Directionally Libertarian

Scary stuff, indeed. The sources are particularly illuminating.

Easier prediction: Both parties will continue concentrating political and economic power, protecting their well-connected friends, and telling voters they have no choice but to support them because the other party is too dangerous.

Ted Brown would be the next U.S. senator from Texas if the state had ranked-choice voting.

The MAGA libertarians have done enormous damage to the credibility of libertarianism. They've spent years defending a president who imposes tariffs, expands executive power, empowers federal agents to violate civil liberties, and starts wars he can't finish. They celebrate shuffling government responsibilities between agencies and abruptly pulling the rug out from under people who depend on existing programs as victories for liberty. And what will they have to show for it when Democrats return to power? A few regulatory cuts that can be reversed? An even more powerful executive branch for the next president to inherit? They've sacrificed their political independence and credibility for a president who routinely violates their supposed principles. Spare me the IQ talk. You can be the smartest person alive and still be spectacularly ineffective at advancing your own goals.

The interesting thing about "dumb people" is that they don't believe they're dumb. And if you think they're dumb, they probably think you are too. So who's right? How would you know?

I want a political party that prioritizes fixing the underlying policies that make housing, healthcare, and other necessities so expensive in the first place. Not one that prioritizes finding new pools of money to expand subsidies for these already unaffordable systems.

What does directionally libertarian healthcare reform actually look like? It doesn't mean waking up tomorrow and abolishing the government services that millions of people depend on. Any proposal to simply pull the rug out from underneath them deserves to be ignored. The healthcare reform idea gaining the most political energy right now is Medicare for All — the Democratic Socialist idea to nationalize healthcare financing. And I think one of the biggest reasons that idea is gaining traction is because most people understandably have very little knowledge of how this system actually works, why it became so expensive, how other countries provide universal coverage, or the problems they continue to have after achieving it. American healthcare barely resembles a functioning market. For large parts of American healthcare, we've removed or badly distorted the things that would normally put downward pressure on prices. You often don't know what something costs before you buy it. The person receiving the service is often separated from the full price by an insurer, employer, or government program. Most people don't shop for health insurance because their employer chooses what is available to them, and even if you do buy your own insurance, you generally can't just switch plans whenever you want. Then we also restrict who can provide different kinds of care, make it difficult to build new healthcare facilities, limit the number of people entering certain professions, and pile regulation on top of new drugs, providers and business models. The system keeps getting more expensive, people get angrier, and politicians learn that voters will reward simple answers. The problem with "free healthcare" isn't just that "nothing is really free." It's that without prices, you lose the mechanism that coordinates supply and demand. Prices don't just tell people what something costs. They communicate scarcity. High prices attract investment. They encourage competitors. They tell producers where additional supply is valuable. That's how markets respond to scarcity. Directionally libertarian healthcare reform should do the following: Make prices visible before treatment. Let patients directly control more healthcare spending. Let insurance protect against large and unpredictable expenses instead of serving as an intermediary for every routine transaction. Make insurance portable instead of tying it to employment. Remove barriers that prevent doctors, nurses, clinics, telemedicine providers, drug manufacturers and new healthcare models from competing and increasing supply. And when someone can't afford to participate in that market? Subsidize that patient. Give them purchasing power. Let providers compete for it. I don't want a healthcare system where poor people simply don't get healthcare because they can't afford it. We can provide universal coverage without making the federal government the payer for everyone. There are many ways countries provide universal coverage, and even countries with universal systems still struggle with costs, staffing, capacity, waiting times and difficult decisions about rationing scarce medical resources. Changing who pays the bill doesn't solve scarcity. Doctors still only have so many hours. There are still only so many nurses, hospital beds, specialists, operating rooms and MRI machines. Spreading the cost across taxpayers or making government the purchaser doesn't create more of those things. Libertarians believe in free markets because they believe markets produce better outcomes for more people over time. But they need a better answer than simply "get the government out of healthcare." We need to be able to explain why healthcare became so expensive in the first place, which parts of the system are preventing markets from working, and how we get from the system we have to something better without taking healthcare away from millions of people along the way. And libertarians need a coalition to make this happen. We need a legible libertarian bloc and the political savvy to work with liberals, conservatives and anyone else who wants universal coverage but is skeptical that concentrating even more power over healthcare in Washington is the best way to achieve it. Preserve the safety net. Rebuild the market underneath it.

Libertarians need to get much better at telling a story about how we got here. The left has one: Billionaires and corporations rigged the economy. That's why you can't afford healthcare, housing or a decent life. Tax them and take back what they stole. The right has one: Immigration, globalization and cultural elites hollowed out the country. That's why wages are weak, housing is scarce and communities are struggling. Close the border and take the country back. These stories are powerful because once you accept the diagnosis, the prescription feels obvious. Libertarians too often show up afterward with a chart, an economic objection or a lecture about individual rights. That's not enough. We need a better explanation of why housing can't respond to demand. Why healthcare absorbs more and more money. Why incumbent businesses become politically protected. Why government programs accumulate constituencies and become difficult to reform. Why centralized systems lose information, feedback and accountability. And then we need to show why competition, choice, decentralization, freer entry and individual liberty aren't abstract ideological preferences. They're mechanisms for making systems work better. If libertarians want to matter politically, we can't just have better policy arguments. We need a better story about what went wrong and how to fix it.

This is actually a good illustration of the political problem I think libertarians have. One side caricatures libertarian voters instead of competing for them. The other often assumes their votes are already guaranteed because “Democrats are worse.” Look at the poll. The major-party candidates are separated by 1 point, while 2% are supporting the Libertarian. That doesn’t mean those voters would all go to one party in a two-way race. It means they’re a constituency large enough to matter—and neither party owns them. Libertarians have helped create this problem too. The caricature exists for a reason. Too many libertarians have done a poor job explaining and defending these ideas to people outside the movement. Too often libertarianism gets presented as an all-or-nothing ideology, purity gets valued over persuasion, or one major party gets treated as the default home for libertarian voters no matter what it actually does. I’m not interested in waiting around for some perfectly libertarian society, candidate, or party to materialize. I’m interested in moving the politics we actually have in a more libertarian direction: stronger civil liberties, less concentrated power, freer markets, fiscal restraint, decentralization and more individual choice. Both parties are capable of moving in that direction. Both are capable of moving in the opposite direction. Neither party owns these votes.

One of the more depressing things about this whole argument is watching libertarians run away from libertarian ideas the moment defending them becomes socially uncomfortable. Chase Oliver wasn’t libertarian because he was gay or smoked weed. He was libertarian because he believed adults should generally be free to run their own lives, opposed war and government surveillance, supported gun rights, wanted to cut spending and federal power, and opposed the drug war. If somebody reduces all of that to “weed and porn,” the response shouldn’t be to disown him because the caricature is embarrassing. Defend the ideas. Libertarianism is going to produce people whose lives you wouldn’t personally choose. That’s kind of the whole point.

I’m sure there’s a perfectly good reason for this, but watching them spray water at a fire that is already sitting in the ocean is fucking hilarious.

There’s a funny double standard in accusing libertarians of being too ideologically pure while also insisting that serious libertarians have to work through the Republican Party. “I’ll work with either party when they move toward liberty” is not ideological purity. “There is no Democrat course toward liberty, and libertarians who cooperate with Democrats are betraying the movement” absolutely is.

This is almost a textbook strategy for having no leverage over either party. Tell Republicans they can spend whatever they want, start wars, impose tariffs, expand federal power and trample civil liberties, and you'll still support them because Democrats are worse. Then tell Democrats there is literally nothing they can do to earn your support. Why would either party give a shit what libertarians think?