It sounds silly; a libertarian-left alliance on economics? It’s almost like the wolf and the sheep allying on what’s for dinner. But hear me out.
There’s a global political realignment in the works, and it’s clearly based on stopping the military-industrial complex, “Big Pharma” and the censorship regime. Can we add to that an economic alliance with the left, on at least some issues?
It sounds ridiculous, but surprisingly, there’s a lot of common ground, including at least four issues involving trillions of dollars per year.
First on the docket should be inflation. While most people on the left are unaware that inflation is the most efficient means of transferring wealth upward, it’s not that difficult to demonstrate that inflation is a direct channel to reallocating purchasing power from those whose only asset is wages to those wealthy enough to have lots of credit and massive debts (real estate moguls and financial institutions). Inflation alone transfers an average of $1 trillion dollars per year in spending power from wage-earners to government and wealthy people with assets like real estate and yachts. No level of inflation ever sunk a yacht, and inflation actually benefits real estate developers who purchase properties with bank debt. Once the left learns this fact, they could be allies in the war against the inflation created by the Federal Reserve Bank.
The left loves to rage against corporate welfare, which we libertarians often oppose as “crony capitalism,” so why not an alliance? We could team up to end corporate subsidies in the energy industry (both hydrocarbons and green energy), corporate subsidies embedded in foreign aid, agricultural price supports, and institutions like the Export-Import Bank.
Even if some of our newfound friends on the left want to defend part of these corporate subsidies—let’s say they want to continue subsidies for small farmers—a coalition of the willing could still get rid of the huge agricultural subsidies for big agriculture and save taxpayers tens of billions of dollars.
Military and surveillance spending is really just the largest portion of the corporate welfare category, as it is driven by subsidizing the military-industrial complex. Military spending in the United States is out of control at more than $1 trillion per year, nearly as much as the rest of the world combined. Arms manufacturers and Big Tech each take in hundreds of billions of dollars that can be cut substantially (though we libertarians would like to see them cut out entirely).
Libertarians want lower taxes and the left wants more money in the hands of working people. This is the perfect area for alliance that could bring fruits, with several trillion dollars per year at stake.
Just those four issues cover a lot of common ground with a huge economic impact, but there’s a lot more space for an economic coalition. Examples include no immunity for Big Pharma, getting government out of the food pyramid business, and even support of labor unions in some instances.
While the left needs to learn more about inflation, many libertarians need to jettison their reflexive hatred of labor unions, which are just workers collectively bargaining for higher wages in the market. Sure, we libertarians don’t think government should be intervening on behalf of unions, and we disagree with the left on this, but in many cases government intervenes against the free market and the voluntary act of collective bargaining, as in the case of Joe Biden’s breaking of the Railroad Workers Union strike in 2022. That’s another area for a natural alliance, if some libertarians can shake their reflexive biases.
Government can not be bent to benefit the working man, because it’s being run by a few billionaires. The left has trouble accepting the first part of that last sentence and intrinsically accepts the second half. Libertarians have traditionally struggled to embrace the latter part of the sentence but reflexively accept the former.
We as libertarians need to do our part by embracing the fact that government is controlled by a select few of the rich people for the benefit of that same set of select few rich people. We don’t live in an idyllic Madisonian, classical liberal society where government leaders are common folk chosen from the great masses of citizens to serve altruistically in government and who have gifted us a Rothbardian free market. America’s politicians, along with politicians elected across the world, are controlled (and often owned) by billionaire corporate interests for whom they serve. These corporations have been brought into the government, as Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler and Antonio Salazar did only a bit more formally ninety years ago, and classical liberal author John T. Flynn is probably looking down from heaven today observing that economic fascism won the Second World War after all. America’s economy today more closely resembles the pre-war Japanese Zaibatsu, a small group of corporate conglomerates who ran a revolving door with the government for state contracts, than it does our own national economic system at that time.
We as libertarians need to unburden ourselves from the reflexive need to inveigh against higher marginal tax rates for the rich. Sure, we oppose them, but should they really be our top priority when the rich already have so many bought-and-paid-for defenders?
Maybe it should be the top priority for Reason and the Cato Institute because they want to keep those huge Koch and Scaife family donations coming. Half of their total donations come from six or seven billionaires donating to them anonymously. But those of us who are not on the leash of a handful of billionaires can afford to let the billionaires themselves, and their myriad paid surrogates, defend the billionaires.
We libertarians have got to stop circulating idiotic memes like “none of your problems are because someone else is a billionaire.” This kind of message falsely implies we live in a perfectly competitive free market, and it falls on deaf ears to the small shop owner who lost everything in the COVID lockdowns when his shop was closed down while his Amazon.com competition raked in billions. It also falls on deaf ears to the nurse who lost her job for not getting the jab while Moderna and Pfizer’s government-subsidized revenues went through the roof, the podcaster censored by Facebook or other social media at the behest of the surveillance state, and the middle class worker unable to afford to purchase a home because the Federal Reserve Bank manipulated interest rates over the past twenty-five years on behalf of real estate developers.
The enemies of the free market have continuously spun the fable that the middle class has never had it so good while simultaneously selling the narrative that complainers are just lazy losers who lack the innovative get-up-and-go of Americans from past generations. It’s a much more palatable narrative than the truth, that inflation has been skimming wages and rewarding the real estate and financial industry while the middle class has largely stagnated since the gold standard ended in 1971.
The “millionaires and billionaires” Bernie Sanders used to rant against before he himself became a millionaire will be fine on their own. The middle class and working poor already aren’t fine, and have virtually no defenders. To win smaller government, libertarians don’t need to resort to populism, but we do need to at least avoid actively trying to be unpopular. Why not appeal directly to the most numerous voting bloc? Why not join in an alliance on economic issues with anyone whenever we agree, even if it includes the left?
Frederick Douglass once quipped, “I will unite with anyone to do good, but with no one to do harm.” It’s a good practice for anyone who wants to be successful, because it’s also courting the same majority voter coalition Javier Milei and Donald Trump courted in their successful political campaigns. It’s courting a market of workers who still have a larger share of the GDP than the modern day Zaibatsu that informally runs Washington, despite ongoing upward transfers of wealth via inflation. And we may just accomplish more by having some single-issue alliances with the sincere left along the way, even on economic issues.
