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 |  Subject: Anarcho-Capitalist NEWS: Documenting the Domination of Libertarian Economics  Sat Sep 26, 2020 5:38 am | |
| Dear Capitolistas,
The New York Times recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of Milton Friedman’s influential New York Times Magazine essay, “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits” with a great idea: having Thought LeadersTM from across the political spectrum opine on the essay and its impact. The idea’s execution was, well, not as great. It honestly seemed like several people hadn’t even read the essay—or at least understood Friedman’s actual point—but that’s actually an issue for another time. Instead, I want to focus on the 3,000-word essay from Kurt Andersen that accompanied the NYT project—“How Liberals Opened the Door to Libertarian Economics”—because it hits on a theme that both the left and the right have recently embraced: the historical dominance of “libertarian economics” or, as Andersen puts it, “the full Friedmanization of our economy for the last four decades.”
That’s right. In case you haven’t heard, my fellow libertarians and I run Washington and have done so since the 1970s. No, really, stop laughing: Seemingly everywhere you look these days, you’ll find politicians and pundits on the right and the left blaming libertarians for whatever problems you, dear reader/viewer/donor/voter, see in America. As I noted to Jonah on The Remnant last year, the concept is laughable—and not just on foreign policy—to anyone who has worked in D.C. over the last several decades, but it nevertheless persists and motivates a lot of populist arguments and proposals.
It therefore deserves a more objective response, so that’s what we’re going to do today.
(WARNING: NUMEROUS CHARTS AHEAD, AND BEFORE YOU ASK: YES, ALL DATA ARE INFLATION-ADJUSTED UNLESS INAPPLICABLE OR OTHERWISE NOTED.)
Before we begin, some necessary context: First, as both history and many of the following charts show, U.S. economic policy in the ’60s was clearly not “libertarian,” following decades of government expansion and economic intervention through the New Deal, the Great Society, the Warren Court, trade and immigration restrictionism, and so on. (Friedman and other free marketers arose in response to this statism.) Thus, simply maintaining the status quo of this era would hardly be reason to declare libertarian victory. Second, even despite the above interventionism, the 20th century U.S. economy was generally more market‐oriented than other countries, due in large part to their dabbling in socialism or communism during the same period and to factors inherent in the U.S. system like property rights and rule of law. This matters when considering, for example, global rankings of government spending or economic freedom—it’s all relative.
Now on to the show.
The size and scope of the federal government.
Let’s start with the U.S. budget and overall size of government. As can be seen from the charts below (courtesy of the Cato Institute’s Chris Edwards), inflation‐adjusted government expenditures have grown steadily over the last several decades, while spending as a share of GDP has fluctuated but is still up since libertarians first “assumed control” of D.C. in the ’70s:
Here: https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/documenting-domination-libertarian-economics |
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