I hate to sound monomaniacal by saying property rights should settle virtually all legal issues. Yet look at the ham-fisted idiocy that ensues when humanity tries conducting policy of any kind without regard to property and without regard to the strict individual, not collective, rights that logically follow from property—including the right to speak without checking for government approval, since self-ownership includes ownership of one’s own flapping gums.
Whether it’s disaster-relief coordination in Colombia or military adventures in Iran, things run by the ostensibly firm hand of central government authority almost always go badly, no matter how loudly rich, white, liberal college girls nowadays cheer for it and sneer at its hapless victims (who were probably, like, total racists or climate criminals or something!).
The U.S.’s “intellectuals” have a long history of looking wistfully at lands other than our own for legal and political models, which sounds thoughtful and humble until you look at how awful the legal regimes of even the most esteemed of those foreign lands really are. Trump notwithstanding, those lands tend to be more authoritarian than us, which is exactly what excites the intellectuals. Finally, they see their chance to boss around their dumb inferiors!
Belgium, for example, seems relatively inoffensive and civilized from afar, but (in addition to benefiting from unfair soccer calls) that nation a few months ago convicted Dries Van Langenhove of speaking with alarm about migration/crime correlations, despite the judge in the case saying the facts to which Van Langenhove pointed aren’t in dispute, that he’s only being punished for the context in which he mentioned them. The U.S. is now arguably the only country where truth is a surefire free speech legal defense. That is to say, tolerant adjudication is apparently not a Belgian strongpoint. I wouldn’t recommend trusting any international institutions headquartered there. (And I say this as someone sympathetic to immigration.)
If people learned economics (real, individual-decisions-based economics, not the politicized, central-planning fantasies of Karl Marx, Paul Krugman, or Robert Reich), they likely wouldn’t sound as lost, confused, and anxious as they do these days, flailing around for some big-government solution to their woes, whether homegrown or foreign-style—and whether on the left, where waging war against businesses has long been presumed to be good for business, or on the right, where everyone from young pundits like Dasha Nekrasova to potential next president JD Vance sound like they’re competing with the left to see who can despair (or snark) fastest about markets and the market-spawned historic prosperity keeping us all alive.
Contrary to the vague nationalist ideas rising in American politics in the Trump era, making sweeping judgments about, say, America being good or, say, Venezuela being bad, is inferior to making more fine-grained judgments about which specific things these places (ideally, specific individuals) are doing right or wrong. America is a place where tens of millions of people have gotten rich and happy—but it’s also, for instance, a place where one of the largest cities, Los Angeles, has a city government that was just sued by Mayor Karen Bass’ own brother for the irresponsible fire management that led to the devastating Palisades blaze, a disaster that her main opponent in the mayoral race was mocked for emphasizing in his campaign anecdotes.
You can love L.A. and denounce its government’s life-endangering political regime. Hate the player, not the place, lazy critic. Once you think about it that way, market individualism becomes the obvious always-active sorting mechanism by which to weed out destructive behavior patterns, and a far more subtle mechanism than bombing, blockading, booing only one party, or beating up outsiders.
Cuba desperately needs market reforms, but saying that is a very different thing from, for instance, saying a future U.S. President Rubio (or maybe Vice President, if Vance comes out on top) should seize control of that country and replace its government wholesale. A lot can go wrong when the goal of your hypothetical military management project is to remake everything. Treat politics as an all-or-nothing project in which everything in the nation is supposed to get transformed simultaneously (instead of in the piecemeal, individualized, ongoing fashion of the marketplace) and likely as not, no matter how good (and even superficially pro-market) your intentions, you end up with side effects such as socialists rioting and burning things in Bolivia because they lost a presidential election. With so much riding on one governmental job slot, you almost can’t blame them.
Back in the U.S., our own El Presidente, Trump, has offered our ostensible main enemy of the moment, Iran, some $300 billion in postwar subsidies (a deal for which Trump would surely have excoriated Obama or Biden had it been made on their watches), admitted that Iran should have ballistic missiles if other nations in the region do, and according to the Independent has told reporters who asked whether war could bankrupt us, “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation—I don't think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon.”
America last? Not at all? Free markets get derided for letting people obsess about which shampoo to buy, but at least they don’t encourage decisions as sweeping and costly—and hair-raising—as the ones politicians so blithely foist on us all.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey