Feral Historian
Published 6 Feb 2026Equal parts political manifesto and wacky adventure story, The Probability Broach is usually not the first title people think of when they hear “libertarian sci-fi” but it almost always makes the list after further reflection. While ideologically-motivated fiction tends to preach more than entertain, L. Neil Smith makes his world so bonkers and whimsical that we almost can’t help seeing our own in a similar light, and in so doing reminds us that things are as they are ultimately because we chose to make it this way.
There’s some jumpcuts in this due to lack of good b-roll, but I suspect that most people who make it past the half-way point on this one are just listening anyway.
The artwork is from the graphic novel adaptation from Big Head Press https://www.bigheadpress.com/tpbtgn
I ordered a copy but the government-run postal system didn’t get it to me in time to use its illustrations of later chapters.00:00 Intro
01:05 The Setup
03:15 Whiskey Rebellion
05:36 Confederacy
07:50 Property, Culture, and Capitalism
15:01 Cultural Assumptions
19:20 Interventionism
21:04 Choices, not Systems
(more…)
February 7, 2026
The Probability Broach: L. Neil Smith’s libertarian fever-dream
November 28, 2025
QotD: Life is not a race to some arbitrary “finish line”
On a friend’s Facebook page I left the following comment about the claim of the writer Abi Wilkinson (in the Guardian!) that inheritance should be confiscated by government to fund the UK’s welfare state. What could possibly go wrong?
I wrote:
The hostility to inheritance also comes from a mistaken sense of fairness. As Robert Nozick argued in Anarchy, State and Utopia (I quote from memory), people wrongly think life resembles an athletics race, where the racers compete to hit the finishing line. As a result, those “lucky” athletes endowed by nature/god whatever with stronger muscles etc must be handicapped by having weights in their shoes, for example. Just as a child of rich parents must be deliberately held back to give poor kids a more “fair” chance of winning. But as Nozick said, life isn’t like that. It is about people exchanging goods, services and ideas with one another. There’s no fixed end-point to which we are all racing.
Also, the idea that there is some “prize” that humans compete for implies that someone or some entity has created that “prize” in the first place. But that’s smuggling in a sort of communitarian assumption into the actions of individuals. In an open society, the prizes on offer are varied and multiply constantly.
I should add that the second section of Nozick’s renowned book dissects and ultimately rejects forced redistribution for egalitarian or other forms of “patterned” notions of justice, and he robustly defends what he calls an “entitlement” concept of justice.
One of the approaches that the late Prof. Nozick used was the thought experiment, such as the example referenced above about a fictitious athletics race in which the entrants are hampered/favoured to make the race more “even”, and then assuming that society in general should be like this. A race, held by people who know the rules and seek to abide by them, is not like an open society. “Open” is the key word here: there is no single end to which persons are heading, such as winning the race.
And yet a lot of the metaphors one comes across around discussions around equality, including equality of opportunity as well as outcome, seem to borrow, perhaps unwittingly, from this “race competition” worldview. To give another example, I remember reading some months ago about a university professor (Warwick) who suggested that when parents read stories to their children, this is a form of privilege. This also plays to the idea that life has a fixed end-measure of success, so that anyone giving a value to someone else is giving the latter an unfair “head start” on someone else. It would require a State to exercise totalitarian control of our actions from the moment we wake up to go to sleep lest our actions unfairly advantage/hamper someone in the “race” they are considered, by this worldview, to be on. (It also, by the way, shows that today’s Higher Ed. is full of certifiable fools and worse.)
Johnathan Pearce, “The assault on inheritance and the assumptions that drive it”, Samizdata, 2025-08-21.
November 7, 2025
Milei – “If we don’t have [power], then the left will have it”
In Without Diminishment, Geoff Russ discusses Javier Milei’s recent podcast appearance and his demonstration that unlike a lot of theoretical libertarians, he understands the dynamics of political power:
There are many liberals, libertarians and anarcho-capitalists who are really useless because all they do is criticise, let’s say, those of us who want to lead the world toward the ideas of freedom. And what they don’t realise is that power is a zero-sum game, and if we don’t have it, then the left will have it. Therefore, if you level your harshest criticism at those in your own ranks, you end up being subservient.
Have truer words ever been spoken by an English-speaking politician?
Argentine President Javier Milei’s words on the Lex Fridman podcast were a blunt reminder of something that many conservatives, particularly those in Canada, have chosen to forget.
Politics is the pursuit of political power and the chance to use it before your opponents can. Debates can be won, superb essays published, and quotes recycled from deceased politicians. Without power, however, it all amounts to nothing more than a glorified brainstorming session.
The thoughtful ideas and proposals go to waste if they lie stagnant in perpetual bickering opposition.
On October 26, Milei won a resounding victory in the legislative elections. His party, Liberty Advances, gained forty-two seats and smashed the hard-left Peronists who have dominated Argentina’s politics for more than half a century.
Milei is a fanatical believer in libertarian ideas, and has never pretended to be a moderate or incrementalist. He famously brandishes a chainsaw to represent his willingness to destroy the broken socialist status quo of Argentina.
Javier Milei at CPAC in National Harbor, Maryland 20 February, 2025.
Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.The rise of Milei has been a cultural battle for the soul of the country, and he is not shy about it. Milei leads a fresh, winning anti-Peronist coalition of forgotten and angry Argentines who want permanent, radical change.
It may be tempting to view Milei’s success as a pure affirmation of the appeal of libertarian ideology, but he is hardly Argentina’s first advocate of economic freedom. He succeeds because he is the opposite of a polite, centre-right reformer. Milei unapologetically embraces his place as a culture warrior seeking to remake the nation.
One of his targets is the institutional decadence and incompetence of the Peronist political machine. By swearing to snuff it out, Milei swept through traditional Peronist strongholds, whose voters had never considered voting for the formerly toothless Argentine opposition.
In Reason, Peter Suderman considers some of the lessons North Americans can learn from Milei’s stunning election victory:
To understand why Democrats overperformed in this week’s elections, look to Argentina.
Last month, Argentinian president Javier Milei won an unexpectedly large electoral affirmation, as his party significantly outperformed expectations by more than doubling its congressional representation in what was widely seen as a referendum on his agenda.
Over the past two years, Milei, the world’s most libertarian national leader, has slashed spending, cut red tape, and made his top priority restoring economic order and prosperity to a country that has long been a socialist basket case. Critics warned that his policies would be destructive, destabilizing, and unpopular. But not only did he deliver the country’s first balanced budget in over a decade, he oversaw a radical decline in inflation — from 200 percent when he entered office down to 32 percent last month.
Despite warnings that the country would reject Milei’s brand of austerity, the country responded with a strong vindication of his policies. In a post-election analysis, The New York Times noted that Milei’s message was that only he offered a “path for a country that has undergone years of runaway inflation under high-spending populist governments”. The report pointed to Milei’s economic record to explain his party’s win: “Many Argentines had grown tired of prices swinging wildly from day to day and of a ruling class they considered to be corrupt and irresponsible”.
The same report said Milei’s outsized victory was “unexpected”. But perhaps it shouldn’t have been, because economic stability and low inflation are what voters the world over clearly want.
When voters swept President Donald Trump into office for the second time last fall, large majorities of his voters gave the economy poor marks and said their own family finances had worsened over the years. Under President Joe Biden, the American economy had been wracked by the biggest surge in inflation in forty years. American voters punished the party that was in power when that happened.
This was true all over the world. After the pandemic, inflation skyrocketed globally, and in election after election, voters rejected ruling parties.
Inflation and economic instability have long been political losers: Look at Ronald Reagan’s victory over Jimmy Carter in 1980, and his ensuing near-sweep of states in 1984 after taming a decade of out of control price hikes. The post-pandemic years have further reinforced this lesson.
Update: Undoctrination looks at Milei’s time in office so far.
Undoctrination
Published 6 Nov 2025Javier Milei just pulled off the impossible … again.
In Argentina”s 2025 “midterm” elections, Milei’s 4-year-old party, La Libertad Avanza, went from a tiny minority to the largest party in the lower house, ending socialist dominance in Congress. The election was widely viewed as a referendum on Milei’s shock therapy plan for Argentina. The results are in: Argentines want more freedom.
In this video we cover:
How Milei slashed inflation from 211% to 31.8% in just 2 years
The 34,000 government jobs cut, 10 agencies eliminated, and 672 deregulations that freed the economy during Milei’s first year in office
How the Buenos Aires rental market exploded after lifting controls
How Peronists lost their veto-proof majority — and what it means for the futureAnd we feature expert analysis from Marcos Falcone, Policy Analyst, Center for Global Liberal and Prosperity.
October 30, 2025
Javier Milei’s party does well in mid-term elections
J.D. Tuccille on the results of Argentina’s recent elections which returned significantly more of Javier Milei’s allies than pre-election polls predicted:
And things were going so well before 2am …
Argentina’s libertarian President Javier Milei won an important election victory on Sunday when his coalition, La Libertad Avanza (LLA), received a plurality of votes in the country’s legislative elections. With about half of the seats in the lower house up for grabs and a third of the Senate, LLA didn’t gain a majority, but it dramatically increased its share enough to block repeals of presidential decrees by lawmakers from other parties and to support presidential vetoes.
As Reason‘s César Báez commented, the results give Milei and his allies crucial time to continue needed free-market reforms and, hopefully, restore the fortunes of a country once held up as a model of prosperity, but which has been driven into poverty by decades of statist misrule.
In what it calls “a shocking electoral victory”, La Nacion reports that LLA pulled 40.66 percent of the vote. That’s well ahead of the opposition Peronists, who have long dominated the country and drew 31.7 percent of votes. Importantly, LLA won the populous province of Buenos Aires (home to 40 percent of voters), a Peronist stronghold where Milei’s allies were recently trounced in local elections.
From Wealth to Poverty Under Government Economic Meddling
This is good news for anybody who hopes for the advance of freedom, of course. But it’s especially encouraging for Argentines who, over the course of generations, have seen their country reduced from one of the wealthiest in the world to an impoverished basket case.
“At the end of the 19th century, economists agreed: Argentina, the ‘land of silver’, had a golden future ahead of it,” Deutsche Welle noted in 2020. “‘Rich like an Argentine’ was a common phrase at the time.”
The German broadcaster added, “in an unprecedented fall, Argentina went from ranking among the world’s top economies to one at the very bottom of the list. Today, economists simply roll their eyes at the fate of Argentina, which is now a developing country.”
The reason is simple enough: Argentines handed their political fates to a man named Juan Peron. In the 1930s, Peron served as a military observer in Europe, traveling to countries including Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union. He was deeply impressed by some of the worst ideas to ever motivate a government and blended them into his own “justicialist” ideology. Through decades of political dominance, first Peron and then successor justicialists demonstrated that, in practice, there’s no real difference between fascism and socialism and that statist economics by any name are destructive.
To illustrate just how destructive Peron’s legacy has been, it’s worth pointing out that after Sunday’s election, The Wall Street Journal reported that Milei’s free-market, smaller-government policies “have restored some credibility to Latin America’s third-largest economy, but about one in three people still live in poverty”. One-third of the population living in poverty is horrifying, but what’s remarkable is that this is an improvement over what went before. At the end of the preceding Kirchner presidency, poverty stood at 41.7 percent and then briefly rose to 52.9 percent before falling to its current level.
In Spiked, Hugo Timms points out that the success of La Libertad Avanza is almost diametrically opposed to what most mainstream media reports were saying in the days leading up to the elections:
Argentine president Javier Milei has won a significant victory in Argentina’s midterm elections, held on Sunday. His libertarian party, La Libertad Avanza (Liberty Advances), claimed more than 40 per cent of the vote, effectively doubling its share of seats in the senate and lower house to 37 (out of 72) and 64 (out of 257) respectively.
The result came as a bitter shock to much of the mainstream Western press. Milei’s assault on established economic orthodoxies since his election in December 2023 led many “experts” to take it for granted that Milei’s party was in for a hiding.
In a primer for the election published last weekend, the Observer had already begun salivating over the prospect of Milei’s defeat. “Argentina is counting the cost of its turn to Javier Milei”, wrote economics editor Heather Stewart. Glum portraits of Nigel Farage and Donald Trump behind Milei loomed above the article. “Politicians around the world are closely watching what happens when populist economic prescriptions collide with reality”.
This was a comparatively soft take compared with what the Guardian published earlier in October. “Farage, Trump, Musk: your boy Javier Milei just took one hell of a beating. Why so quiet?”, blared the headline when Milei’s party was defeated in a provincial election in the capital Buenos Aires. The Guardian said Milei’s “hard right” administration was “melting away”, along with his “once-packed international throng of cheerleaders and wolf-whistlers”.
Unsurprisingly, the BBC struggled to get to grips with Milei’s victory on Sunday, even though its only job was to convey the results impartially. Apparently, the president made gains despite Argentina “hurtling towards an economic collapse”, it editorialised. It said the voter turnout of 68 per cent reflected “widespread apathy”. This might be lower than past midterm elections in Argentina, but it was still higher than turnouts at last year’s US presidential election (65 per cent) and the most recent UK General Election (60 per cent).
None of this should come as a shock. Since Milei’s rise to power in 2023, most of the commentariat has been eager to see him fail. His promises to radically cut public spending and deregulate key industries were seen in the eyes of many economic experts to only mean one thing: the dreaded return of Thatcherite “neoliberalism”, from which, they claim, Britain and America have never truly recovered.
The antipathy is mutual. In a speech to the World Economic Forum in January 2024, Milei famously referred to the world’s political classes as “parasites who live off the state”. That his speech was shared approvingly by Elon Musk on X confirmed, in the eyes of the Western establishment, Milei’s status as a dangerous insurrectionist.
September 25, 2025
David Friedman on markets, governments and whether we need either?
Adam Smith Institute
Published 16 May 2025When markets go awry, who is to blame? Some blame greedy profiteers, whilst others blame governments for tinkering with incentives and supply chains. Where does the truth lie? And what role should the government play when markets go wrong?
Professor David Friedman is a physicist, leading free-market economist and Professor Emeritus of law at Santa Clara University. The son of Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, David has authored many textbooks on free-market and libertarian theory. In 1973, he published The Machinery of Freedom, which has been ranked by Liberty magazine as one of the “Top Ten Best Libertarian Books” of all time.
TIMESTAMPS
0:00 – Intro
1:00 – What is a market failure?
2:44 – Restaurant analogy
4:15 – Negative externalities
5:00 – Positive externalities
5:50 – Malls
6:55 – Radio
7:40 – Price System
8:48 – Why most economists aren’t libertarians?
9:26 – Government action is a political market
12:30 – Secure property rights for future benefits
15:27 – Stalin
16:15 – Military examples
18:20 – Teaching
19:47 – Desert example
20:55 – Conclusion
22:19 – End
September 24, 2025
QotD: The political divisions of humanity
The first time, in the history of Western Civilization, that this became an issue, was the Renaissance/Reformation. Information suddenly came flooding, unbidden, into Europe, from North Africa, through Galileo’s telescope, out of Gutenberg’s printing press, and a dozen other undesirable, unlicensed, and deplorable sources. It must have been a nightmare for the aristocrats who considered themselves to be in charge, the kings and barons and bishops and bullies. They struggled in vain to get it back under control. They got the Church to condemn it. They intimidated and tortured its emissaries when they could. They invented universities to get a handle on it, a collar around its neck, but it was a lost cause. In just a couple of centuries (compared to the previous 500 generations), people — ordinary people; who the hell did they think they were? — came to know too much for the good of Authority.
And they soon proved it, in the American Revolution, which told 10,000 years of kings to go to hell, and the French Revolution, which cut to the chase and removed their overly-pampered heads. I have actually seen the blade. Many other revolutions followed, worldwide, and people began to learn, slowly and awkwardly, to live their own lives. The one good thing to come out of the brutal and deceitful Russian Revolution was the ultimately individualistic philosophy of refugee Ayn Rand.
Otherwise, it was a naked attempt by the authoritarians, the feudalists, to regain control of the masses that the Czar had clumsily let slip through his overly-manicured fingers. Whenever human beings have clashed over whether their lives should be controlled by others or not, it has almost certainly been a matter of who gets to be the next king, baron, bishop, commissar, etc., a battle between liberated entities and those who would restore feudalism.
L. Neil Smith, “The Deep State”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2019-04-14.
September 18, 2025
Broken feedback paths lead to broken organizations … like government
Lorenzo Warby on the ever-increasing dysfunction of most western governments due to the deliberate sabotage of what used to be functional feedback paths:
That institutions within Western democracies have deteriorated in recent decades is clear. That the march of progressivism through the institutions is at the heart of this deterioration is also clear.1
This has been progressives acting like progressives, with all the perverse relationship with information that is at the heart of progressivism. A perverse relationship that leads directly to their degradation of institutions.
Progressives use the imagined future as their benchmark of judgement, but there is no information from the future, so there is no reality-test in their benchmark of judgement. The imagined future can, however, be as glorious as one likes.
Conversely, anything actually created by humans will have downsides and even sins attached. This gives progressives a great rhetorical advantage over anyone who attempts to defend anything humans have actually built. All of the painful history of human achievement is rendered as naught, as mute, in the face of the splendours in their head.
Arnold Kling’s Three Languages of Politics model.
If a group is disproportionately successful, that is not an example to emulate but a sign of their oppressor status. If they are comparatively unsuccessful, that is not a warning about what to avoid, but a sign of their oppressed status. This is an outlook deeply hostile to learning from what does, and does not, work.
For using the glorious imagined future as the benchmark of judgement creates the basis for denigrating anything that comes from the past: which is all the information we have about what works and does not. This includes denigrating the embedded learning in institutions. Even fundamental questions about what is required to sustain a social order get written out of acceptable discourse as not fitting with their imagined-future benchmark of judgement, with the splendours in their heads.
Using the imagined future as one’s benchmark of judgement also naturally leads to concluding that one owns morality, as any opposition to the glorious imagined future is clearly immoral. This leads to, at best, comprehensive disengagement with, and at worse, systematic denigration and delegitimisation of, those who disagree. A systematic denigration and delegitimisation that often involves systematic misrepresentation of those who disagree. The consequence of all this is to block feedback about one’s political projects.
The most extreme instance of this has been the UK, where the Blair–Brown Governments of 1997-2010 took power away from elected officials (apart from the PM) and handed it to “experts” in quangoes, to judges via human rights legislation and to the EU. Those with the “correct” understandings could do their thing, insulated from voters. This made the UK a state, a polity, with broken feedbacks.
Modern Western civilisation is a civilisation with broken feedbacks — as I discuss here, here, here, here and here — but the Blair-Brown constitutional vandalism extended that pattern of broken feedbacks systematically to the British state. The consequences have become grimly obvious. Massive waves of unwanted migrants as part of a massively dysfunctional British state.
If you systematically kill feedbacks from voters, you systematically kill accountability. Of course dysfunction will spread across the organs of the state, as it has. (See here for a discussion of aspects of that horrifying dysfunction.)
- Feminisation of institutions has also been a corrosive factor, but that is deeply intertwined with the march of progressivism through the institutions.
Update, 19 September: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
July 23, 2025
Javier Milei is delivering “a man-made miracle” for Argentina
Niall Ferguson‘s thread on the social media site formerly known as Twitter, thanks to the Thread Reader App:
While the world fixates on Donald Trump’s populist cocktail of reciprocal tariffs and big, beautiful deficits, @JMilei is delivering a man-made miracle that should gladden the heart of every classical economist and quicken the pulse of all political libertarians.
@JMilei has brought monthly inflation down from 13% to 2%. The economy is now growing at an annual rate of 7%. Investors no longer shun Argentine bonds and stocks — indeed, they were among the best investments you could have made over the past two years. After a brief upward jump, the poverty rate has fallen from 42%, when Milei was elected, to 31%
These are astonishing feats. And they have ramifications that go far beyond South America. Free-market economics and political libertarianism are sometimes dismissed as a fad of the “neoliberal” 1980s, long ago superseded by the new populisms of the left and the right. Not so. The world has never seen a government more radically libertarian than @JMilei. But the amazing thing is not that it is working economically. The true miracle is that Milei’s shock therapy is working politically.
With his leather jacket and late ’60s mop top, @JMilei is part–rock star, part–mad professor, dancing, singing, and screaming his catch phrase: ¡Viva la libertad, carajo! — “Long live liberty, damn it!” It’s as if Joe Cocker had gone onstage at Woodstock and sung “I’ll Get By with a Little Help from My Friedman”. Never in the history of democracy has a tribune of the people won power this way.
July 12, 2025
Noah Smith on how surprisingly well free market policies are working in Argentina
In the headline, you should read the unstated “surprising to far too many mainstream economists and political commentators”, but full credit to Noah Smith for admitting that Milei’s radical agenda has started to make life much better for ordinary Argentinians:
Javier Milei at CPAC in National Harbor, Maryland 20 February, 2025.
Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.
So to be clear, when I say that criticism of free markets has been overdone, I’m partly talking to myself. A couple of months ago, horrified by Trump’s tariff policies, I wrote an apology to libertarians, admitting that I had failed to see the political usefulness of their project in terms of maintaining economic sanity on the Right.
But it’s not just the political benefits of free markets that have been undersold; I think the purely economic advantages are also too often ignored.
Exhibit A is Javier Milei’s track record in Argentina. A year and a half ago, when Milei was elected President of Argentina, a bunch of left-wing economists warned darkly that his radical free-market program would lead to economic devastation:
The election of the radical rightwing economist Javier Milei as president of Argentina would probably inflict further economic “devastation” and social chaos on the South American country, a group of more than 100 leading economists has warned … [S]ignatories include influential economists such as France’s Thomas Piketty, India’s Jayati Ghosh, the Serbian-American Branko Milanović and Colombia’s former finance minister José Antonio Ocampo …
The letter said Milei’s proposals – while presented as “a radical departure from traditional economic thinking” – were actually “rooted in laissez-faire economics” and “fraught with risks that make them potentially very harmful for the Argentine economy and the Argentine people” … [T]he economists warned that “a major reduction in government spending would increase already high levels of poverty and inequality, and could result in significantly increased social tensions and conflict.”
“Javier Milei’s dollarization and fiscal austerity proposals overlook the complexities of modern economies, ignore lessons from historical crises, and open the door for accentuating already severe inequalities,” they wrote.
Milei won anyway. His first big policy, and the one the lefty economists fretted about the most, was deep fiscal austerity. Argentina’s long-standing economic model, created by dictator Juan Peron in the 1950s, involved a large and complex array of public works projects and subsidies for various consumer goods like energy and transportation. Milei slashed many of these, as well as cutting pensions, civil service employment, and transfers to provinces. Overall, he cut public spending by about 31%, resulting in a near-total elimination of Argentina’s chronic budget deficit:
The point of all this cutting wasn’t just to remove state intervention in the economy — it was to stop inflation. Basically, macroeconomic theory says that if deficits are high and persistent enough, then they convince everyone that the government will eventually inflate its debt away by printing money (which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy). And most or all countries that experience hyperinflation end up escaping it only when they get their fiscal house in order. Perpetual deficits were part of Argentina’s “Peronist” system, and it’s probably a good bet that this has been responsible for the periodic bouts of hyperinflation that it experiences.
[…]
But still, Milei’s success so far should make us somewhat more confident about free-market policies — especially when we evaluate them against the new socialist ideas that have been gaining currency in the U.S. In the past, socialists and other left-leaning economic thinkers advocated central planning and nationalization of industry; in recent years, they have taken to calling for expansion of the state through fiscal policy, mixing macroeconomic justifications with micro. At all times, they call for deficit-financed expansion of social programs; when fiscal hawks want to tame the deficits, the lefties warn of the short-term macroeconomic harms of austerity.
If you’re always more terrified of austerity than you are of deficits, expansion of the state — and of the deficit — becomes a one-way ratchet. This approach is very different than Keynesianism, which advocates stimulus to overcome recessions, followed by austerity during boom times. You’ll recognize it as bearing a distinct similarity to MMT; that pseudo-theory has largely fallen out of favor, but there are plenty of more respectable progressive types whose ideas nonetheless have a lot of this “macroleftist” flavor.
July 9, 2025
Argentina after 18 months of Milei’s leadership
All the mainstream media folks were predicting that Argentina would be an utter economic disaster after the election of Javier Milei. A few of them are starting to come around to admitting that Argentina seems to have made the right move:
What’s happening in Argentina is super impressive, but it’s not a miracle.
Yes, Milei’s reforms are generating great results, but that is exactly what libertarians and small-government conservatives said would happen.
Let’s start with this celebration of the amazing growth of private-sector wages since Milei took office in late 2023.
Or how about the astounding way that Milei has conquered inflation (I also like how this tweet mocks the statists like Piketty who frantically and erroneously warned that Milei’s election would produce an economic catastrophe).
[…]
Let’s close with another tweet.
Here’s Noah Smith, who is not a libertarian, shared two days ago.
Give him credit for acknowledging Milei’s success.
I’ll add two comments about this tweet, one about economic data and the other about predicting whether Milei would get great results.
Regarding data, I don’t think anyone should get overly excited by one month or one quarter of economic data. Even one year of data might create a misleading impression (which is why my Anti-Convergence Club is always based on decades of data). That being said, there is every reason to expect continuing strong results for Argentina.
Regarding predictions, Smith’s tweet asserts that libertarians didn’t expect Milei to be so wildly successful. At the risk of sounding like a politician, I agree and disagree.
- The “agree” part is that many libertarians were worried at the beginning of Milei’s presidency that he might face immovable opposition from the Peronist-controlled legislature. We also worried that the special interest groups might launch massive – and successful – protests that would derail necessary reforms. So if you asked me in December 2023 for my prediction, I would not have been overflowing with optimism.
- The “disagree” part is that I have always had total and absolute confidence that radical pro-market policies will produce great results, anywhere and everywhere. And I assume other libertarians (as well as Reagan-type conservatives) share my faith that good policies lead to good outcomes. So if I was told in December 2023 what Milei would have accomplished in his first 18 months, I would have fully expected the great news we now see.
In other words, what’s miraculous is that the reforms happened. The subsequent economic renaissance has been boringly inevitable (but totally wonderful).
P.S. I am cautiously optimistic that Milei will get more allies in the legislature after Argentina’s mid-term elections later this year.
July 8, 2025
“One of the problems with being a writer is that all of your idiocies are still in print somewhere”
At the Foundation for Economic Education, Itxu Díaz considers the work of P.J. O’Rourke:
Though P.J. O’Rourke passed away three years ago, his sharp wit and defense of freedom continue to resonate in a world still tempted by interventionist solutions. Reclaiming his work is more vital now than ever. What he told us through laughs and jabs in recent decades has proven to be one of the sharpest diagnoses of the dangers of postmodern left-wing ideology — and one of the most inspired reflections on why we must root our societies in individual liberty, private property, the free market, and the Judeo-Christian values that shaped the West for centuries.
Progressives want bigger government, and often conservatives don’t want it as small as we ought to like. O’Rourke knew all too well that the larger the state grows, the smaller individuals become. He devoted much of his work to explaining this in a way anyone could understand — even those not particularly interested in politics. His words resonate today in a new light, and fortunately, they remain easy to access: the Internet is full of O’Rourke’s articles, and all his books are still in print. The ideas, the jokes — the profound, the outdated, and even the ones that haven’t aged all that well — are still out there, waiting to be discovered by any digital wanderer with a sense of humor and a thirst for sharp thinking. It’s almost frightening to realize that some of O’Rourke’s tech-related jokes would go completely over a Millennial or Zoomer’s head today. And it’s even more pitiful to think that some of his old comments would be cancelled in today’s dull, hypersensitive postmodern world. Perhaps it’s because, as he once said, “One of the problems with being a writer is that all of your idiocies are still in print somewhere”. Incidentally, that’s where O’Rourke found his only point of agreement with environmentalists: “I strongly support paper recycling”.
The hippie student he was in the ’60s lost his enthusiasm for leftist ideas the following decade, as soon as he got his first paycheck from National Lampoon: a $300 check that filled him with joy — until he was told $140 would be deducted for taxes, health insurance, and Social Security. That day, he got mad at the government, and the grudge never faded. Before that, while still sporting what he called “a bad haircut” — think John Lennon’s worst style — he’d decided to tell his Republican grandmother he’d become a communist. Her response threw him off: “Well, at least you’re not a Democrat”.
O’Rourke was never one to romanticize his drug-fueled college days. “Oh God, the ’60s are back,” he wrote. “Good thing I’ve got a double-barreled 12-gauge with a chamber for three-inch magnum shells. And speaking strictly as a retired hippie and former beatnik, if the ’60s come my way, they won’t make it past the porch steps. They’ll be history. Which, for God’s sake, is what they’re supposed to be.”
From his time as editor-in-chief of National Lampoon in the ’70s, we got his account in The Hollywood Reporter, “How I Killed National Lampoon“. The job was a blast, but the environment was hell: “Having a bunch of humorists in one place is like having a bunch of cats in a sack”. As a satirical war correspondent covering every late-century conflict, O’Rourke filled countless pages describing the struggle to find a damn glass of whiskey in the burning countries at the “end of history”. His last dangerous assignment was in Iraq. “I’d been writing about overseas troubles of one kind or another for twenty-one years, in forty-some countries, none of them the nice ones. I had a happy marriage and cute kids. There wasn’t much happy or cute about Iraq,” he wrote in Holidays in Heck.
June 3, 2025
QotD: Heinlein’s opinions on the right to bear arms
Between 1942 and 1966 Heinlein’s politics evolved from New Deal left-liberalism towards what after 1971 would come to be called libertarianism. But that way of putting it is actually misleading, because Heinlein did not merely approach libertarianism, he played a significant part in defining it. His 1966 novel The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress was formative of the movement, with the “rational anarchist” Bernardo de la Paz becoming a role model for later libertarians. By 1978, we have direct evidence (from an interview in Samuel Edward Konkin’s New Libertarian magazine, among other sources) that Heinlein self-identified as a libertarian and regretted his earlier statism.
But if Heinlein’s overall politics changed considerably and wandered down some odd byways during his lifetime, his uncompromising support of civilian firearms rights was a constant on display throughout his life. Brin observes that was already true in 1942, but attempts to attribute this position to John W. Campbell. Multiple lines of evidence refute this claim.
[…]
Heinlein, on the other hand, was a vocal and consistent advocate of civilian weapons ownership both during and after his association with Campbell. This is perhaps clearest in his 1949 novel Red Planet, written after their parting of the ways. In that novel, the bearing of personal weapons is explicitly connected to the assumption of adult responsibilities.
Red Planet is also interesting because, although we might consider the views of Heinlein’s characters an unreliable guide to Heinlein’s own, Heinlein’s letters about the novel reveal much more. His editor at Scribner attempted to delete the section of argument in which weapons-bearing is connected to adult responsibility; Heinlein rejected this, objecting that it eviscerated the book’s ethical core and making very clear that the views of the pro-gun mentor figures in the novel were his own.
Heinlein was to reiterate similar views not only in his later fiction but in the posthumous nonfiction collection Grumbles From The Grave – by which time they were no surprise to any Heinlein fan. And it would be difficult to overstate the influence they had on firearms-rights activists during the dark years between the Gun Control Act of 1968 and our vindication in the 2008 District of Columbia v. Heller ruling.
Heinlein’s gift to firearms-rights activism during that bleak four decades was to be able to draw on the principled case for civilian firearms going back to the framers of the U.S. Constitution and English Republican sources and restate it in language appealing to the brightest children of post-WWII America. But he did more than that, because in Red Planet and elsewhere firearms rights were presented as an inextricable part of a philosophical whole, with the personal firearm both as instrument and defining symbol of personal liberty and responsibility.
Eric S. Raymond, “Brin on Heinlein on guns is dead wrong”, Armed and Dangerous, 2011-07-18.
May 31, 2025
“U.S. libertarians [are] the best friends Canada doesn’t know it has”
In the National Post, Colby Cosh sings the praises of American libertarians for their work in trying to dismantle some of Donald Trump’s dubiously Constitutional extensions of presidential power:
The James L. Watson Court of International Trade Building at 1 Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan, New York City.
Photo by Americasroof via Wikimedia Commons.
The U.S. Court of International Trade (CIT) issued a decision Wednesday that annuls various salvos of surprise economic tariffs, including ones on Canada, that have been enacted by President Donald Trump since his inauguration in January. I won’t lie to you: I had the same initial reaction to this consequential news that you probably did, which was “Hooray!” and then “Huh, there’s a U.S. Court of International Trade?”
This court is surely unfamiliar even to most Americans, no doubt because much of its work involves settling issues like “Do hockey pants count as ‘garments’ or ‘sports equipment’ under customs law?” Nevertheless, the CIT does have exclusive jurisdiction over civil actions involving U.S. trade law. It’s just that no president has ever before rewritten the tariff schedule of the republic in the half-mad fashion of a child taking crayons to a fresh-painted wall.
The American Constitution, from day one, has unambiguously assigned the right to set international tariffs to Congress. Congress is allowed to delegate its powers to the president and his agents for limited or temporary purposes, but it can’t abandon those powers to him altogether. Defining this legal frontier is what the CIT was asked to do, and their demarcation of it will now swim upward through higher appellate courts (its decision has been put on hold in the meantime).
The lawsuit was actually two parallel suits raising overlapping objections to the tariffs. One was brought forward by 12 U.S. states, and the other was filed by a group of tariff-exposed American businesses, including manufacturers of bikes, electronics kits and fishing equipment. The latter set of plaintiffs was roped together by the usual posse of heroic libertarians and legal originalists, including George Mason University law prof Ilya Somin.
About 24 hours after Trump originally announced the “Liberation Day” worldwide tariffs, Somin quickly blogged about how insanely unconstitutional the whole idea was, and concluded his article essentially by saying “I’m darn well gonna do something about this nonsense”. I don’t mean to suggest he deserves primary credit; I only intend to call attention, once again, to U.S. libertarians being the best friends Canada doesn’t know it has.
April 23, 2025
“Liberals have never met a crisis they didn’t think they could spend their way out of”
Jesse Kline refutes Mark Carney’s recent diss against libertarians:
The Liberal Boomer in his natural state (spotted on social media, 20 April, 2025).
“The capacity of the federal government to invest in the economy, to support businesses and individuals, will ensure that we bounce back strongly.”
That was Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announcing an $82-billion support package at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, but it could just as easily have been Carney, who said over the weekend that, “In a crisis … government needs to step up.”
At a Saturday news conference, the Liberal leader unveiled his party’s election platform, which includes $130 billion in new spending over four years to fend off the threats posed by U.S. President Donald Trump.
“It’s said there are no atheists in foxholes, there should be no libertarians in a crisis,” Carney argued to justify the continued spending spree.
This offends me as both a libertarian and an atheist. In fact, Canada would be in much better shape today if there were a few libertarians in the room when the Liberals were dealing with the numerous emergencies they’ve faced over the past decade.
The problem with crises is that there’s no way to predict when the next one will hit. But a prudent government should expect the unexpected and leave some fiscal room in the budget to address unforeseen events, while working to fortify the economy during good times so it can withstand the bad. This is not what the Liberals have done.
They took a $1.9-billion surplus in the 2014-15 fiscal year and turned it into a $25-billion deficit in 2016-17.
[…]
And so, we got more Big Government programs that we could ill afford, while Trudeau turned away world leaders looking to Canada to help solve an energy crisis resulting from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Now, as Carney prepares to launch another massive spending spree to deal with the effects of U.S. tariffs, he’s pledging hundreds of millions of dollars for unnecessary programs, including permanent funding for the Sexual and Reproductive Health Fund to make it easier to abort babies, and $400 million for IVF treatments to create new ones in a test tube.
Needless to say that if there were some libertarians around the cabinet table during the crises of the past 10 years, we likely wouldn’t be facing a major economic upheaval with a $40-billion budget deficit, which Carney wants to increase to $62 billion, and a national debt approaching $1.26 trillion.
Spending always appeals to the voters at election time, and the Liberals have been past masters of using that to get into power. But even though there may be a lot of ruin in a nation, even the biggest of nations eventually runs out of money. According to a report from Policy Horizons Canada, an in-house government think tank, we’re well on the way to reaching that ruin and nobody will like what that looks like:
The report warns that by 2040, housing affordability is essentially limited to the wealthy or those with family help; most new homeowners get help from family, some depend on intergenerational mortgages and have several generations of family living together, and others enter “alternative” household mortgages with friends, with a growing percentage of homeowners also owning rental properties.
“Inequality between those who rent and those who own has become a key driver of social, economic, and political conflict,” reads the report.
Moreover, the report highlights a growing dependence on intergenerational wealth, noting that by 2040, inheritance is widely seen as the only reliable path to prosperity. “Society increasingly resembles an aristocracy,” it states, as family background — particularly property ownership — becomes the defining factor in determining one’s opportunities.
Canadians in this future rarely mix with others of different socio-economic status, and there is a clear disconnect between the aspirations of the country’s youth and economic realities, which leaves most with limited expectations of success.
And finally, the rapid propagation of artificial intelligence has dramatically reshaped the labour market. By 2040, the rise of artificial intelligence will have significantly diminished the availability of jobs in creative and knowledge-based professions, once seen as stable paths to upward mobility.
[…]
As a result of the six factors, Canada’s economy could shrink or become less predictable, with the consumer economy shrinking in size, and a higher proportion of very wealthy, older people holding the capital capacity for investment in new businesses. Labour unions could also grow in power and size from a frustrated population. The mental health of Canadians could suffer from living cost challenges.
With these upward mobility issues, Canada may become a less attractive destination for immigrants, and there could be an exodus of young workers, which would exacerbate the issues with supporting the public and social services that support the country’s growing cohort of seniors. This could also result in a labour shortage in industries where artificial intelligence is most difficult.
Perhaps most dystopian is a partial reversion of Canadian society to a trade-and-barter and neo-hunter-gatherer society by 2040, in response to declining trust in formal systems and reduced access to traditional economic opportunities.
[…]
The report’s vision of a future Canada — where trust in institutions collapses, effort no longer yields reward, and people yearn for systemic change — carries echoes of that dangerous historical crossroads, where ideological extremes once flourished in the face of prolonged despair.
With all that said, how likely is this precarious scenario of Canadian society in just 15 years from 2025?
According to Policy Horizons Canada, its “research suggests that it is plausible and would create challenges across a range of policy areas.”
February 22, 2025
Trump’s movement is not the same old GOP
Lots of comments by and for Canadians in the last few weeks have been of the “running around with hair on fire” school of journalism. Donald Trump has transmogrified from the butt of jokes to the embodiment of everything technocratic Canadian “elites” fear:
Diagram of the “Overton Window”, based on a concept promoted by Joseph P. Overton (1960–2003), former director of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. The term “Overton Window” was coined by colleagues of Joe Overton after his death. In the political theory of the Overton Window, new ideas fall into a range of acceptability to the public, at the edges of which an elected official risks being voted out of office.
Illustration by Hydrargyrum via Wikimedia Commons
The re-election of Donald Trump has masked a growing and profound shift in American politics, and ushered in a new era of Republicanism in the United States. Trump’s return is seen by many to be an isolated incident, an aberration from previous conventional norms and one that will resolve once the man himself is gone from power or from this earth.
For these people, the issue is Trump and Trump alone.
I believe that this is a profound misunderstanding of what is happening in America today, and what the future holds.
The old Republican party is gone. In its place is a movement that is built on the foundations of 19th century expansionism; strength and self-interest. It is motivated to settle grievances against the post-war consensus conservatism that it blames — more than it even blames the left — for the decline of the once-mighty American empire. For the New Republican, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were as much responsible as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama in ushering in America’s decline.
Donald Trump is the transitionary vessel to carry that movement forward. He is the tip of the spear whose job is to crack open the institutions that the New Republican believes poisoned America for decades. Overton’s Window is wide open for the New Republican now.
It is useful to start with describing the New Republican movement. It is not the previous Republican movement of lower taxes, less state intervention or smaller government. These things may also be part of Trump’s movement, or at least a slice of it, but those are the beliefs of yesterday’s Republicans. Today’s ideology happens to dovetail well into the libertarian beliefs of the tech bros led by Elon Musk. Trump and Musk’s bromance is premised on some shared affection for each other as strong businessmen and leaders. But the alliance is shaky. Libertarian Republicans are only being tolerated by the larger movement because it’s useful in tearing down the structures the New Republican wishes to rebuild.
[…]
The New Republican is a value proposition. He rejects the very notion of normative values, that some countries may have values that are different, and which are to be tolerated even though they may be counter to American interests. There is no space for these values for the New Republican. The New Republican believes American values are superior and should be exported to the world. These values include family, fortitude, hard work, God, self-interest, the proper roles of the (two) sexes and especially, strength. That these values are the “right” values is self-evident to the New Republican, who believes that they should also be for everyone else.
Who are the New Republicans? One should look to Trump’s choices for cabinet — J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio and Howard Lutnick are good places to start. They all figure to be around — and in control of the party apparatus — once Trump is gone.
Elon Musk is not one of these people. Like Trump, he is the pointy end of a spear, and when the falling out between him and the New Republicans happens, it will not be pretty.
Finally, the New Republican is a lot of Americans. More than many would like to believe.
