[Ilya Somin] How Trump Imperils Free Markets and Personal Liberties
The Volokh Conspiracy 2025-02-28
[Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank provides a helpful summary, with a little help from me.]
Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, recently said the Post opinion page should be "writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets." This inspired Post columnist Dana Milbank to write a helpful piece outlining some of the many ways in which the new Trump administration threatens those values:
Personal liberties and free markets are part of the American creed. But many readers I've heard from suspect the words are cover for a plan to turn this into a MAGA-friendly outlet.
I don't yet know for sure. But this much is clear: If we as a newspaper, and we as a country, are to defend his twin pillars, then we must redouble our fight against the single greatest threat to "personal liberties and free markets" in the United States today: President Donald Trump…..
Claiming monarchical powers, attacking the free press, starting trade wars, cutting off legal immigration, siding with despots over free countries, politicizing law enforcement and the military, assaulting the judicial system and injecting crony capitalism at the highest levels of government: These are all the very antithesis of "personal liberties and free markets."
Milbank also interviewed me about this issue, and quoted a few things I said:
"I think, and many of us (libertarians) think, that the Trump administration is very bad on these metrics of both economic and personal liberty," [Somin] told me. "The massive trade wars that he's starting right and left go against Econ 101 as well as any libertarian principle. There's the mass deportation and immigration restrictions, which restrict both economic and personal liberty on a massive scale. There's his attacks on the freedom of the press, which are also troubling," as is Trump's "kissing the rear end of dictators like Vladimir Putin."
Somin likes some of Trump's efforts to cut regulations and taxes, but "if you look at the cumulative impact … the horrible things Trump is doing massively outweigh many times over the good that he might do in a few areas."
He rattled off a list of Trump's offenses against personal liberties and free markets. The president, by circumventing Congress's constitutional spending authority, is making the treasury "essentially the personal piggy bank of one man," which is "extremely dangerous from the libertarian point of view." Trump's attempts to cut federal spending and the workforce, though laudable, "are actually pretty piddling, and some of them may even make the federal budgetary and regulatory situation worse" because of their ham-handed implementation. His takeover of independent federal agencies raises libertarian concerns because it puts massive governmental power "concentrated in the hands of one man." His attempts to dictate school curriculums under the guise of abolishing DEI, and his discrimination against transgender people also offend libertarian principles. The GOP budget that passed the House this week with Trump's help "will massively add to the deficit," Somin pointed out, while doing nothing to stop the major entitlement programs, Medicare and Social Security, from "just handing out money to the nonpoor elderly or even the affluent elderly."
Somin said the handing over of taxpayers' personal information to unvetted members of Musk's team violates personal liberties. Trump's attacks on media outlets critical of him are classic "weaponization of government," Somin added, and his packing of the Justice Department and FBI with loyalists is "scary and dangerous." The presence of "cranks like RFK Jr." overseeing health policy will reduce access to medicines and vaccines, which is "just a straightforward violation of libertarian principles." And the president's crackdown on migration is "a severe restriction on both the economic and personal liberty of native-born Americans. People who want to hire immigrants or engage in social relations with them cannot do that if those people are not allowed to enter the country."
The professor was heavily critical of the Biden administration, too, most notably for unilaterally forgiving student loans. But "Trump is worse," Somin said, because "under Biden there was just no equivalent to the massive assault on immigration and trade," nor Trump's attempt "to usurp the entire spending power from Congress." In sum, Trump's approach is "irreconcilable" with the principles of free markets and personal liberties.
I outlined how severe immigration restrictions like those Trump is implementing, threaten liberty in greater detail here. The fundamental problem with Trump's administration is that the modest good he is doing on a few issues is massively outweighed by the immense scale of the harm, which includes massive trade wars with nearly all major trade partners, the most draconian immigration restrictions in modern history (save possibly those in force at the height of Covid), and undermining the Western alliance to the great benefit of authoritarian enemies like Russia and China.
I was, as Milbank notes, highly critical of many Biden policies, such as massive unilateral use of executive power to institute student loan forgiveness, and the abuse of the Covid emergency to perpetuate a nationwide eviction moratorium and bogus public health immigration restrictions. But Trump's assaults on liberty and constitutional government are substantially worse.
I don't agree with every point Milbank makes. For example, while Trump may be wrong to seek a federal takeover of the DC government, it isn't really a matter of personal liberties or free markets. But he's right about the overall picture.
I speak only for myself. But it's worth noting that I'm far from the only libertarian or libertarian-leaning commentator to sound the alarm about the new administration. For example, my Cato Institute colleagues Walter Olson, Alex Nowrasteh, David Bier, Scott Lincicome, Michael Cannon, and Patrick Eddington have also outlined the grave dangers posed by many of the new administration's policies.
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