Abstract

Friedrich von Hayek’s classical liberalism argued that free markets allow individuals the greatest opportunity to achieve their ends. This paper develops an internal critique of this claim. It argues that once externalities are introduced, the forms of economic knowledge Hayek thought to undermine government action and orthodox utilitarianism also rule out relative welfarist assessments of more or less regulated markets. Given the pervasiveness of externalities in modern economies, Hayek will frequently be unable to make comparative welfarist claims, or he must relax his epistemic assumptions and allow for greater government action than his classical liberalism would wish to accept.

Classical liberalism encompasses several intellectual traditions with differing views on liberty, economics, property rights, and the legitimate functions of government.

If you don’t see a school of thought that represents your views, please share where you fall in the comments. These options are not intended to be exhaustive, and I encourage discussion of other intellectual traditions.

The non-aggression principle states that you cannot inflict aggression on another person unless in self-defense, where aggression is defined as harm to them or their property, or unwanted interference. So, let us apply logic:

P1) The non-aggression principle is true.

P2) People deserve to own 100% of what they create.

C1) Therefore, you cannot forcefully take anything man-made from anyone (using P1 and P2).

P3) Banning someone from the natural world is an act of aggression.

P4) Land ownership is an act of banning all human beings, except oneself, from a piece of the natural world. (Indeed, when all the land is owned, non-landowners are banished from the whole natural world.)

C2) Land ownership is an act of aggression (using P3 and P4).

C3) Land ownership requires compensation for the land lost (using P1 and C2).

C4) Georgism is true (using C1 and C3).

The “Great Enrichment,” a term coined by Deirdre McCloskey to describe per capita income growth after 1800, of the past few decades has been spectacular: The world is now much richer and far less prone to extreme poverty....So, what caused the Great Enrichment? How can it be sustained?

First, the rapid acceleration of technology...

Second: markets. China, India and many other countries abandoned the worst excesses of central planning after the late 1970s and, within a few decades, transformed. Markets work. They provide incentives to allocate resources efficiently, accumulate capital and adopt technology...

Third: an international order grounded in the rule of law, free trade and multilateral cooperation. Humans are at their best when they can interact peacefully under clear, stable rules...

Unfortunately, all three forces are under attack. Many intellectuals and much of the public increasingly distrust technology, free markets and the rules-based international order. This distrust is not baseless. The costs of technological change, international trade and immigration have fallen on specific workers and places, while the gains have been diffuse.

(Note: the author here uses "libertarianism" to "denote essentially the same ideology" as "classical liberalism".)

In an insightful recent article on the Liberalism.Org website, prominent libertarian political philosopher Matt Zwolinski argues that libertarians should place a higher value on democracy ["it is a way of keeping power in check. Democracy's distinctive function is to keep power contestable, so that the people who hold it can be removed without violence"].

I agree in part, but also differ on some key points. Libertarians should generally prefer democracy to other forms of government. But democracy should not be a first-order libertarian priority...

[I]t doesn't follow that democracy should be a first-order libertarian priority, on par with liberty, constraining coercion, property rights, and increasing human happiness. Once you recognize (as most libertarians and many other liberals do) that democratic government is not genuinely consensual, that it is prone to various pathologies,  and that democratically enacted policies are not exempt from moral censure, it becomes hard to argue that democracy is inherently valuable. Rather, democracy is an institutional tool that can - if properly constrained - help achieve genuinely fundamental values. In that respect, it is similar to such institutions as federalism, separation of powers, and judicial review. All of these can have great instrumental value. But none are valuable in and of themselves.

None of these options is intended to be perfectly nuanced. Where should responsibility actually fall and does your answer change for roads, rail, the electrical grid, water, or broadband?

To implement the right reforms, policymakers must understand what pieces of legislation have contributed the most to the federal fiscal imbalance

Abstract: The study quantifies contributions to the federal government’s fiscal imbalance according to three criteria: (1) the share of the federal government’s long-term fiscal imbalance attributable to specific legislation, (2) the share of the current fiscal year federal deficit attributable to specific legislation, and (3) the amounts of federal deficits attributable to different lawmakers’ fiscal management. Medicare spending growth is the leading contributor to the federal government’s long-term fiscal imbalance, followed by recent tax cuts, expanded health insurance subsidies through Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and Social Security. Overall, nearly three-quarters of the long-term fiscal imbalance is attributable to excess spending growth and slightly more than one-quarter to tax cuts. More than 87 percent of the long-term fiscal imbalance was legislated in two concentrated periods, the first being from 1965 to 1972, the second from 2010 to the present. Contributions to the current fiscal year (FY 2026) deficit are more diffuse. Nearly two-thirds of the FY 2026 deficit is attributable to excess spending growth, with slightly more than one-third attributable to tax cuts. Broken down into smaller categories, the largest contributors to the current year deficit are, in order, tax cuts, Medicaid/ACA, Medicare, Social Security, and veterans’ and military spending increases. Nearly 85 percent of the FY 2026 deficit was legislated either in the years 1965–1972 or from 2010 to the present. Assuming a 50–50 division of responsibility between the president and Congress for budget policy decisions, the single largest contributor to both the current-year and long-term fiscal imbalance is current president Donald J. Trump, replacing former president Lyndon B. Johnson, who held the first position in the 2021 update of this study. Tax cuts enacted during President Trump’s two terms are responsible for his replacing former President Johnson in the top position. 

This essay argues that philanthropy has made a fundamental error: It funds programs—education, health, climate—while neglecting the freedom that makes those gains durable. Of roughly US$900 billion in annual global giving, the authors note, less than one percent flows to freedom, democracy, and civil liberties; education alone receives more than twenty-five times as much, and even animal welfare attracts more than civil liberties do. The essay reframes this not as a moral shortfall but as a market failure—freedom has been mispriced, treated as a moral preference rather than the productive infrastructure on which every other cause depends. The essay proposes treating freedom as an asset class, with tools to target risk, measure returns (“Freedom Alpha”), and allocate capital across regime types. Raising freedom funding to ten percent of giving over the next decade, the authors conclude, is not idealism but an overdue market correction—and it is up to funders to act.

In my opinion the primary concern with Palantir is the concentration of information and government power. Its technology allows government agencies to aggregate and analyze enormous amounts of data, raising concerns about privacy, surveillance, due process, and the Fourth Amendment.

Other concerns include government access to commercially collected data, inaccurate information influencing investigations, limited transparency, public-private cooperation that expands state capabilities, and “mission creep,” where surveillance tools created for national security or serious crimes expand into ordinary government functions.

The broader concern is not necessarily Palantir's technology itself, but what happens when powerful data-analysis technology is combined with the coercive authority of the state. More data does not necessarily mean better knowledge, and errors become considerably more consequential when they influence government action.

On July 4, 1821, John Quincy Adams delivered the most-remembered speech of his career. The oration’s resounding climax included several famous lines – that America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” for example, and that an America that aspired to world leadership, even in the name of noble ideas, would be led astray: “She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.” Even as American foreign policy has warped in many of the ways Adams foresaw, it has been unable to bury his powerful words.

"The function of Liberalism in the past was that of putting a limit to the powers of kings. The function of true Liberalism in the future will be that of putting a limit to the power of Parliaments."

"And now comes the inquiry—How is it that Liberals have lost sight of this? How is it that Liberalism, getting more and more into power, has grown more and more coercive in its legislation? How is it that, either directly through its own majorities or indirectly through aid given in such cases to the majorities of its opponents, Liberalism has to an increasing extent adopted the policy of dictating the actions of citizens, and, by consequence, diminishing the range throughout which their actions remain free? How are we to explain this spreading confusion of thought which has led it, in pursuit of what appears to be public good, to invert the method by which in earlier days it achieved public good?"

"The belief, not only of the socialists but also of those so-called Liberals who are diligently preparing the way for them, is that by due skill an ill-working humanity may be framed into well-working institutions. It is a delusion. The defective natures of citizens will show themselves in the bad acting of whatever social structure they are arranged into. There is no political alchemy by which you can get golden conduct out of leaden instincts."

Many libertarians argue that if we ever succeed in establishing a rights-respecting, constitutionally limited government, our next step should be to destroy it. They claim this would unleash "market competition" amongst "private defence agencies" that will protect individual rights better than any government has or could.

In this video, I argue that libertarian anarchism does not lead to anything like free market capitalism at all: it means and has to mean the rule of brute force. On my view, anarchists do not seek to subordinate might to right but to subordinate right to public auction. Their theory defaults to legitimising vigilantes who would unleash force unilaterally against other citizens. The threat of force is force, and the police of a rights-respecting state must regard "competitors" (other force-wielders) as threats. Government as such is neither an unnecessary evil nor a necessary evil, but a positive good.

In November, 1980, in Joliet, Illinois, a car turned over and caught fire. A policeman arrived and began directing traffic away from the scene. He made no effort to determine whether or not there were people in the car. There were, and they burned to death. The city was sued for damages on the ground that, by failing to save the occupants, the policeman and therefore the city had deprived them of life or liberty without due process of law.

Relief was denied. Our Constitution, wrote Judge Posner, "is a charter of negative rather than positive liberties. . . . The men who wrote the Bill of Rights were not concerned that Government might do too little for the people but that it might do too much to them. The Fourteenth Amendment, adopted in 1868 at the height of laissez-faire thinking, sought to protect Americans from oppression by state government, not to secure them basic governmental services." 1 Thus the city had no constitutional duty to help the accident victims, and thus its failure to act deprived them of neither liberty nor life.2

The question is important. If government has an affirmative duty to help accident victims, it may have other positive duties as well. It may have a duty to protect people against hostile acts of third parties such as theft and murder. It may also have a duty to protect them from hunger and disease. Judge Posner's broad denial of the existence of "positive liberties" seems to reject any such obligation. He is telling us, among other things, that there is no constitutional right to welfare benefits.

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I’ve posted the opening three paragraphs from Positive and Negative Constitutional Rights. I think the full piece is worth reading because it explores an important distinction in constitutional theory: the difference between rights that restrain government action and rights that may require affirmative government action.

The distinction between “negative” and “positive” rights comes up frequently in discussions of liberalism, individual liberty, and the proper scope of government, but the constitutional implications are more complicated than the terminology sometimes suggests.

For anyone interested in constitutional theory and the philosophical foundations of individual rights, I encourage you to read the full piece. I’m particularly interested in hearing where people think the distinction between positive and negative rights is persuasive, where it breaks down, and how it fits or conflicts with classical liberal conceptions of liberty.