, were using federal agencies to torment non-profit organizations whose ideas they didn't like.

"The IRS used inappropriate criteria that identified for review Tea Party and other organizations applying for tax-exempt status based upon their names or policy positions instead of indications of potential political campaign intervention," the tax inspector general found in 2013, when Biden was vice president.

Since then, the Biden administration has taken to labeling opinions and ideas it doesn't care for as somehow illegitimate and leaning on private platforms to suppress such expression.

"I make a special appeal to social media companies and media outlets: Please deal with the misinformation and disinformation that's on your shows," Biden huffed in 2022. "It has to stop."

"The United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian 'Ministry of Truth,'" U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty warned of government arm-twisting to suppress disfavored speech (the Supreme Court recently dismissed a legal challenge to the practice.)

Ever-Bigger Government

When it comes to economics, surveys find that Democrats now view socialism more positively than capitalism. Hey, if you try it enough times, maybe just once it won't result in poverty and misery.

Those shifting sentiments offer cover for even bigger-government schemes than Democrats usually favor.

Just this week, the White House proposed national rent control, asking Congress to "cap rent increases on existing units at 5%." The scheme, which probably won't make it by lawmakers, has the same sort of purchase-popularity vibe as the administration's repeated attempts at student loan forgiveness.

That economic genius is on top of hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies the Biden administration handed out to favored corporations in the EV industry, broadband firms, tech companies, and more.

And when it comes to protectionism, the Democrats and Republicans are now both such committed protectionists that the Tax Foundation analyzes their policies as a joint exercise in idiocy.

"We estimate the Trump-Biden tariffs will reduce long-run GDP by 0.2 percent, the capital stock by 0.1 percent, and employment by 142,000 full-time equivalent jobs," according to a June analysis by the organization.

That's not to say there are no grains of wheat in the chaff. Republicans strongly endorse school choice and have at least a bit of awareness of the destructive power of the regulatory state, even if they kind of like it. They're also more open to shifting authority from the federal government to states. Democrats, for their part, are committed to reproductive rights and reject the GOP's tendency towards theocracy (though social justice ideology plays that role for some). Given Biden's deteriorated state, they're unlikely to emulate Republicans in embracing a cult of personality; the guy just isn't up to it.

But the two major parties are, overall, farther from libertarians than they've been in a long time.

Normally, I would drop in a mention here that at least we can park our votes with the Libertarian Party. But that column of smoke you see in the distance is the dumpster fire it has become after an influx of populist trolls. Oh, well, it was nice-ish, and often amusing, while it lasted.

This is probably a good time to get outside, touch grass, and think about living free lives that don't require the cooperation of what has become of America's political parties.