One of the most despicable yet self-congratulatory subsets of the pundit class are writers who huff in that “I guess now I know all that I need to know about them!” tone about other writers not because those other writers said something wrong but merely because they haven’t said what the huffy writers wanted to hear precisely when the huffy writers wanted to hear it.
In decades past, the huffers might sometimes take the form of leftists accusing me of sucking up to the religious right even if I’d said so many times that there’s probably no God that I feared becoming boring. (I’m reminded, too, of some typical jerk I met at a party in Brooklyn who insisted that my old boss Judge Andrew Napolitano was just another apologist for George W. Bush—even though on-air the Judge had repeatedly called for Bush and Cheney to be prosecuted for war crimes.)
Naturally, nowadays the presumptuous huffers spend much of their time lamenting that various libertarian writers or activists have been insufficiently critical of Trump, even though most of those libertarians are likely just continuing the admirable, humble habits of tolerance and waiting-and-seeing they honed during prior authoritarian presidencies they despised, such as those of Obama and George W. Bush. But pundits who want you dancing rapidly to their tune only applaud you for sitting politely on the sidelines when it suits their specific political purposes for you to do so.
Right now, some of them are convinced the rest of us have no interest in calling out Trump-era corruption, separately from explicit bad policies.
On the contrary, if I, for one, haven’t frequently focused on politicians’ corrupt behaviors, it’s largely because I thought—in rather liberal fashion—that the classy, patient thing to do is to focus on the abstract moral arguments for or against their policies, not to harp too much on such mundane things as their extramarital affairs or taking of bribes. You could build an entire (very useful) career out of detailed reporting on graft, but many of us—politely, tolerantly, humbly—thought it best to aim high and analyze the pros and cons of best-case-scenario outcomes of clashing proposed policy alternatives.
Still, if it’s condemnation of current real-world corruption you want, here are 10 big areas of potential corruption (across the political spectrum and in both the public and private sectors) for the discerning libertarian-ish pundit to lament in the 2020s, lest anyone think we haven’t noticed.
It appears Trump profited while in office from, among other things, buying Palantir stock and then touting the stock on his Truth Social account. Impeach him.
Meanwhile, Trump’s frequent ally Speaker of the House Mike Johnson whines that if Congress’s salaries (like those of many actual workers) haven’t risen in two decades, the law should at least change to let them do more stock trading, as if that wouldn’t increase the incentives to shape regulations and spending programs in ways that benefited their own pocketbooks. Impeach him.
It’s not just the U.S. that suffers from the corrupting effects of mixing economics and big-government politics, of course. Economist Richard Werner courageously addressed the European Parliament on the threat posed by centralized digital currency, which is far from the same thing as a free market of competing digital (or any other kind of) currencies. Much easier to unilaterally inflate, for one thing—the same old problem as government-printed, centralized paper currency. Abolish all government currencies.
At the same time, recent attacks or threatened attacks on crypto billionaires by deranged activists wielding wrenches are not, I posit, the path to a civil, humane economy and will tend to corrupt the very idea of activism until activism is indistinguishable (if it’s not already) from merely acting out, like so many death-dealing Mangiones. Condemn the wrench-wielders. Arrest them. Shoot back at them when necessary.
I’d never want a legal ban on “reverse ATMs,” useful machines that give you a short-term credit card in return for feeding them cash, but voluntary capitalist practices can in the long run be their own undoing. We should keep in mind that the more cash the establishment gets off the streets, the more digitized and thus centrally-programmable our money becomes (for specific, establishment-approved geographic, physical, or behavioral qualities). Try not to comply with the systems that make them think like our overlords.
While the masses fight each other in an effort to resolve disagreements, the governing class is perfectly happy to put contradictory policies in place at the same time, as long as all the policies increase the power of the government or its allies. We’ve lately been on a foreign aid spree (see: various military conflict zones) and a ham-fisted nationalist bender at the same time (see: tariffs on Canada, though also, just as tragically, tariffs by Canada). The right and left must both end if resources are to flow to the productive activities customers and investors would actually prefer, to put it mildly.
Making any cuts to government’s obscene bloat remains tricky while outlets like The New York Times are ever-ready to make pathetic attempts to tug at the heartstrings by doing profiles of people like a laid-off woman who made over a quarter-million a year at USAID but now has a low-paying retail job after Trump cut the USAID budget. It never occurs to the socialists at the Times that these bureaucrats might’ve been overpaid back when they got their loot from the helpless taxpayers and are more fairly evaluated now that their money comes from willingly-paying customers. Even the sad and laid-off can be corrupted by government money, so end it.
Speaking of the Times, columnist Nicholas Kristof (reports the New York Post) has been doing friendly columns about the people who contributed to his failed gubernatorial campaign. Not the end of the world but probably not exactly objective.
Lest we invest too much hope in new media as a solution to problems like the Times, and lest we think Trump is the only person distorting and uglifying national dialogue, I must note that impotently-fuming, vlogging, middle-aged, white-male Trump-haters are some of the most unsettling characters in the current national drama. When they have a regular podcast, instead of seeming happy to have an outlet, you get the unsettling impression someone from the Democratic Party is holding a gun to their sweating, bald, unsmiling heads until they hit Kamala Harris’ favored talking points or whatever and thus receive their pay. Maybe they’re just like that naturally, I don’t know. They don’t seem to be having fun, in any case.
As a result of such horrors, I find myself increasingly fond of videos posted by completely amateur non-pundits who just happen to have witnessed something firsthand that shocks them into commenting. Duke Energy has allegedly been overbilling people, with results such as one customer making a video about how they not only charged her the most at times when nothing was in use in her house but also charged her the same amount on each of two separate houses, down to the penny, the sort of thing that makes one worry it’s all an arbitrary fiction. Corruption erodes trust as surely as communism does.
And speaking of communism, don’t start imagining that that’s a route of escape for our corrupt and faltering republic. Zach Weissmueller at Reason offers a fine overview of how quickly the Democrats are now veering in that deadly-dangerous direction thanks to the DSA, and Splice Today’s Chris Beck wrote recently about the danger of “the Hasan Piker gamble.” At least a decentralized marketplace, unlike communism, lets you ditch one corrupt business for another.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey